Darren Sands: How an ancestor’s story inspired a mission to raise awareness for black Civil War soldiers

My great-great-great-grandfather Hewlett Sands, born a slave in Oyster Bay, New York, in 1820, was one of more than 200,000 names on the African American Civil War Memorial in Washington DC. This meant that he was a soldier who served in a regiment of the United States Colored Troops who fought for the Union – and for the freedom we still celebrate today.

As the screen glowed, a mix of emotions – anxiety, elation, pride – washed over me. This was the first step in understanding his life story. I want to share what I know about him!

I had to resist the urge to run to the statue of the Spirit of Liberty and trace his name engraved on the nearby wall of honor. I waited until the sun came up.

This June 19, I returned to the memorial to pay tribute to him and all those who served our country, a country that spent its first two centuries treating most of its black people as someone’s property. ‘other. At a special ceremony on June 19, I helped commemorate the 150-year-old slaves in Galveston, Texas, and found out on June 19, 1865, that they had been freed. It is a long-standing sacred celebration for many Black Americans, but only recently was it recognized as a federal holiday.

I didn’t go there just for myself or my family. I also wanted to pay tribute to Frank Smith, a civil rights leader and director of the memorial, whose work preserving this lesser-known American story helped me understand where I came from and who I was.

One of Smith’s biggest wishes is for the National Park Service to station a full-time park ranger at the memorial site. If ever there was a candidate, it would be Marquett Awa-Milton. I first encountered it when I was searching for my ancestor’s name. He serves the memorial daily in full Civil War regalia, and was taking selfies and joyful visitors with his rifle above his head when I arrived.

Soon the ceremony began. Smith, who once presided over this event with only his team and very little fanfare, opened the ceremony by welcoming about 150 people, many of whom hid in the shade as temperatures rose. Smith then asked me and two dozen other volunteers to read the names of the soldiers who were in Galveston at the end of the war, including the 26th Regiment.

After reading Hewlett Sands’ name aloud, I took my wife, Jummy, by the hand and showed her the small corner of the memorial symbolizing his sacrifice. I felt again the same mix of pride and gratitude that I first felt in the summer of 2021.

“Congratulations on finding your ancestor,” Smith told me again last week, as he did after first telling me in 2021 after I found my connection to Hewlett Sands. I think that’s what he says to everyone who finds their ancestor on the wall, a thank you for all these men who sacrificed themselves.

I discovered Hewlett Sands while researching my family history, hoping to incorporate it into a book I’m writing about Coretta Scott King’s work in trying to transform America into a society nonviolent following the assassination of her husband, Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968.

Over the many decades following the Civil War, there was much displacement among my ancestors; people moved away and never came back and many of our family stories were lost.

But I do know that the men of the Sands served valiantly in World War II. There was a newspaper headline about “Sands Family Fights” with a photo of several of them. We knew a lot more about World War II than we did about the Civil War.

According to the records I found, Hewlett Sands was born on November 29, 1820 in the home of the Townsend family, a wealthy and powerful Long Island family who held many enslaved people before New York abolished slavery in 1827.

I’m not sure how he spent much of his life between 1820 and 1852. He apparently worked as a farm laborer and even as a clam picker. At the age of 32, he met and married a young widow named Anne Amelia Payne, who took Sands as her surname.

In April 1861, Confederates fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina, starting the Civil War.

In January 1864, Hewlett Sands collected a $300 bounty and joined the 26th Infantry Regiment of the United States Colored Troops, which was preparing for war with thousands of other soldiers on Riker Island. His enlistment papers said he was 42, but in reality he was about to turn 44.

According to military records, his regiment – ​​after enduring harsh conditions in camp – boarded a ship named Warrior in March 1864 bound for South Carolina, where it fought at the Battle of Honey Hill and other commitments.

Hewlett Sands’ postwar life was defined by a series of economic hardships. He fell and lost the vision in one eye; and he lost a legacy he intended to pass down to his family through the generations. He died on April 8, 1901, at the age of 81.

But his and Amelia’s son, James Edward Sands, married and had two children, including Alfred Sands. Among Alfred’s children was my grandfather Alonzo, who served with his brothers in World War II. In June 1960, Alonzo and Catherine Sands gave birth to a boy, Lonnie, who is my father.

Like Hewlett Sands, I grew up on Long Island, in the town of Roslyn, where I developed a passion for reading. I first read the life of Martin Luther King at Bryant Library, and by the age of 11 I was giving speeches about him and his impact on my life.

It was in Roslyn as a child that I decided I wanted to become a journalist, after a visit from a compassionate Newsday reporter to hear our family’s side of the story in an article about a controversy of area.

Now that I’m working on this Juneteenth story as a journalist, I think it’s part of my mission to educate and inform people about all of this. And being able to share it with my father, my mother – my whole family.

I have a very strong feeling of connection with the idea that Hewlett Sands risked his life not only for his family, but also for a higher ideal. I think all these men shared the feeling of doing something that was going to impact generations they would never meet.

No one alive had ever seen Hewlett’s grave, and I went there the other day. On a cloudless day, my father and I discovered his headstone, inscribed Co. D 26th US INF. Somehow we felt a little closer to him and a little closer to each other.