Corporal Freddie Stowers

The photographs on this page, brought to life.

Barbara Bush hands the Medal of Honor to Georgina Palmer, Freddie Stowers's sister, at the White House in 1991. Robert Ward, Department of Defense. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The paperwork was filed in 1918. The medal was pinned in 1991. He had been dead for seventy-three years. Freddie Stowers was born in Sandy Springs, South Carolina, the grandson of enslaved people, and he was drafted into an army that would not let him serve alongside white soldiers. He was a corporal in Company C, 371st Infantry Regiment, 93rd Division — a unit of Black American soldiers that the United States Army handed over to the French, because the French would put them in the line and the American command would not. They fought in French helmets, with French rifles, under French officers, and they were extremely good at it. September 28, 1918. Hill 188, in the Champagne Marne sector. The German position appeared to surrender — men climbing up onto the parapet with their hands raised. Company C came out of cover to accept it. Then the Germans dropped back into the trench and opened up with machine guns, and in the first minutes more than half of Company C was down, including the company commander and most of the noncommissioned officers. Corporal Stowers took charge of what was left. He got his squad crawling forward, led them onto the machine gun position that was doing the most damage, and destroyed it. He was moving them toward the second trench line when he was hit. He kept giving directions from the ground until he could not. His squad took the hill. His commanding officer wrote him up for the Medal of Honor. The recommendation was never acted on. There is no surviving record of a decision — it simply stopped, somewhere, in 1918, for reasons that were never written down and that everyone can guess. In 1990 the Army reviewed the treatment of Black soldiers in the First World War and found the file. On April 24, 1991, the President of the United States presented the Medal of Honor to Freddie Stowers's two surviving sisters, who were in their eighties and had spent their whole lives knowing. He is buried in France, in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, with the rest of them. If you are connected to Anderson County, South Carolina, or to the 371st, or to any family that waited that long for an answer — this page is yours to add to. Citation: Medal of Honor, United States Army.