Upon his death in 1922, Colonel Charles Young was the highest ranking African American officer in the United States Army. Born into slavery in Kentucky in 1864, he moved to Ripley with his parents, Gabriel and Arminta, in the 1870s. He excelled academically, graduated with honors from Ripley High School in 1881, and then taught in Ripley's African American school. Encouraged by his father, a Civil War veteran, and mentored by J. T. Whitman and John P. Parker, he accepted an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1884. He became the third African American to graduate from West Point in 1889 and the last to do so until Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. in 1936. After 1889, he rose from second lieutenant to lieutenant colonel in the Buffalo Soldier regiments of the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 25th Infantry, serving in the American West, the Philippines, and the Mexican Punitive Expedition. He was professor of military science at Wilberforce University from 1894 to 1898, commanded the 9th Battalion of the Ohio National Guard during the Spanish-American War from 1898 to 1899, served as U.S. military attaché to Hispaniola from 1904 to 1907 and to Liberia from 1912 to 1915 and again from 1920 to 1922, and became the first African American superintendent of Sequoia National Park in 1903. He received the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1916, was promoted to full colonel and retired in 1917, then rode horseback 497 miles from Wilberforce to Washington, D.C., in 1918 to prove his fitness after forced retirement and was reinstated. He died in 1922 while serving as military attaché to Liberia and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.