Black soldiers and sailors from Newburyport served in every American military conflict while often being denied full citizenship and equal treatment. During the Civil War, Black men became vital to the U.S. Army and Navy, and by the war’s end one in four U.S. Navy sailors was Black, yet discrimination remained severe. Evans Covington of Newburyport entered the Navy with fourteen years of prior naval service but was assigned the lowest rank of landsman, sailed on the USS Richmond in the fleet that seized New Orleans, then after his discharge in 1863 joined the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment and fought in South Carolina. When the government paid Black soldiers less than white soldiers despite recruitment promises, he and others refused all pay until it was equalized. Covington died in 1864 in the Government Asylum for the Insane, which treated veterans for mental illness related to military service, and his wife Victoria was repeatedly denied a widow’s pension. Some of Newburyport’s Black enlistees were only fifteen, including Arthur L.W. Fowler of the 5th Colored Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, who was among the first to gallop into Richmond during the capture of the Confederate capital in 1865. After the war, Black veterans returned to Newburyport to face a mixed reception shaped by entrenched prejudice, even as Congressman Benjamin F. Butler praised Black soldiers and the Newburyport Daily Herald published an anti-Black poem about postwar expectations. During World War II, the Cousins family sent four brothers into military service as part of more than a million Black men and women in the U.S. military. Frank G. Cousins Sr., forced by a racist complaint to walk at the back of his 1941 Newburyport High School graduation procession, joined the Merchant Marine and served on Liberty ships carrying critical supplies to England and Russia, while Kenneth L. Cousins and William J. Cousins entered the Navy’s segregated facilities and George R. Cousins joined the Army Air Forces. Back home, George used the GI Bill to obtain no-down-payment loans for several houses, a benefit often denied to Black veterans elsewhere, but even after the U.S. military formally desegregated in 1948, the struggle for equality continued.