Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Yes, I know it’s weird to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving in an obit watch, but it is a weird Thanksgiving. I’m actually rooting for Detroit to win this year. (And the odds look good: they’re playing da Bears.)
Rev. Robert W. Dixon Sr. (United States Army – ret.) passed away on November 15th. He was 103 years old, and was the last surviving “Buffalo Soldier”.
Created after the Civil War, the Army’s all-Black cavalry and infantry regiments were nicknamed “Buffalo Soldiers” by Native Americans who encountered them in the nation’s Western expansion in the post-Civil War 19th century. The name may have been a reference to the soldiers’ curly black hair or to the fierceness that buffalo show in fighting. In either case, the soldiers embraced the name.
The troops could serve only west of the Mississippi River because most white Southerners would not tolerate armed Black soldiers in their communities. They fought in the Indian Wars and protected settlers moving West. During the Spanish-American War, the experienced horsemen of the 10th Cavalry led the way for Col. Theodore Roosevelt’s novice Roughriders in fighting in Cuba.
In the 20th century, official racism by the Army diminished the role that Buffalo Soldier regiments played in major engagements during both world wars, although some troops saw action in World War II during the invasion of Italy and in the Pacific theater.
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Mr. Dixon, who grew up in New York City, enlisted in the Army in 1941 and remained at West Point through the war.
His wife, whom he married in 1977, said she did not know where he learned to ride or what he did at West Point; he was a disciplined, modest man and a Baptist pastor, who never spoke of his wartime service, preferring to focus on the future.
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Mr. Dixon returned to West Point at 101 to visit a monument to Buffalo Soldiers erected in 2021 on the open grasslands where they had trained future officers; the area is now named Buffalo Soldier Field.
At a celebration of Mr. Dixon’s life this week, Aundrea Matthews, the granddaughter of a Buffalo Soldier who serves as president of the Buffalo Soldiers Association of West Point, recalled that Mr. Dixon declined the help offered by cadets during his visit.
“When the soldiers went to grab Rev. Dixon to bring him up, he shook them off,” she said. “At 101, he walked by himself, and he saluted the Buffalo Soldier monument.”
For the historical record, archived NYT obits for Jim Abrahams and Helen Gallagher, which were posted after I put up yesterday’s obit watch.