America’s conscience in a miscarriage of justice
Convictions of Black soldiers overturned more than 100 years later
On Nov. 13, the Army overturned the 1917 convictions of Black soldiers convicted of mutiny in Houston. I was overjoyed: After more than 100 years, this miscarriage of justice had finally been corrected.
After the U.S. entered World War I, the all-Black 24th Infantry Regiment, a unit of the well-known Buffalo Soldiers, was dispatched to Houston, a city where Jim Crow laws were in effect.
The 156 soldiers were ordered to guard the construction of Camp Logan, a training base located in what’s now Memorial Park. Houston’s white citizens — including police — were hostile.
On Aug. 23, 1917, a little more than a month after the 24th arrived, during a police raid on a craps game in downtown Houston, one soldier stood up for a Black woman he believed police were abusing. He was arrested. After a respected corporal went to talk with police about the matter, he was pistol-whipped, arrested and beaten.
After the corporal returned to camp, bloody, the soldiers were on edge, and at one point they believed they were being attacked by a white mob. More than 100 of them then marched on the downtown jail.
By the time the shooting stopped that night, four soldiers and 15 white civilians were dead.
It’s the only racially motivated confrontation in U.S. history in which more whites than Blacks were killed.
Perhaps this unusual outcome was due to the fact that the confrontation had involved well-trained, well-armed Black men.
Afterward, 118 enlisted black soldiers were indicted. Of those, 110 were found guilty. Nineteen were hanged, and 63 received life sentences.
It was the largest courtmartial trial in U.S. history, but all the soldiers were represented by only one man, who taught law at West Point but was not a lawyer and had no trial experience.
They had no chance to appeal.
Their story has always haunted me. Thirty-six years ago I thought the story of the so-called Camp Logan Mutiny was so important that I wrote a play to dramatize the events.
With Mountaintop Productions, I toured with it across the country.
It was performed at over 400 colleges, universities, military installations and commercial venues, including the Kennedy Center.
We presented the case and asked this question about the
hanging of the soldiers: Was it murder or was it justice?
Metaphor for America
“Camp Logan,” the play, is a metaphor for America. It’s not about soldiers or military valor. It is not about a mutiny, nor, for that matter, does it focus upon the largest murder trial and largest mass execution in American history.
Yes, the facts are 1917, but the problem is 2023. The texture is the U.S. Army, but the context is U.S. society. The specific characters, circumstances and confrontations are of a past era. But the story, the general mood, and the fundamental undertones are every bit as relevant today as they were 107 years ago. Camp Logan is about us and one dark side of American society. Like the George Floyd tragedy, it exposes a frightening mindset that existed at that time, and that still exists.
This vindication of the soldiers seems to be a part of what’s happening in America, and indeed the world, since the beginning of the new millennium: a global purging of the soul.
Repentance is trending, and the world is confronting the upheavals of the past hundred years as a form of collective atonement — for British colonialism, Nazism, communist totalitarianism, anti-Semitism, apartheid, anti-Black violence, anti-immigrant violence. But nowhere, perhaps, is the process more fraught today than in this country’s angst over its brutal treatment of African American citizens over the past 100 years.
Still, “Camp Logan” was not offered as a dramatic apology for the soldiers, nor to evoke a sense of collective guilt to the nation. Rather, I hoped to offer an undisguised acknowledgment of the inequality and hypocrisy fostered by American institutions, including the Armed forces, within which African Americans have rarely been given a fair opportunity for excellence. These men sought nothing more than human dignity and equal treatment. More than any other institution in America, the way the United States Army treats its soldiers and veterans is a barometer of its soul.
Dead by hanging
The soldiers kept a code of silence all during the trial, and on Dec. 11, 1917, they calmly met their deaths, asking for nothing but to be executed by firing squad like soldiers instead of being hanged like criminals.
By sunrise, 13 of them were dead by hanging.
Justice was a long time coming, but the journey to clemency was begun by the NAACP and other civil rights groups immediately the day after the public was informed of the secret hanging.
A nation that does not know its past, does not acknowledge its past and does not try to correct the wrongs of its past is doomed.
Horrific as this betrayal was, widespread indignities and prejudice continue today in every American city, inexorably pushing the United States toward a retrospection about man’s inhumanity to man. And well it should, indeed it must, for America will collapse under the weight of another 100 years of racism, oppression and inequity.
In this season, I’m thankful to see that the spirit of justice could no longer be denied. Vindication of and exoneration for the soldiers of the 24th Infantry came through the dedicated lawyers of the very institution that had denied them justice: the United States Army.
The Army’s decision confirms the words of the great Martin Luther King Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Overturning this conviction is a triumph for the men, a redemption for the Army and a hope for America.
Playwright Celeste Bedford Walker won a Guggenheim Fellowship Award in 2023. She lives in Houston.