Arlington National Cemetery — the most sacred burial ground in the United States — was segregated. Black soldiers who died for the country were buried in a separate section, in a different part of the grounds, until 1948. It is called Section 27. There are roughly 3,800 formerly enslaved people buried there too — residents of Freedman's Village, the settlement established on the Arlington estate during the Civil War for people escaping slavery. Their headstones are marked "Citizen" or "Civilian." Many have no name at all. Black servicemen were buried alongside them in that section, apart from the white dead, for eighty years. Men who had died in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the First World War, and the Second. The desegregation of military burials came with the broader desegregation of the armed forces in 1948. For most of American history, a Black man could die in uniform for this country and be buried in it according to a rule about where his body was allowed to lie. Even in death, Black people were not free savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…