THE WAR AT HOME
‘The 24th’ relives the painful days of the Houston riot of 1917. |
The photograph stuck with Kevin Willmott for 30 years.
In the image, the year is 1917. Sixty-three Black men sit wedged into a Houston courtroom. All are on trial for mutiny and murder. It was, the original photo caption tells us, “the largest murder trial in the history of the United States.”
Willmott, a veteran filmmaker known for his recent collaborations with Spike Lee (“BlacKkKlansman,” “Da 5 Bloods”), was taken aback when he first saw the image all those years ago. “I had never heard anything about this,” he says by phone. “I don’t think many people have heard anything about it today.”
They’ll know a lot more if they watch Willmott’s new film, “The 24th.” Premiering Aug. 21 on videoon-demand and digital streaming, it tells the story of the 3rd Battalion of the all-Black 24th United States Infantry Regiment. Assigned to guard the Camp Logan construction site, an area now occupied primarily by Memorial Park, the men of the 24th endured violent harassment from Houston police, who didn’t take kindly to the presence of Black men in uniform. The soldiers eventually took matters into their own hands, killing 11 civilians and five policemen over the course of one chaotic night.
When the court-martial dust settled, 19 soldiers were executed.
It was an ugly period of American history, underscored by a brutal irony: At a time when the U.S. was fighting overseas to make the world safe for democracy, Black Americans weren’t even safe in their own country. As Willmott points out, Black veterans returning home from World War I and World War II had a good chance of getting lynched, especially if they wore their uniforms in public.
“The story of all of these incidents is about Black improveStreet, ment,” says Willmott, who also teaches film at the University of Kansas. “Black soldiers want to fight overseas. They know if they can prove their level of patriotism and manhood, it would improve their conditions. But when whites saw Black people in uniform …”
Of course, uniforms weren’t necessary to set off those looking to stamp out Black advancement: In the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, the white mob set its sights on Greenwood, a prosperous neighborhood known as Black Wall and burned it to the ground.
Willmott, who won an Oscar for co-writing the screenplay to “BlacKkKlansman,” actually started working on the “24th” screenplay 20 years ago, haunted by that courtroom photo. Trai Byers, at the time Willmott’s student at the University of Kansas, helped him with the screenplay’s early drafts.
When Willmott finally picked up the project again, he once again sought Byers’ help. Byers is also a producer on the film, and he plays the pivotal role of William Boston, based on Cpl. Charles William Baltimore.
Boston is in a hard spot throughout the film. Light skinned, educated in Paris at the Sorbonne, he is scorned and distrusted by many of his fellow infantrymen. To Houston’s white populace, however, he’s an uppity Black man.
One of the key lines is uttered by the most vicious of the policemen, Cross (Cuyle Carvin): “We’re gonna take our country back.” A founding principle of white supremacy in the wake of the Civil War, the declaration has gone through many variations in subsequent years, the most recent finding its footing in presidential politics.
“It’s a constant cry that you hear throughout history when white people hear there’s been African American advancement and they feel threatened by it,” Willmott says.
Willmott thinks back to that photograph and how he had never heard the story behind it. “It’s one of those uncomfortable parts of our history we just bury,” he says. “It’s a shame because that’s where we learn why we have the problems we have today. All of the movies I make are about learning from history. History owns us. We don’t own history.”