Lea Kahn, Staff Writer
At the end of a long lane behind 417 S. Main Street in Pennington Borough lies the final resting place of African-American men who fought in the Civil War, more than 150 years ago.
The stories of those men, who belonged to the United States Colored Troops, will be told by Civil War historian Kellee Green Blake in a lecture at The Pennington School next week. It is free and open to the public.
Blake will present “No Slave Beneath that Starry Flag: Civil War Heroes of the Pennington African Cemetery,” at 7 p.m. July 19 at the K. T. Yen Humanities Building at The Pennington School.
Blake is the retired director of the National Archives Mid-Atlantic Region in Philadelphia, Pa. She is writing a book about the Civil War in Virginia, which includes assessments of the United States Colored Troops and their role in occupying Richmond, Va., in April 1865 as the war was winding down.
The United States Colored Troops was made up of African-American soldiers who could not join any of the other Union Army units because of racial segregation. They were put into their own units.
The soldiers in the segregated units – likely including African-American men from Pennington – won battles in Virginia, defended Union territory in Louisiana, and took part in the April 1865 liberation of Richmond, Va., which was the Confederate States of America’s capitol.
The idea for the lecture emerged in discussions between Blake and members of the Pennington African Cemetery Association. The Pennington African Cemetery had its genesis in the Civil War.
Pennington’s African-American community, some of whom were going off to war, acquired the deed to a one-acre parcel of land for a cemetery because African-Americans could not be buried in white cemeteries. Segregation affected the location of burials, among other aspects of day-to-day life.
The Pennington African Cemetery, however, is no longer active. It contains the remains of members of the town’s African-American community, some of who were born as far back as the American Revolutionary War.
