[News] Forgotten: an African American Soldier Turned Rebel Leader in the Philippines

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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Forgotten: an African American Soldier Turned Rebel Leader in the
Philippines
Jonathan Melrod - February 16, 2023
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The 24th U.S. Infantry (primarily made up of African-American soldiers) at
drill in Camp Walker, Cebu, 1902 – Public Domain

You won’t find this story anywhere else for Black History Month, but you
should! By the mid-1900’s, a “Buffalo Soldier” named David Fagen was
virtually a household name, particularly in the African American community.
Fagen’s story makes myth of the false contention that African Americans
offered little resistance to institutionalized racism from the Civil War
until the end of WWII.

Was Fagen a hero or “a mad dog”?  The answer is rooted in whether you
believe that fighting against U.S. colonialism/imperialism in 1899, in this
case the U.S. war of Philippine conquest, is righteous and worthy of giving
rise to a true hero, martyr and courageous Buffalo Soldier, who deserted
the U.S. side and joined the Philippine Revolutionary Army. The PRA was
fighting to establish their own independent republic after the Spanish were
kicked out.

In diaries and letters, Black soldiers posted in the Philippines. recounted
how racism was endemic in the U.S. military, describing the racist abuses
suffered by both African Americans and Filipinos.

Fagen was a native of Tampa, Florida, the youngest of 6 children of former
slaves. He grew up where Jim Crow racial segregation laws prevailed. With
the specter of lynching, race riots and the chain gang looming over Tampa’s
Blacks, Fagen “lived in dread at all times.” Searching for any escape from
Jim Crow, Fagen enlisted in 1898, being assigned to the 24th Infantry
Regiment, a unit of so-called Buffalo Soldiers.

Expansionist USA, intent on developing a global commercial empire,
dispatched 6000 African American soldiers, including 2100 of the famed
Buffalo Soldiers, to the Philippines islands per President McKinley’s
assessment that the racial inferiority of Filipinos justified denying them
sovereignty and engaging in a bloody war of conquest. Fagen, now on the
battlefield, detested his white commanding officer Lt. Moss, a West Point
graduate. Moss and Fagen clashed repeatedly, with Moss eventually fining
Fagen more than a month’s pay and sentencing him to 30 days of hard labor.
Life was immutably altered when Fagen, after just a few months of battling
Filipino rebels, turned his back on the U.S. army and joined Filipino
revolutionaries who were actually fighting against American invaders.

At the time, there was a fierce debate in African American communities on
their role in these foreign wars. Many saw the invasion of the Philippines
as a ‘race war’, through which white settlers would inevitably repeat in
Asia the wave of enslavement and genocide that had been inflicted on Native
Americans and Black slaves.  Contrary to enlistment promises, African
American soldiers in the Philippines were relegated to second-class status.
Officers often ordered them to carry out ‘dirty jobs’ that no white
soldiers wanted to do. They were also forced to serve as expendable “shock”
troops on the frontlines, where lives were most at risk, while white
commanders stayed back at a safe distance from the Filipino rebels.
Filipino insurgents put up posters and distributed flyers with messages
encouraging ‘colored’ soldiers to join their cause, appealing to their
common suffering at the hands of white Americans.

Historians studying the Philippine-American War estimate that at as many as
15 Buffalo Soldiers decided that their place, rather than helping to
suppress the Filipinos’ struggle for independence, was in joining them in
revolution. The supposed ‘deserters’ of the 24th infantry proved one thing:
systemic racism and oppression by white Americans was enough to forge
alliances across vast national and ethnic lines.

This may have been the very reason Fagen turned his back on the U.S. army,
for a new life as a Filipino guerrilla. One night, Corporal Fagen snuck out
of his barracks and met with a Philippine ‘insurrecto’ officer, who had
arranged Fagen’s escape. The rebel agent had a horse waiting for Fagen
outside the garrison, and together, they disappeared into the jungles.

Fagen was never captured or killed. Out of respect and tribute for his role
as guerrilla leader, his Filipino compatriots addressed him as El General,
although he was a Captain. Despite the wide respect and honor in which he
was held by his fellow anti-imperialist insurgents, the U.S. army branded
Fagen a deserter and traitor and expunged all memory of him from the annals
of history. His racist white U.S. General, Frederick Funston, described
Fagen as a “bandit pure and simple, and entitled to the same treatment as a
mad dog”.

In this writer’s estimation, Fagen was anything but a ‘mad dog’, but a
courageous resistance fighter who chose the right side in a battle against
U.S. aggression and imperialism. I conclude with the aspirational belief,
circulated by many, that Fagen fell in love with a Filipina woman and ran
away to the mountains to live a peaceful life with her.

Long live the memory of David Fagen.

*Jonathan Melrod is author of Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines
of the Class War (PM Press). He is married to Maria Isabel Lopez, Filipina
actress and political activist. Together they are involved in the human
rights struggle in the Philippines and the on-going defense of indigenous
people’s ancestral lands from incursions by the Philippine army at the
behest of foreign mining and logging companies.*
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