A marker now commemorates the only site in Georgia where African-American soldiers fought during the Civil War.
On October 13, 1864, 800 members of the 14th and 44th U.S. Colored Troops were poised to defend Fort Hill in Dalton from 40,000 advancing Confederates.
Heavily outnumbered, they surrendered with tragic results.
Southern troops executed many of them, and re-enslaved others.
Whitfield County Commission Chairman Mike Babb says a new Georgia Historical Society marker gives Georgians a more complete version of what happened:
"So it’s not a pretty thing but war is not pretty. And it’s still a part of our history regardless of how it reads.”
Georgia is working hard at telling its Civil War stories in an effort to attract tourism as the war’s 150th anniversary approaches.
Hermina Glass-Avery with the Center for the Study for the Civil War era at Kennesaw State University says abolishing slavery and allowing blacks to fight planted the seeds of the Civil Rights movement, and race relations today:
“The consequences of the Civil War are still with us even today. We’re still talking about race, we’re still talking about inclusivity, we’re still talking about diversity.”
The American Civil War was fought over four years from 1861 to 1865.