Benjamin O. Davis Sr.

Benjamin Oliver Davis was born on the first of July 1880 at Washington, D.C., the youngest of three children of Louis Patrick Henry Davis — a messenger of the Department of the Interior — and Henrietta Stewart Davis. He was raised in the Black professional Washington of the Reconstruction period and educated at the M Street High School.

He enlisted in the District of Columbia National Guard on the thirteenth of June 1898 — at the outbreak of the Spanish–American War — at eighteen, in the Eighth Volunteer Infantry, a Black volunteer regiment. He was mustered out on the sixth of March 1899 at the close of the volunteer engagement.

He enlisted in the regular United States Army on the fourteenth of June 1899 in the 9th United States Cavalry — one of the four Black ‘Buffalo Soldier’ regiments of the regular Army — and served in the Philippine–American War in the 9th Cavalry across the years 1901 to 1902.

He was commissioned a second lieutenant of the regular Army on the second of February 1901 by examination, having passed the regular-Army commissioning examination administered to enlisted men of the period — at the time the only Black line officer of the regular Army.

He served across the following thirty-nine years in cavalry posts that the Army systematically chose for him to avoid the placement of a Black officer in command of white troops — the assignments were as professor of military science and tactics at Wilberforce University, Ohio (1905–1909, 1929–1930), at Tuskegee Institute (1920–1924, 1931–1937), as military attaché at the United States Legation at Monrovia, Liberia (1909–1912), and as instructor of the District of Columbia National Guard (1924–1929).

He was promoted to brigadier general by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the twenty-fifth of October 1940 — the first African American to attain the rank of general officer in the regular United States Army.

He served the Second World War from 1940 to 1945 as the Inspector General of the European Theater of Operations and the Assistant to the Inspector General of the Mediterranean Theater — investigating the treatment of Black troops at the segregated installations of both theaters and providing the principal Army documentation that supported the post-war 1948 desegregation of the United States armed forces under President Harry Truman’s Executive Order 9981.

He retired on the fourteenth of July 1948 — five days before Truman’s desegregation order of the twenty-sixth of July 1948 — after fifty years of regular and volunteer Army service. He was the father of Benjamin O. Davis Jr. (placed in this archive), the first African American Air Force general.

He died at Chicago on the twenty-sixth of November 1970 of complications of leukemia, at ninety.

He is honored here as the first Black general of the regular United States Army.