CHARLES FOSTER — He Desegregated the Citadel. Nobody Was Watching. #shorts #blackhistory #facts

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]Charles Delesline Foster was born November 26, 1948 in Philadelphia. His father was a Korean War veteran. His mother was a high school teacher. The family moved to Charleston, South Carolina where Charles grew up attending Emanuel AME Church, the oldest AME [music] church in the South, played football, sang in the choir, and graduated with honors at 17 from Charles A. Brown High School. [music] In the fall of 1966, he decided he wanted to attend The Citadel.

[00:00:27]The Citadel was founded in 1842. [music] No black man had ever been part of its core of cadets. The Confederate flag still flew on campus. [music] Dixie was regularly played at events. He enrolled anyway.

[00:00:41]On the day of his enrollment, he was escorted by his mother, his brother, >> [music] >> and his maternal grandmother.

[00:00:47]The college had asked local newspapers and television stations not to publicize his arrival. They agreed. [music] The national media filed low-key stories and left. During his four years at The Citadel, only two stories, one column, [music] and one editorial were written about him locally.

[00:01:04]The graduation story had one paragraph about the first black graduate. [music] He was deliberately rendered invisible.

[00:01:11]Name-calling was common. Cadets yelled insults from windows to camouflage the source. The abuse didn't end with his freshman year. His first roommate, Dave Hooper, received letters warning him never to associate with Foster. Hooper said that every time he visited a certain upperclassman's room, >> [music] >> the same question was asked, "Did you kill him yet?" Classmates were pressured to pressure Foster to quit. In most [music] cases, plebes banned together.

[00:01:36]For Foster, that solidarity almost never came. He carried his burden alone.

[00:01:42]He graduated in 1970.

[00:01:45]He was the first black man to earn a degree [music] and a ring from The Citadel's core of cadets. His brother William later said, "Those four years made him a completely different person, no doubt about it. [music] His demeanor had changed.

[00:01:58]I'm sure something happened and it was so traumatic that he refused to talk about it. Foster never told anyone what had been done to him inside [music] those walls.

[00:02:06]Charles Delesline Foster died on March 29th, 1986 [music] in a house fire in Garland, Texas. He was 37 years [music] old. In 2016, he was honored on the floor of the United States Congress.

[00:02:19]In 2020, the South Carolina Court of Cadets marched in [music] his honor. He had been dead for 34 years. In 2021, The Citadel unveiled a portrait of Foster and placed it in the great hall of their library. Pat Conroy, The Citadel alumnus and author, said the college treated Foster as the wrong black guy to be the first.

[00:02:41]In the four years they designed to break him, he graduated. He wore the ring and he never told a soul what they put him through. If you care about real history, subscribe to Afri Eye.