Robert Dixon, Last Surviving Buffalo Soldier, Dies at 103

The Rev. Robert W. Dixon Sr., the last known survivor of the U.S. Army’s all-Black regiments known as Buffalo Soldiers, died on Nov. 15 near Albany, N.Y. He was 103.

His wife, Georgia Dixon, said he died at a rehabilitation center.

Mr. Dixon was a corporal in World War II stationed at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where members of the Ninth Cavalry Regiment, composed of African Americans, trained cadets in horseback riding and mounted tactics.

Created after the Civil War, the Army’s all-Black cavalry and infantry regiments were nicknamed “Buffalo Soldiers” by Native Americans who encountered them in the nation’s Western expansion in the post-Civil War 19th century. The name may have been a reference to the soldiers’ curly black hair or to the fierceness that buffalo show in fighting. In either case, the soldiers embraced the name.

The troops could serve only west of the Mississippi River because most white Southerners would not tolerate armed Black soldiers in their communities. They fought in the Indian Wars and protected settlers moving West. During the Spanish-American War, the experienced horsemen of the 10th Cavalry led the way for Col. Theodore Roosevelt’s novice Roughriders in fighting in Cuba.

In the 20th century, official racism by the Army diminished the role that Buffalo Soldier regiments played in major engagements during both world wars, although some troops saw action in World War II during the invasion of Italy and in the Pacific theater.