Redtails

The newest dormitory at West Point (actually, they call it a barracks) was dedicated in 2017, and named after General Benjamin O. Davis Jr.

This honor is the last thing anyone would have expected when Davis was a cadet in the 1930s.

The son of the first Black one-star general in U.S. Army history, Davis was also the only Black cadet during his entire time at the academy.

He wasn’t wanted. He was shunned. For his entire career at West Point, none of his classmates talked with Davis unless it was absolutely necessary.

He ate virtually every meal alone.

He never had a roommate, never had a friend.

Nobody helped him in any way, unless there was no other option.

“I was to be silenced solely because the cadets did not want Blacks at West Point,” Davis wrote in his autobiography in 1991. “Their only purpose was to freeze me out. What they did not realize was that I was stubborn.”

Davis persevered, graduated, and was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1936. At the time, he and his father were the…