Robert Dixon, Last Surviving Buffalo Soldier, Dies at 103

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Robert Dixon, Last Surviving Buffalo Soldier, Dies at 103

A member of one of the U.S. Army’s all-Black regiments, formed after the Civil War, he trained West Point cadets in horsemanship during World War II.

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Robert Dixon in 2002 at Mount Calvary Baptist Church, in Albany, N.Y., where he was a pastor for 36 years. He was the last known survivor of the U.S. Army’s Black regiments, known as the Buffalo Soldiers.Credit...Luanne M. Ferris/Times Union

By Trip Gabriel

Published Nov. 27, 2024Updated Nov. 28, 2024, 1:42 a.m. ET

The Rev. Robert W. Dixon Sr., the last known survivor of the U.S. Army’s all-Black regiments known as Buffalo Soldiers, died on Nov. 15 near Albany, N.Y. He was 103.

His wife, Georgia Dixon, said he died at a rehabilitation center.

Mr. Dixon was a corporal in World War II stationed at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where members of the Ninth Cavalry Regiment, composed of African Americans, trained cadets in horseback riding and mounted tactics.

Created after the Civil War, the Army’s all-Black cavalry and infantry regiments were nicknamed “Buffalo Soldiers” by Native Americans who encountered them in the nation’s Western expansion in the post-Civil War 19th century. The name may have been a reference to the soldiers’ curly black hair or to the fierceness that buffalo show in fighting. In either case, the soldiers embraced the name.

The troops could serve only west of the Mississippi River because most white Southerners would not tolerate armed Black soldiers in their communities. They fought in the Indian Wars and protected settlers moving West. During the Spanish-American War, the experienced horsemen of the 10th Cavalry led the way for Col. Theodore Roosevelt’s novice Roughriders in fighting in Cuba.

In the 20th century, official racism by the Army diminished the role that Buffalo Soldier regiments played in major engagements during both world wars, although some troops saw action in World War II during the invasion of Italy and in the Pacific theater.

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Officers of the Buffalo Soldiers in 1915, during World War I. The all-Black regiments were established in 1866 and existed until 1948, when the U.S. Army was desegregated.Credit...Education Images/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images

At the same time, the horsemanship of the soldiers was officially recognized. Detachments of the Ninth and 10th Cavalry Regiments were assigned to West Point beginning in 1907 to teach military horsemanship to cadets.

Mr. Dixon, who grew up in New York City, enlisted in the Army in 1941 and remained at West Point through the war.

His wife, whom he married in 1977, said she did not know where he learned to ride or what he did at West Point; he was a disciplined, modest man and a Baptist pastor, who never spoke of his wartime service, preferring to focus on the future.

Once when she went horseback riding with a friend, Ms. Dixon said, her husband showed no interest in joining them.

Robert Walter Dixon was born Sept. 11, 1921, in Manhattan, one of five children of Benjamin Dixon and Louise (Hammond) Dixon.

After the war, he remained in the Hudson Valley, where he worked for I.B.M. in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., retiring in 1977 as a manager of a unit that built computer motherboards. For 19 years, he was the part-time pastor of Central Baptist Church in Salt Point, N.Y., in Dutchess County.

Both he and his wife, a psychiatric nurse, had prior marriages. They moved their blended family to Albany in 1977, when Mr. Dixon was offered the job of pastor of Mount Calvary Baptist Church. He served for 36 years, retiring in 2013. From 1998 to 2005, he was president of the Empire Baptist Missionary Convention of New York, an association of Black churches.

He was also active in civic affairs. He helped create the Community Police Review Board in Albany and served as its chair from 1984 to 1998. He led a commission to build a memorial to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the city.

Besides his wife, Mr. Dixon is survived by six children, Carolyn Suber and Terry, David, John, Jacqueline and Robert Dixon Jr.; nine grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. His son Gerald died in the 1980s.

The Buffalo Soldiers unit at West Point was disbanded in 1946, when the Army became fully mechanized. Two years later, President Harry S. Truman ordered the desegregation of the military. In 2005, Mark Mathews, who was then the oldest living Buffalo Soldier, died at 111 and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

The regiments have also been memorialized in popular culture, in Bob Marley and the Wailers’ 1983 song “Buffalo Soldier” and the 1997 movie “Buffalo Soldiers,” with Danny Glover.

Mr. Dixon returned to West Point at 101 to visit a monument to Buffalo Soldiers erected in 2021 on the open grasslands where they had trained future officers; the area is now named Buffalo Soldier Field.

At a celebration of Mr. Dixon’s life this week, Aundrea Matthews, the granddaughter of a Buffalo Soldier who serves as president of the Buffalo Soldiers Association of West Point, recalled that Mr. Dixon declined the help offered by cadets during his visit.

“When the soldiers went to grab Rev. Dixon to bring him up, he shook them off,” she said. “At 101, he walked by himself, and he saluted the Buffalo Soldier monument.”

Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk. More about Trip Gabriel