Obediah Summers (1845–1896): Re-Interred Black Civil War Veteran

Obediah Summers, Sacramento Bee, 1889

Civil War Grand Army of the Republic plot

Obediah Summers was born enslaved in Kentucky in 1845. When the Civil War came, he escaped the South and joined the Union Army—one of the tens of thousands of Black men who wagered their lives on the dangerous idea that freedom could be seized, not granted. He survived the war, learned to read and write with ferocity, and reinvented himself in California as a minister, political force, and public speaker whose voice carried far beyond the pulpit.

By the 1870s and 1880s, Summers had become a leading figure in Black civic life in Northern California. He served as pastor of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, rose to Presiding Elder of the A.M.E. Church in California, and was appointed the first black chaplain of the California State Assembly in recognition of his political work and oratory. Newspapers described him—often with begrudging admiration—as “self-made,” a man who had clawed his way from slavery into prominence.

Summers also found himself at the center of a bitter and very public inheritance battle in 1889. When Eliza Scott, a Black woman who had amassed a considerable estate, died and named Summers her executor and beneficiary, the trustees of his own church sued him, claiming the money belonged to the congregation, not the man. The dispute dragged through the courts with what one paper described as “much spirit,” but Summers prevailed. 

He died suddenly in Oakland in March 1896, just fifty-one years old, reportedly from liver disease. 

At Mountain View Cemetery, Summers—Union Army veteran—was placed not with his fellow Civil War soldiers, but in the cemetery’s “unendowed” section, a potter’s field reserved for the poor. Over time, his grave was forgotten, his marker reduced to a modest stone that misspelled his name. The segregation he had escaped in life followed him, quietly, into death.

More than a century later, Oakland historian Dennis Evanosky and Summers’ descendants discovered the error. In 2004, after painstaking research and advocacy, Summers’ remains were exhumed and re-interred in the Grand Army of the Republic plot among other Civil War veterans—where he should have been all along. The ceremony was described as “righting a wrong,” a rare instance where the historical record was not merely corrected on paper, but physically amended in the earth.

The U.S. government provided an official military headstone under long-standing federal policy guaranteeing burial markers for honorably discharged veterans, regardless of race, rank, or ability to pay.  

Obediah Summers now rests among soldiers who fought the same war, under the same flag, for the same fragile promise of citizenship. 

Sources:
The Sacramento Bee (Oct. 19, 1889), “Obediah Has Won”; Marysville Democrat (Mar. 17, 1896), “Died at Oakland”; Oakland Tribune (Oct. 18, 2004), “Righting a Wrong / Oakland man fights for Civil War vet,” pp. 1 & 5; Mountain View Cemetery burial and re-interment records; United States Colored Troops service statistics (National Archives). 

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Black Soldiers in the Civil War

Approximately 180,000 Black men served in the Union Army and another 20,000 in the Union Navy, making up about 10 percent of all Union forces by the end of the war. Most served in segregated United States Colored Troops (USCT) units and were often paid less, given harsher labor, and denied promotions—but their service proved decisive in tipping the balance toward Union victory.

By contrast, only a few thousand Black men served the Confederacy, and nearly all did so as enslaved laborers—teamsters, cooks, fortification workers—rather than as recognized soldiers. Formal authorization for Black Confederate soldiers did not occur until March 1865, just weeks before the war ended, and resulted in almost no meaningful enlistment. The overwhelming historical record shows that Black military service in the Civil War was a Union phenomenon, driven by the pursuit of freedom and citizenship rather than loyalty to the Confederate cause.

Obediah Summers’ choice to escape slavery and fight for the Union placed him squarely within this larger, transformative movement—one that reshaped the meaning of American democracy, even when the nation struggled to honor it afterward.

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