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In 1866 Cathay Williams, a newly freed Black woman from Independence, Missouri, made a historic decision. She switched her name to William Cathay, disguising herself as a man so she could become a legendary Buffalo Soldier.
Cathay Williams was a trailblazer, who confronted racial and gender discrimination during the Reconstruction Era, the era after the Civil War when social inequities were being readdressed across the United States.
“If a woman is a slave and goes to being a soldier, that is one of the longest journeys in American history,” says storyteller George Pettigrew of the Alexander/Madison Chapter of the Kansas City Buffalo Soldiers.