"Colonel Young" (22"X30") portfolio cover etching. This etching was done from an original photograph of Colonel Young from my Colonel Charles Young personal photograph collection.

On this website, you will be able to get an overview of the many challenges that Colonel Charles Young faced as a black officer in a segregated army at the turn-of-the century. But to give you a first-hand view of what he was up against, it is important for all concerned to read Young's personal statement - which appeared in Emmet Scott's book - Scott's Official History of the American Negro in the World War on page 439, so that you may reflect on Colonel Charles Young's words as you view my website.

"The black officer feels that there was a prejudgment against him at the outset, and that nearly every move that has been made was for the purpose of bolstering up his prejudgment and discrediting him in the eyes of the world and the men he was to lead and will lead in the future.

Unpatriotic and unwarranted statements do no good and lull the country to sleep, and throw it off its guard while the effects of these statements are causing just rankling in the breasts of the Negro people who have had a new vision.

The Negro officers know the psychology of their own race and also the white race; but it is to be feared the latter will never know the mind and motive forces of the Negro if he imagines that this group has not had a new birth in America, whose language it speaks, whose thought it thinks for its own betterment, and whose ideals, both social, political and economic, it emulates."