Charles Young

Charles Young (March 12, 1864 - January 8, 1922) was the third African American graduate of West Point, the first black U.S. national park superintendent, first black military attaché, first black to achieve the rank of colonel, and highest-ranking black officer in the United States Army until his death in 1922. Charles Young was born in 1864 into slavery to Gabriel Young and Arminta Bruen in May's Lick, Kentucky, a small village near Maysville, but he grew up a free person. His father Gabriel escaped from slavery in 1865, going across the Ohio River to Ripley, Ohio to enlist as a private in the Fifth Regiment of the Colored Artillery (Heavy) Volunteers during the American Civil War. Accounts differ as to whether he took his wife and...