ALBUQUERQUE — Until a few years ago, the memory of three African-American soldiers was buried beneath the desert in New Mexico, their remains left behind by the military and to the mercy of looters.
With some investigating and modern forensics, government archaeologists excavated the remains and identified them as Army Pvts. Thomas Smith, David Ford and Levi Morris. They were among the famed Buffalo Soldiers, African-American members of the U.S. Army who served at remote outposts on the Western frontier.
On July 28, more than 130 years after their deaths, they will be laid to rest with full military honors at the Santa Fe National Cemetery. They will have named headstones with birth and death dates.
Retired Army Maj. Gen. Julius Parker, one of the Army’s highest-ranking African-American military intelligence officers, will deliver the eulogy, and members of the Tucson-based Arizona Buffalo Soldiers Association, dressed in period uniforms, will serve as pallbearers.
The ceremony marks the end of an exhaustive project by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which exhumed more than 60 sets of human remains of men, women and children in 2007 after widespread grave looting was discovered.
