639 Black Officers—Then Army Shut It Down In May 1917, the U.S. Army made a calculated bet: allow 1,250 Black men to train as officers at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, expecting them to fail and prove that Black Americans couldn't lead troops. What happened instead changed history. 1,000 college graduates from Howard, Harvard, Yale, and Tuskegee, plus 250 Buffalo Soldiers from elite cavalry and infantry units, gave up everything with less than 30 days' notice. They trained 16 hours a day under white in