Newt Knight

Here's another February Twitter thread that was too long to include in the monthly round-up. This one is from cartoonist and writer Chris Schweizer, whose bio also includes "former college professor, former social studies teacher, history buff, but certainly no expert." It was posted on February 16 with this drawing by Schweizer:

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the passing of Southern Civil War hero Newt Knight, who led a band of more than a hundred guerrilla commandos, mostly Confederate Army deserters and formerly enslaved people, against the Confederate Army from 1863 to 1865....

The Knight Company famously ran the Confederate government out of Jones County [Mississippi], put the American flag back up at the courthouse, and succeeded in making it impossible for taxes and requisitions to be collected from the population for the remainder of the war.

After the war’s end, Knight led a raid to rescue kids still being held in slavery, was responsible for distributing food, and served as a colonel in the (otherwise all Black) Jasper County 1st Infantry, which protected locals from racial violence from paramilitary insurgents.

There's more in Schweizer's post. 

It turns out that Newt Knight has a Preservation Society with a website of its own. Looking around a bit more, I see enough written about Knight it seems that this is one of those parts of history that it's hard to believe I've missed it before now.