The tragic history of Camp Logan
Century-old mutiny at Houston military site was rooted in racism, buried for years
Around 2 a.m. on a sticky August night in 1917, a 35-year old Army sergeant named Vida Henry sat exhausted and bleeding by the Southern Pacific railroad tracks just west of downtown Houston. As he watched his men slowly melt into the darkness, the first steps of a long trudge toward a dubious future, there was only one task remaining.
For the previous five hours, Henry had led the soldiers of I Company on a march through town with a single objective — retribution. Now it was done. Houston stood awash in blood and fear, with more than two dozen bodies in the streets, the morgue and local hospitals.
None of this was imaginable a month earlier when the Third Battalion of the 24th Infantry rolled into the city. But Henry watched it build day by day, the anger that finally boiled over on a rainy Thursday afternoon. His African-American soldiers absorbed the abusive treatment by white citizens, especially
the police, until the moment they decided not to. He saw the fury in their eyes as they raised their rifles.
Now Henry had seen enough. As the soldiers declared their intention to head back to camp, many expected him to lead them. He said no.
“Ain’t going in,” he said. “Ain’t going to camp no more.”
Only one thing was on his mind. He wanted one of his soldiers to finish him off. One by one he asked them. Each refused. At last they picked up their rifles and turned to go. Henry reached for his as well, ready to inflict the last death on a night devoted to it.
Historians would record the Camp Logan Mutiny as an event without true precedent, a deadly and premeditated assault by black Army soldiers on a white population. The immediate effect was 16 dead, including five police officers, and 22 wounded (although accounts of the precise number have varied). That was followed months later by the largest murder trial on record, soon followed by two more, with 19 men sent to the gallows and 53 handed life sentences. The greater upshot was a lasting stain on the U.S. military and especially the 24th Infantry, whose proud history would henceforth contain a horrible chapter.
A century has passed since the events of Aug. 23, 1917 — ample time to digest the horrific violence, reflect on its causes, make some sense of how such a thing could happen in 20th-century America or perhaps how it was bound to, and then interpret and reinterpret the lessons for later generations.
None of that took place. The soldiers’ rebellious acts — coldblooded murder or militant selfdefense — were buried along with the bodies that lay lifeless on the streets late into that sweltering summer night, and the bodies hauled down from the gallows not long thereafter. The city moved on. Save for the families of the dead, black and white, there seemed a conscious desire not to remember an event that fit into no useful narrative.
“Yes, they buried it — they had rejected this story for years,” said local playwright Celeste Bedford Walker, who brought it back to life in 1987 with her play “Camp Logan.” “Houston was an upand-coming type of town. Even though it was the South, it wasn’t the ‘South’ South. A black man, if he kept his head down, could make it here. No one really wanted this story out.”
Camp Logan barely outlasted World War I. The ground it sat on became what is now Memorial Park. By the 1930s, the East Texas oil boom fed the continuing transformation of what had been only the state’s third largest city. Houston business leaders wanted to project an image of New South opportunity, for white and black alike. Many of the city’s black residents had been leaving as part of the Great Migration to the North, where industrial employment offered the potential for a better life. That was a problem. Picking at the scab covering the Camp Logan killings was not perceived to be in anyone’s interest.
Over the years the echoes of this furious moment grew fainter until at last they were mostly gone. If no one mentioned it or saw good purpose in reconstructing an ugly tale with no heroes, then it might as well have never happened. Of course, there was another reason for Houston to let it go, one that became more apparent as the civil rights movement began to take root.
“It raises the specter of black violence,” said Chad Williams, a Brandeis University history professor who specializes in the African-American military experience. “This is really critical. Going back to antebellum days, one of the great fears was black people taking up arms and fighting back in retribution for the racist treatment they had endured. That is what happened in Houston. That is a possibility that the nation still shudders at.”
With America’s entry into World War I, black units were pressed into duty in support roles as the Army mobilized. The task of the Third Battalion of the 24th Infantry that summer was to do guard work for a cantonment under construction in Houston, Camp Logan. The city celebrated the new base, but the decision by the War Department to send in the black soldiers was disliked by white civic leaders, who registered a mild protest. Even a few black leaders considered it a bad idea and said so publicly, which inspired a Houston congressman to redouble his efforts the have the unit posted elsewhere.
Fresh in the minds of many was a major race riot at the beginning of June in East St. Louis, Ill., in which a white mob invaded the city, burned down many of its buildings, and killed more than 100 African-American residents. That arose out of a labor dispute, but still. And some officers in the upper ranks of the 24th were just as nervous, recalling previous problems when black regiments had been sent to Texas.
The military stuck to its decision, pointing out that the assignment was to last only seven weeks and that the men were to be quartered on the edge of town. Upon arrival, the Third Battalion’s commander assured leading citizens who greeted him that the men were never armed except while on sentry duty, had a sterling record of overall personal conduct, and would not live at the camp proper but in a special “Negro camp” a mile or so east. There would be a dance hall and cafe next to the camp for the black soldiers, and local black residents would get ample visitation privileges so as to further reduce trips into town.
The soldiers of the 24th Infantry, a descendant of the “Buffalo Soldier” regiments of the western frontier, had a proud history and had recently served with distinction in the Philippines and Mexico. Wherever they had been sent, their race had never overtly been an issue. But on July 28, as they got to Houston, they found it was all that mattered. A black man in military uniform was an affront to what local whites viewed as the southern way of life.
In a land ruled by Jim Crow, the soldiers were told to sit only in the back of streetcars, to drink from specified water sources, to ignore the daily barrage of insults and epithets, and to treat white people deferentially, especially police officers. Every encounter, it seemed, carried the sting of slur. The soldiers felt it daily, from the police more than anyone. When they talked back, the townsfolk fumed and the cops became increasingly violent. Small incidents grew until they became a constant headache for city officials and camp commanders.
As the weeks passed, the soldiers’ anger tipped toward rage. Increasingly willing to spout off to abusive police officers — virtually the entire force was white and defiantly racist — they suffered assault and arrest without striking back. Adding to their frustration was a belief that the white officers who topped their ranks were doing little to stand up for them and stop the daily denigration.
By the halfway point of their stay, both city leaders and the unit’s senior officers were on edge. Fear was rising that something — anything — might spark a major incident. They were right.
On Aug. 23, reports began to reach camp that one of their own was dead. Charles Baltimore, a popular corporal of I Company, supposedly had been shot by Lee Sparks, who along with partner Rufus Daniels were the most feared and despised officers in the San Felipe district, a black neighborhood that today includes parts of downtown and Montrose. At last a line had been crossed. The news made the rounds in no time.
Later came encouraging bulletins that Baltimore was not dead, only injured. That did little to assuage the mounting anger. Soldiers sent word to their girlfriends not to come out to camp or even be on the streets that night. A plan was afoot.
As Baltimore was being brought back to camp, an officer asked him to play down the situation with his excited fellow soldiers. Don’t make a big deal about it, he said. Try to calm the frayed nerves.
“I understand, sir,” Baltimore replied.
Yet as soon as he was back in camp, Baltimore was relating his tale and vowing revenge. Increasing numbers of soldiers promised to join him, and soon they were recruiting throughout the various companies.
The white commander of the Third Battalion, Major Kneeland S. Snow, was warned by a companysergeant that trouble was brewing. Though hardly a gifted leader — he preferred to spend his time playing golf with local citizens and attending social events — Snow had the sense to realize it wouldn’t take much to push his men over the edge, and to be safe he decided to cancel all passes to town.
He also pleaded with the soldiers not to take the law into their own hands, adding that Sparks had already been suspended. Just for good measure, he ordered rifles and ammunition to be collected and placed in the guarded supply tents. Some men complied. When he saw several walking away with stolen ammunition, he placed them under arrest and went to supervise collection efforts himself, only to be stopped at gunpoint.
“I couldn’t get any response at all in the way of obedience,” Snow testified at the first court martial. “No man paid any more attention to me that night than as though I had been a mosquito on his face. I didn’t appeal to a man to help me, to stand by me, that responded to me.”
With the camp on the edge of open mutiny, all the white officers and some of the black sergeants desperately tried to maintain control. Those efforts were made moot when Frank Johnson, a well known private with a booming voice, bellowed out, “Grab your guns, boys. Here comes the mob!”
A single shot echoed through the darkness. Even though it likely came from Johnson, who had concealed a rifle in his pants leg, the effect was to cause instant panic. Soldiers who had turned in their rifles rushed the supply tents, knocking aside those standing guard. Within seconds, shots were fired out of the camp toward the woods and nearby homes and buildings, into bushes hither and yon, across the camp and through the soldiers’ own tents, up in the air and down at the ground.
It is unclear how long the gunfire continued. Some later said 30 minutes, though it may have been less. Residents who lived nearby at first thought it was some sort of “sham battle” training exercise. The firing went on until Snow and other officers finally managed to convince the men that there was no mob, that the only threat was to their fellow soldiers from their own shooting. One had already been seriously wounded.
A few moments of silence was erased by soldiers shouting from various directions. “Let’s go to town and get to work,” one exhorted. “Stick by your own race,” said another. Finally came the clear words of Company I’s true leader, 1st Sergeant Henry, a severe by-the-books stickler whose loyalty to the Army and its discipline had never before been in doubt.
“Fall in!” Henry said. “Fill your canteens.”
Within minutes a group of about 100 soldiers left camp and started toward town. Some of the soldiers on guard duty at Camp Logan also deserted. Snow got on the phone to warn Ben Davison, former Houston police chief and still a civic leader. The current police chief apparently was asleep and could not be reached.
“Hell has broken loose in my camp,” Snow excitedly said, “and I can do nothing with the men.”
Then the line went dead.
For all the soldiers’ talk that day of “shooting the town up” or “burning the place down,” there was little by way of a plan when Henry and his men left camp. He had spoken to a fellow sergeant about “seizing the arsenal” or marching all the way to the city jail for a confrontation with police. A serious military man with 13 years of service, Henry had no
interest in a disorganized rampage.
Yet the first victims fell just minutes after the group left camp. Moving through neighborhoods just inside the city limits, the soldiers fired first on some white residents outside their home. A teenage boy fell dead on his porch. His brother was wounded.
Henry gradually imposed discipline in the ranks and threatened to shoot any man who fell out of formation. He would need them all if a major battle materialized. But as it happened, the killings ultimately proved random. Meeting no organized resistance, his men worked their way east toward the San Felipe district and fired at targets of opportunity. Cars were stopped. Anyone in a uniform was suspect.
After a series of fatal encounters — some with police, some civilians — a misunderstanding as to the occupants of one automobile left a captain and corporal from an Illinois National Guard unit dead. The shocking realization of having killed fellow soldiers had a sobering effect on Henry’s men. They had believed them to be police officers.
Henry and his corporals knew that stout military resistance was coming at some point. Desertions increased during gunbattles and rest stops. Enthusiasm waned — not all the men who left camp were eager participants — and there was no hope of making it to the jail. The encouragement of black residents of San Felipe, some of whom wanted to join the band, had worn off.
Several hours after leaving, exhausted from the excitement and the 4-mile march through the August sauna, most of the men who remained in the core group were ready to head back to camp. Even those most loyal to Henry were realizing the opportunity for sustained action had passed.
At the tracks, spent and dejected, Henry thought again about the attack on Cpl. Baltimore that sparked such violent response. Half of Henry’s adult life had been devoted to serving his country, yet this was how his country saw him and men like him?
“Look here how this boy is beat up,” he said to no one in particular.
When time came for the men to go, none having volunteered to shoot him, Henry gave away his watch to a private and shook every man’s hand in turn. Then he bade them on their way, counting on fellow sergeant and friend William Nesbit to guide them quietly along Buffalo Bayou back toward Camp Logan, staying out of view of the white mobs or white soldiers who might be gunning for them.
As the weary men began to plod down the tracks leading to the bayou, they heard a single gunshot. Children playing in the area the next morning found Henry’s body on the tracks, his Springfield rifle next to it. There was no evidence of anything but suicide. The back of his head was blown off. Despite a heavily bandaged right thumb, he had somehow managed to put the rifle in his mouth and pull the trigger.
The next day, as a few stragglers were arrested in the San Felipe district, Texas Gov. James Ferguson issued a declaration of martial law that lasted several days. During that time many white Houstonians armed themselves, fearing follow-on attacks, while a concerted effort was made to disarm black residents. There were instances of reprisal but no widespread assault on black neighborhoods.
The War Department and the Army were determined to provide swift justice on their own terms, so swift in fact that the first of three courts martial began on Nov. 1 at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. By the end of November, it was over. With 63 defendants in the dock — represented by a single officer untrained in the law — 13 were found guilty and sentenced to be hanged and 41 given life sentences.
The executions took place on Dec. 11 with no public notice until the men were dead. There was no press coverage and families received no warning. One of the few witnesses later reported that the condemned men calmly marched to the gallows singing hymns.
Two more courts martial early the next year produced another 16 death sentences and 12 life sentences. Having at first remained silent about the violence, President Woodrow Wilson later commuted 10 of the death sentences to life. Of the total 118 men charged with serious crimes, 110 were found guilty of at least one. None of the white officers who oversaw the battalion were charged for their conduct or loss of control over the men in their charge.
While the quick hangings and the large number of lengthy prison terms largely satisfied the Houston community and the white press, black communities around the nation were outraged, with one newspaper labeling it “the South’s pound of flesh.” It was not simply the severity of the punishment that angered them, but the absence of meaningful appellate review along with the sketchiness of evidence against some of the men who claimed to have had little or no active participation in the mutiny or the shootings. A few insisted they never even left camp.
The NAACP mounted petition drives and began a relentless campaign to have the sentences reduced and the soldiers granted parole. After no initial success, the campaign slowly gained traction. During the mid-1920s, one small group of prisoners after another was released each year, to the consternation of white Houstonians. By the early 1930s, virtually all the mutineers were out of prison. In another victory of sorts, the military changed its policy to bar the execution of any soldier on U.S. soil until a complete review of the case by the judge advocate general and confirmation by the president.
For Williams, whose study of black soldiers in World War I culminated in his book “Torchbearers of Democracy,” the night of Aug. 23 cannot be reduced to crime and punishment. The angry soldiers don’t get a pass for their actions, but neither does Houston escape culpability. It was a needless tragedy, he said, but not an unpredictable one.
“These men were black America’s war heroes,” Williams said. “The 24th had a proud historical legacy that most of the men had internalized. To juxtapose that with the sort of treatment they received and the kind of indignities they had to endure in Houston, especially from the police — that tension was certainly profound. It drove the men who participated to the breaking point.”
When the Army investigation into the mutiny was completed, there was widespread acceptance that the soldiers of the Third Battalion were responding to an “unfortunate” racial environment and repeated provocation, yet it did not matter. What saddens Williams is that the event and the reasons for it did not seem to have resonance outside the black community.
“What’s at the core of the Houston tragedy is the tragedy of American racism,” he said, “and what it does to men and especially soldiers who had pledged their lives to the service of their country, only to have their country abandon them and treat them with basic disrespect of their manhood, disrespect of their humanity.”
In other words, to treat them as if their lives did not matter.