“Those four years made him a completely different person — no doubt
about it. Charles was intense after he graduated. You could really tell
when he talked, especially when he was making a point. His demeanor had
changed. I’m sure something happened and it was so traumatic…he
refused to talk about it.” — Bill Foster, brother
Charleston, S.C. — Charles DeLesline Foster was just a
seventeen-year-old Black kid who wanted a college education when he
joined The Citadel Corps of Cadets in 1966. What he got was a lesson in
humility and a place in the history books as the corps’ first Black
graduate.
Unlike the four women who broke the gender barrier at the
153-year-old military college in 1996, Foster carried his burden alone.
When the female pioneers entered The Citadel, the world watched.
Foster’s arrival thirty years before stirred barely a ripple beyond The
Citadel’s iron gates.
“People didn’t want him there,” said his brother, Bill Foster, who
with his mother accompanied Charles on the first day of registration.
“But that first day, they treated him as any other plebe coming into
the system. No one treated us ill, but you could tell feelings were
hidden.”
That kind of ambiguity may have been the hallmark of Charles
Foster’s four years at The Citadel. Even today, thirty years after he
broke the corps’ color barrier and ten years after he died in a Texas
house fire, questions remain not only about the facts of Foster’s
Citadel years, but about his place in history, too.
“For The Citadel, Charles Foster was the wrong Black guy to be the
first, just like Shannon Faulkner was the wrong first woman,” said
alumnus and author Pat Conroy, a frequent Citadel critic.
From the beginning of his Citadel experience, Charles Foster drew
little attention. The great desegregation stories had already been
written: James Meredith had already integrated the University of
Mississippi; Harvey Gantt of North Charleston had broken the color line
at Clemson.
