CNN style Arts | Rarely-seen photos tell the story of America’s Black Civil War soldiers
The emancipation of slaves
is central to the story of the American Civil War. But as curator and
photographic historian Deborah Willis discovered growing up in the 1950s and
’60s, the Black people who served in the conflict are often ignored by the
history books.
As she would later learn, almost
180,000 Black soldiers fought for the North in the name of
ending slavery. By the end of the war, a tenth of the Union Army was made up of
free African American men.
“When Black soldiers were fighting for their emancipation, they were
fighting for not only their own (freedom), but that of their families and other
Black people,” Willis said in a video interview. “They felt the cause
was necessary to fight.” —read
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