Alexander Thomas Augusta was born in 1825 to two free people of color where he learned to work as a barber in his youth while secretly learning to read and write. At that time it was illegal for people of color to read or write in Virginia. So Augusta took his book skills to Baltimore, Maryland to pursue an education in the medical field. He married and applied for doctor school at U Penn but was told "No!"

Due to being denied admittance at the doctor college, he self-educated every night and would be found looking disheveled in the morning after another all-night bender of hitting the books. This would be a nightly ritual until he found a faculty doctor at U Penn who would privately tutor him in the ways of people-cutting and sewing.

Augusta went to California to earn enough money to pay for school and after giving up on earning a doctorate in doctoring in the United States, in 1850 he enrolled at Trinity College in Toronto. He paid for his schooling and other costs as a chemist and druggist during his six-year stay in Toronto where he eventually earned a degree in medical science. He stayed in Toronto for a few years to establish his medical practice, created a literary society for "coloured" children as they were called in Canada at the time, and traveled to the West Indies for a year before returning to Baltimore in 1861.

Seeing there was a war going on for the rights to free all men and women from slavery, he thought it was a good idea to join that fight. So he wrote Abe Lincoln a letter requesting he be allowed to serve in the U. S. Army. In 1863, Augusta was commissioned as a major and became Regimental Surgeon of the 7th U.S. Colored Troops. making him the U.S. Army's first African American surgeon. Pretty cool! Two years later he was awarded a brevet promotion of lieutenant colonel and became the first African American lieutenant colonel in his household but still had to take out the garbage every night as his wife demanded of him.

While on his way to court while still serving as a commissioned regimental surgeon, Augusta was told "No!" and was shoved off a trolley car for refusing to stand on its outside platform and away from the white passengers. Missing his court appearance, Augusta wrote a letter to the judge explaining why he was unable to make his court appearance in time. This letter was so effective that it was later read aloud in Congress. He wrote another letter to a major general protesting the treatment of African American passengers on rail cars. He later testified in 1868 on behalf of Mrs. Kate Brown, an employee of Congress and an African American woman, who was injured while being forced off of a railcar. A federal charter was created that prohibited the railcar company from discriminating due to race. This preceded the 1898 Plessy v. Ferguson (separate but equal) decision.

After the war he doctored around, cutting and sewing people here and there while always refusing to take the world "No!" as an answer.

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This was the first of many stories of Black heroes I will be writing about during the month of February. Thank you for your time and I hope you learned something new today.