At a Civil War battlefield in Mississippi, there’s a new effort to include more Black history

VICKSBURG, Miss. (AP) — Thelma Sims Dukes grew up during the 1940s and ‘50s in a segregated Mississippi town steeped in Civil War history.

As a small Black girl, she would walk to school through Vicksburg National Military Park — the hilly battlefield where Union and Confederate soldiers fought and died over whether the U.S. would continue allowing slavery in the South.

Union forces won a pivotal campaign to capture the town of Vicksburg and gain control of the Mississippi River in 1863, hastening the war’s end. But during Dukes’ childhood, Vicksburg venerated the Confederacy and ignored the history of Black soldiers who fought for the Union, including her great-great grandfather, William “Bill” Sims.

“The superintendents and the museum curators — they said we didn’t fight in the Civil War,” Dukes said recently.

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The Black soldiers’ valor and service to the country is no longer ignored, thanks to the efforts of historians, park employees and citizens like Dukes. On crisp morning