TACOMA, Wash. — In the documentary "Buffalo Soldiers: Fighting On Two Fronts," we learn long before America kept its promise that all men are equal, Black soldiers fought for this country as peacekeepers in the Indian Wars and well beyond.
Director Dru Holley said the film got its start after his daughter asked him about Black reenactors riding horses at a Langston Hughes Juneteenth event in 2018.
"I told her they were the Buffalo Soldiers," Holley said. "But I was a little bit sad that I didn't know much about the Buffalo Soldiers and I was even sadder that my daughter wouldn't learn who they were."
So Holley, a graduate of the Art Institute of Colorado, began researching the subject. Living in Tacoma at the time, he couldn't have picked a better city to investigate the past. Tacoma is home to the Buffalo Soldiers Museum.
"All the relics and artifacts that they have at the Buffalo Soldiers Museum in Tacoma really brought the story to life for me," he said.
It's a complicated history. Denied their civil rights by Jim Crow laws in the South, thousands of freed African-American men joined the military, where they could learn to read and write and make enough money to send to their families.
As one man recounts in the film, his grandfather said he became a Buffalo Soldier because the army gave him the only part of the American dream that the nation would let him share in.
But to become a soldier in that time meant participating in the subjugation of Native peoples as the United States appropriated tribal land, the persecution of striking silver miners in Idaho, and against Filipinos fighting for independence during the Spanish-American War.
The role of Black soldiers in battle has been downplayed in many history books. The iconic photo below of Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders celebrating the victory of San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War has always been cropped.
The actual photograph reveals members of the 10th Cavalry (Buffalo Soldiers) who actually were among the men leading the charge up Kettle Hill, exposed to Spanish gun fire.
Holley says the more he learned about the Buffalo Soldiers, the more he wanted to share the story.
"Our history is far more than just slavery," Holley said. "It's far more than inner city ghetto. We have actual patriot black cowboys in our past and they're the reason so many of us live on the West Coast".
Using re-enactors and animation, "Buffalo Soldiers: Fighting On Two Fronts" has received critical acclaim and even won the Audience Choice award at the 2022 Tacoma Film Festival. Holley is hoping to do a tour of Washington State schools so his daughter's generation learns about the Buffalo Soldiers.
"This is all of our history and we should all know it," Holley said.
"Buffalo Soldiers: Fighting On Two Fronts" screens at 7 p.m. Friday, Feb. 3 at The Grand Cinema in Tacoma. Holley will be doing a Q & A after the screening.
The Buffalo Soldiers Museum is open from 1-4 p.m. Wednesdays and Saturdays.
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