Flipper, Henry O.

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Flipper, Henry O.

March 21, 1856
May 3, 1940

The son of Festus and Isabella Flipper, Henry Ossian Flipper, the first African-American graduate of West Point, was born a slave in Thomasville, Georgia. Festus, a shoemaker and carriage trimmer, managed to save enough money to purchase the freedom of his wife and children; in 1865 he brought the family to Atlanta. Henry and his brothers were educated in American Missionary Association schools and attended Atlanta University. In 1873, his first year in the university's collegiate department, Henry applied for and received an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point. He was not the first African American appointed to West Point: Michael Howard and James Webster Smith entered the academy in 1870, but both were dismissed prior to graduation. Flipper, however, endured four years of ostracism and persecution. On June 15, 1877, he became the first black cadet to earn a commission, graduating fiftieth in his class of seventy-six. In 1878 Flipper published The Colored Cadet at West Point, an autobiographical account of his experiences at the academy.

That same year Flipper was assigned to the all-black Tenth Cavalry Regiment and served in Texas and the Indian Territory. In 1881, while serving as post commissary at Fort Davis, Texas, he was brought before a general courtmartial and charged by his commanding officer, Col. William R. Shafter, with the embezzlement of $3,791.77 in commissary funds and with "conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman." Although he was acquitted of the first charge, the court found him guilty of the second. On June 30, 1882, he was discharged from the army. Flipper claimed he was innocent of any misconduct and believed that his dismissal was motivated by white prejudice.

As a civilian, Flipper worked in Mexico and the American Southwest as a mining engineer and as a special agent of the Department of Justice in the Court of Private Land Claims. He became a recognized authority on Spanish and Mexican land law. While serving as an engineer for the Greene Gold-Silver Company in Chihuahua, Mexico, Flipper befriended Albert B. Fall. In 1919 Fall, then in his second term as a U.S. senator from New Mexico, asked Flipper to come to Washington, D.C., as a translator for the subcommittee on Mexican internal affairs of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Two years later Fall was appointed secretary of the interior in the Harding administration and named Flipper as an assistant. In 1923 Flipper left Washington to work as a consultant for the Pantepec Oil Company in Venezuela. During his seven years there, he published an important translation of that country's mining and land law. In 1930 Flipper retired to Atlanta to live with his brother Joseph, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He died of a heart attack in 1940.

Flipper spent most of his life trying to clear his name, but despite the many political connections he was able to make in the West and in Washington, D.C., his efforts were in vain. Finally, in 1976 the army granted him a posthumous honorable discharge, and on May 3, 1977, West Point unveiled a bust commemorating its first black graduate. An annual award is given in his name to an outstanding cadet, and a section of the West Point library honors him.

President Clinton granted Flipper a presidential pardon fifty-nine years after his death. The ceremony, although largely symbolic, took place on February 19, 1999. Flipper's descendants attended the ceremony along with military officers. Also in attendance was Gen. Colin L. Powell, retired Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staffs, who said that he kept a picture of the lieutenant on his desk for inspiration. At the ceremony President Clinton said, "This good man now has completely recovered his good name."