“Buffalo Soldier’

Liberty native recalls days in segregated cavalry

David Bruser   www.enterprise-journal.com.
Enterprise-Journal -article taken by permission from this newspaper.

Published Thursday, July 03, 2003 12:29 PM CDT

Faced with a glut of black Civil War Army veterans, the U.S. Congress created the segregated 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments in July 1866 and assigned them an unenviable mission. The mounted soldiers fought Indians in the West and soon earned respect from their enemy and the nickname “buffalo soldiers.” Until the early 1890s they made up about 20 percent of cavalry forces on the American frontier.

McCoy Weathersby didn’t know or care much about that legacy when he joined the Army in 1942 and was assigned to the 9th Cavalry.

“That’s where they put (black soldiers) when I got in the Army. I didn’t know nothing about that,” said the Liberty native. “I lived on a farm. I knew my way around a horse.

“They let you ride bareback. You walk the horse, and you go around and trot and then you gallop and then you charge. I like that charging part — as fast as you can go. We had an M1 rifle. They had a holster on your saddle. They train you how to shoot from a horse. You may not hit the target, but you come pretty close to it.”

There is no official explanation of the regiment’s nickname, reportedly assigned by the Cheyenne and Comanche. According to the Buffalo Soldier Museum Web site, “stories relating to the origin of the legendary name ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ are as varied as there are people to tell them.”

Weathersby, now 83, is no different. He said Indian warriors thought the cavalrymen were big like buffalo and black like crows.

“I tell you just like it was told to me because the Indian gave ’em their name,” he said. “The Indian hadn’t seen the black soldier because he hadn’t been exposed to him as much as others, and when he did see them, he saw a whole lot of them.”

Weathersby, now a resident of Washington, D.C., recently visited his home state and longtime friend Jim Causey of Liberty. He stayed at the Comfort Inn in McComb, a greater distance than he imagined from the Amite County cotton fields he worked in the 1920s and 30s.

The two reminisced about the their youth in Southwest Mississippi and time fighting for freedom.

Singing in the cotton house

Weathersby drove from his home in Washington, D.C., in a spacious white Cadillac, 65 years after he roamed land near McClain Road on a mule.

“It don’t look the same. It’s all grown up. In Amite County, when you looked across the road, about a quarter-mile away, where you saw all the way back across the fields where corn used to grow — nothing but trees, 40 feet tall. No, I don’t like it. ... Now you can’t see anything.”

His great-grandfather Hiram Webb was sold into slavery on an Amite County plantation. “They put him on a stump and bid him off for $1,000 dollars,” he said.

Weathersby attended Liberty Rosenwall school and walked three miles to get there. “Didn’t think nothing of it.”

Causey, his friend and neighbor, walked a mile to catch the bus for white children headed to a different school.

“We couldn’t go to school together, even though we were friends, played together and all that. That was back in the thirties,” said Causey, 77.

But Causey, who went on to fight in Okinawa as a rifleman in the 96th Infantry and later in the Korean and Vietnam War, remembered prevailing racist attitudes couldn’t keep him and Weathersby apart.

“There were four, five families. It was just the two houses at that time,” he said. “We grew up together. We worked in the fields together. McCoy and them had a quartet ... and we worked in those fields together and when it rained we got in the cotton house and they’d sing. We’d pray it would rain so we could hear the music. ... We were kids in the country.

“We got separated during the war.”

World War II

Shortly after arriving at Fort Clark, Texas for training, Weathersby learned the story of what has been called one of the most distinguished fighting units in the Army.

“Black regulars took center stage in the Army’s Western drama, shouldering combat responsibilities out of proportion to their numbers,” wrote T.J. Stiles in a December 1998 Smithsonian Magazine article.

In addition to fighting several Indian tribes and the great war chief Victorio, the buffalo soldiers also explored and mapped the Southwest United States, strung hundreds of miles of telegraph lines, repaired frontier posts and protected railroad crews, according to the International Museum of the Horse in Lexington, Ky.

But in the middle of World War II, the 9th Cavalry mechanized, and Weathersby traded his horse for a Jeep.

“General MacArthur said he didn’t want horse cavalry in the Pacific. Eisenhower said he didn’t want horse cavalry in Europe. So what are we going to do? We mechanized. ... Horseback was obsolete. I didn’t have much faith in it anyway.”

Though the 9th Cavalry dramatically changed, its purpose remained intact during World War II. Like his predecessors, Weathersby found himself carrying out tenuous missions that placed him in vulnerable positions protecting whites.

In Oran, North Africa, Weathersby ended up in a car company, driving driving military brass in “command cars.”

Next, in segregated cattle cars, he traveled to Tunisia to catch a boat to battles in Italy.

“We got on two British ships there. On our way out there, about five miles in the water, hell broke loose — American submarines attacking Germans. We were going across, the moon shining bright, the water was calm. The Germans tried to attack our convoy.”

Weathersby next served in Naples, Italy, transporting materiel to Rome, where he earned of one his three Bronze Stars.

Typically bashful and wry, Weathersby downplayed the incident.

“I think somebody’s truck got shot up. If you were in a certain area, you qualify for a star. I got three of them and I don’t know what the hell I got them for.”

While sitting at the Comfort Inn with Causey, looking at pictures taken during the war, Weathersby proudly pointed to one depicting him at 23 and wearing a style of military cap that violated Army protocol.

“See that cap there: It’s illegal to wear a garrison cap with a uniform like that. But there was so little known about this cavalry. When you got out, the MPs, they didn’t know. They didn’t now about us buffalo soldiers.”