Mary Lee Brady, Ph.D.

Bass Reeves and his father Arthur Reeves both apparently fought in the Civil War but not in the same combat unit listings, ... with Bass apparently fighting among the Native American forces that gave him refuge from slave catchers after he escaped from slavery.  The truth is that enlistments in Union forces during the Civil War proved hundreds of thousands of men had surnames naturally acquired via virtue of being descendents of slave owners and/or women who gave them birth, ... and knew for sure who their own fathers were and who fathered their children.

The great tragedy is that so many demographers have chosen to ignore facts that time has not blurred and washed away in human memory.  The story of Bass Reeves is all the more amazing because he did all the courageous and good deeds that Hollywood screen-writers routinely characterized as Whites only.  The real culprits are African-Americans themselves who dared not protest the racist propaganda being generated in the 1920s-1950s, ... until the 1960s demonstrated what America had begot. Two societies, one Black and one White, ... with conflicts in between about categorizations and classifications based on color and caste. 

The most popular points of ignorance about African-American history certainly includes who, how and why they acquired Anglo names like Brady and Reeves, with most scholars assuming that ex-slaves after emancipation chose to simply use surnames of their former owners.  The consecutive generations of slavery was a unavoidable undoing of slave-holding states by virtue of sheer numbers of courageous young men generated, ... who hated it and helped become the slave-owners worst nightmare.  Slave owners in their deliberate breeding of slaves could not eliminate facts that some would possess courage to defy them, ... such as Bass Reeves. 

In many cases, such as that of Arthur Reeves and Bass Reeves, both a father and son picked up guns in the historic fight for life, liberty and pursuit of happiness among "the least of us" ... even those fearful to receive it.  In all truths about successful revolutions in a society, ... only about five (5) percent of the population, young men, are necessary to achieve it.  Southern slave owners from the decades even before Thomas Jefferson feared that a day of reckoning would come and their reign of fear and terror in the name of law would be overcome.  

African American Sailors in the Union Navy

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