SAN FRANCISCO — Go to San Francisco National Cemetery at the Presidio today and you’ll find them. Four hundred fifty Buffalo Soldiers, identified by the National Park Service and the Presidio Trust, buried on a hill above the Golden Gate.
This Veterans Day, they’re worth the visit.
Congress authorized the Army’s first Black regiments in July 1866. For the next three decades the Army kept those soldiers out West and away from big cities. That changed in April 1899, when the 24th Infantry arrived at the Presidio. One company went to Alcatraz. Others camped here, then sailed for the Philippines. The 9th and 10th Cavalry came through after them.
They guarded the parks before there were park rangers
There was no National Park Service yet. So every summer the Army sent soldiers from the Presidio to protect the parks. In 1899, Black soldiers took that job for the first time, riding to Yosemite, Sequoia and General Grant to run off poachers and trespassers.
In 1903, Capt. Charles Young, the third Black graduate of West Point, led a detachment to Sequoia and General Grant. He became the first Black superintendent of a national park. His men finished the wagon road to the Giant Forest and pushed it on to Moro Rock.
One grave to look for
Pvt. William H. Thompkins of the 10th Cavalry is buried at the Presidio. During the Spanish-American War, Pvt. Thompkins and three other Black soldiers rowed ashore under heavy fire at Tayabacoa, Cuba, to rescue wounded American and Cuban soldiers who were trapped there. They got them out. He received the Medal of Honor for it.
Port Chicago
The Bay Area’s Black military history has a harder chapter too. On July 17, 1944, an explosion at the Port Chicago naval magazine in Contra Costa County killed 320 people, most of them Black sailors loading ammunition onto ships. When the survivors were ordered back to the same work under the same conditions, hundreds refused. The Navy court-martialed 256 of them and convicted 50 of mutiny.
It took 80 years. In July 2024, the Navy exonerated all 256.
Today
The cemetery is at 1 Lincoln Blvd. in the Presidio. National parks, including Muir Woods, are free today for Veterans Day.
To every veteran in the Bayview, the Fillmore, Oakland and across the Bay: The Sun-Reporter thanks you.
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