Black Civil War soldiers honored in Beaufort ceremony

BEAUFORT -- As a teenager growing up in Beaufort County, Howard Wright heard a story about an African tribe known as the people of Sommer.

It's a story about a man who came to an African sage with a question.

"He said, 'Oh great sage, I hear you are wise. I heard that there was a people Sommer who were in this area. They were great and mighty warriors. The whole world spoke of them. I hear nothing of them now. Oh great sage, whatever happened to the people of Sommer?' "

Wright continued: "And that sage took his cane, and he put it on the ground. And he looked down and he looked up. He turned to his right and he looked at the sky and then he focused his eyes back on that man and he said, 'Ah, yes the people of Sommer. I remember them well. You see son, they were great warriors. They were one of the best-known people on the planet and everybody talked about them. But alas, my son, they forgot their history, so they died. ' "

Wright has never forgotten that story. It's a piece of what guides him as the executive director of the Sankofa Restoration Project, which aims to commemorate the sacrifices of black soldiers from Beaufort County in the Civil War.

"I know for a people to not know their history is a people that won't know where they're going," he said during a ceremony Saturday at Beaufort National Cemetery for those soldiers.

"Sankofa" is a word "as common as the name George" on the West African coast, according to Wright, and it means "that one must go back and fetch their history."

Billed as a day of song, spoken word and praise, the event was meant to coincide with Veterans Day and is part of Wright's effort to have more than 2,000 headstones delivered by the Department of Veterans Affairs to cemeteries around Beaufort County, each inscribed with the name of a black man or woman who served in the Civil War.

About 1,000 Veterans Affairs headstones already mark the graves of black Civil War soldiers at Beaufort National Cemetery, and some of those will be replaced with new headstones, which should arrive by the end of February, according to Wright. He began the headstone initiative after researching the life of his great-great-grandfather, a veteran whose grave in a makeshift family plot didn't have the standard military tombstone.