Memorial honoring black Civil War veteran to be placed at MSUM

MOORHEAD, Minn. (KVRR) — MSUM is commemorating one of the first black Civil War veterans in the area with a statue.

Felix Battles was a Union soldier born into slavery in Tennessee and moved to Mississippi during his childhood.

Sometime before 1860, he gained his freedom by likely escaping and moving north to Iowa.

In 1864, he was one of a hundred black Americans to join the Union from Minnesota.

“Five years ago, me and my co-artist Lyle Landstrom came up with this idea about, you know, Civil War monuments being in the news. You know who deserves a statue more than Robert E. Lee is Felix Battles. We can do that. I designed it and Lyle Landstrom is a metal worker,” said Markus Krueger, the Program Director of the Historical Society of Clay County.

Battles moved to Moorhead after the Civil War to set up his own barber shop shortly after the city was founded in the 1870s.

“We gathered a supergroup of Fargo-Moorhead black community leaders to guide the project going forward. Really impressive people and we proposed to put it near Felix’s front yard which is where we’re standing,” Krueger said.

That is near the Paseka School of Business at MSUM.

Krueger says stories like this are often overlooked.

“It’s a way of showing people in our community that there were black pioneers in the Red River Valley in Frontier, Minnesota and North Dakota. Also, by showing him in uniform, because he was a Civil War veteran, this will be one of the very few monuments in our nation that talks about African-American experiences in the Civil War.”

He says they plan to build and raise money for a concrete walkway so people can visit the statue year-round.

The Clay County Historical Society has been studying Felix Battles for thirty years.

$2,000 was raised to build the statue.

They plan to break ground in the next couple of weeks.