Belle Montgomery
2nd Lieutenant
- Joined
- Oct 25, 2017
- Location
- 44022
An 1890 illustration depicts members of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment at Fort Wagner in South Carolina in 1863. (Kurz & Allison LOC)
By Danny Freedman
Dec. 28, 2020 at 9:00 a.m. EST
It was an unusual request for the FBI. The military’s National Museum of Health and Medicine was, in 2018, hoping the FBI would divine a face from an anonymous skull that likely belonged to an African American soldier — a skull that had been punched through by a 1-inch iron ball from a Confederate howitzer.
The soldier is thought to have been a member of one of the Civil War’s first Black regiments, an iconic infantry whose hard-fought loss near Charleston, S.C., was depicted in the Oscar-winning 1989 film “Glory.” “I desperately wanted to do it,” says then-FBI forensic artist Lisa Bailey, who retired in 2019. “I said: ‘I’ll do it at home, I don’t care.’ ”
A mostly self-taught artist and former Russian linguist for the Navy, Bailey had approximated dozens of faces from unidentified skulls during her 18 years at the FBI. In sculptures and sketches, she rebuilt likenesses from only anthropological inference — ancestry, sex, age — and a chassis of bone.
“My whole career I’ve ...
Rest of Article with more pics...How a forensic artist attempted to re-create the face of a Black Civil War soldier - The Washington Post
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