Medal Of Honor Awardee, Buffalo Soldier Gets Marker At TSU

NASHVILLE, TN -- One of Tennessee State University's most distinguished alumni will be honored with an on-campus historical marker.

The marker commemorating William McBrayar, Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial College (as TSU was then known) Class of 1934, will be unveiled Tuesday at 1 p.m. outside Kean Hall.

McBrayar, who graduated college when he was 73, is one of 90 black Medal of Honor recipients of the more than 3,500 awarded since 1861.

While serving with the 10th Cavalry Regiment - better known as the "Buffalo Soldiers" - during 1890's Cherry Creek Campaign in Arizona against the Apaches, McBrayar was awarded the Medal of Honor for "coolness, bravery and marksmanship."

In 1898, McBrayar re-enlisted, this time as a member of the 25th Infantry Regiment, and participated in the Spanish-American War's Battle of El Caney in Cuba, after which he was commissioned as a lieutenant.

During his commission, he served with the 8th, 9th and 49th Volunteer Infantry Regiments, fighting with the latter in the Philippines until the unit mustered out in 1900.

Remarkably, then, five years later, at the age of 43, he re-enlisted - as a private, despite having been a sergeant prior to his commissioning as a lieutenant - in the 9th Calvary, serving less than a year before he was discharged with rheumatism.

In the 1920s, he served as a military instructor at St. Paul's College in Lawrenceville, Va., before matriculating at Tennessee A&I, from which he graduated in 1934 at the age of 73.

In the May 1935 issue of campus publication "The Bulletin," McBrayar wrote an essay on the need for justice in society:

The word justice is one of the most potent in the English tongue. Justice has been thus defined: conformity in conduct or practice to the principles of right or of positive law; regard for or fulfillment of obligations. Two important synonyms are equity and fairness; equity is equal justice and is thus a close synonym for fairness. The chief distinction between the creation of civilization and the brute creation lies in that one word – justice.

...

What is the nature of that human weakness which seeks justice for itself and denies it to others? What is it within us which causes us to shudder at cruelty in the brute creation and to accept it with complacency among human beings? Why is justice glorified for one race as the supreme good and denied to another? It is a mental conception of the human which cannot be explained.

The average man in the English race has been fighting for more than a thousand years, trying to extract justice from the English ruling classes and make it secure for himself and his posterity forever. Justice is the life-line of a nation; injustice, the cancer which slowly eats away the heart.

Let us call the roll of a few of the great empires of antiquity: Assyria, Syria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, and Rome. Where is the Babylonian empire with its great wealth and power? What has become of Persia with her tremendous expanse of territory and might? What remains of the Grecian empire except her literature and her art? And Rome with her mighty armies? All of these mighty nations have perished on the rock of injustice. The world is littered with the remains of other dead empires which went likewise.

But in the hearts of men there is an instinct for justice which causes them to establish governments to protect the weak, to provide for the care of the children and the aged. This might properly include, justice in commerce in the courts, justice between men and men, justice among races, as well as the recent ambitious national program of social justice. Justice is the heart blood of civilization. Allow this to become stagnant, and the nation languishes and dies.

McBrayar died in 1941 at the age of 80. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Photo via United States Army