Black, Copper, & Bright:
The District of Columbia's Black Civil War Regiment

Black, Copper, & Bright reveals the little-known story of men from the Atlantic seaboard states,  the Caribbean and Canada who with freedom on their minds formed the nation's capital's first black military unit to battle theConfederacy.

The shining moment of "The First Regiment, U.S. Colored Infantry" came when they confronted a cavalry division that outnumbered them two or three to one commanded by Major General Fitzhugh Lee, a nephew of General Robert E.Lee.  They not only defeated Fitzhugh Lee's cavalrymen but compelled him to admit that his soldiers had "found a foe worthy of  their steel.".

C.R. Gibbs has done a fine job again with this exciting, thoroughly researched volume on a  little-known but significant aspect of our Civil War history.

          William Loren Katz,
          author of forty books on
          U.S. history including
          Black Indians: A
          Hidden Heritage

 
 

.." I heartily recommend the book by C.R. Gibbs, Black, Copper & Bright: the District of  Columbia's Black Civil War Regiment, published by Three Dimensional Publishing   The book is extremely well documented and  pleasingly designed. The history of Washington D.C. churches and ministers is exceptional, as it is interdenominational.  The information on the Reverend Henry McNeal Turner, chaplain of the regiment and black nationalist, is well worth alone, to use James Baldwin's words "the price of the ticket."

Jean Libby
an Allies for Freedom author