Henry Ossian Flipper, photograph, Fort Davis National
Photograph of Lieutenant Henry Ossian Flipper, 1856-1940, served and courtmartialed at Fort Davis, born a slave in Georgia in 1856, the first African-American graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point, special assistant in the 1920s to the Secretary of the Interior, exhibited at the Fort Davis National Historic Site, a US army fort established 1854, in a canyon in the Davis Mountains in West Texas, USA. The fort was built to protect emigrants, mail coaches, and freight wagons on the trails through the State from Comanche and Apache Indians. After the Civil War, several African-American regiments were stationed here. By the 1880s, the fort consisted of one 100 buildings, housing over 400 soldiers. It was abandoned in 1891, but many buildings have been restored and the compound now operates as a historical site and museum. Picture by Manuel Cohen
