We apologize for editorials on Houston’s deadly 1917 riot
Reading words from back then is a chilling reminder of the deeply entrenched role of racism in this city’s past
When Harris County Sheriff Marion Hammond cut Bert Smith loose from a tree in September of 1917, the body of the 22-yearold Black man, a husband and a cook for an oil contractor, was still warm.
Hundreds of people, acting on accusations that Smith had sexually assaulted a white woman, wanted blood. Smith’s death certificate from the county clerk was clear: “hung by mob.” The sheriff, speaking to reporters the day after the Goose Creek lynching, was clear as well: “It would not have occurred had I got there 15 minutes sooner. The sheriff of this county is opposed to mob law of any kind.”
Hammond urged citizens to trust in law and order and was quick to pursue murder charges. Even so, fear grew in the Black community around Baytown, and many wondered if they’d all be driven out by mob violence. It was a moment in time when Ku Klux Klan parades were a routine sight and when news about the hanging appeared in the newspaper, as it did in the Houston Chronicle, beside a breezy write-up about an Eastwood dance hosting the KKK.
Smith’s murder is one of four documented lynchings in Harris County commemorated in the county’s Remembrance Project, which has adopted the wisdom of journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells: “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth on them.”
Many news organizations at the time, including this one, lacked the moral compass to do so.
Smith didn’t get a trial. Even if he had, justice wasn’t guaranteed, as evidenced by the scores of Black U.S. Army soldiers stationed here at Camp Logan who were arrested in the wake of the 1917 Houston Riot, which happened just a few weeks before Smith’s murder.
The notorious Aug. 23 riot led to the deaths of 16 white people, including five officers, and four Black soldiers. Indiscriminate killing in the streets is never justified, but fair accountability for any truly guilty parties was thwarted by an official response that can only be described as indiscriminate vengeance.
Little consideration was given to the events leading up to the riot, including police harassment of the out-of-town Black soldiers, some of whom were Northerners and others unaccustomed to Jim Crow-era segregation and subjugation that mandated color lines on everything from water fountains to street cars. Hours before the riot, a Black Army sergeant, Alonzo Edwards, was beaten and arrested after he confronted police who had dragged a young woman, Sara Travers, from her home in her nightgown, supposedly in pursuit of illegal gambling next door. When Camp favorite Cpl. Charles W. Baltimore tried to check on Edwards, police again beat the Black soldier and shot at him as he fled. Although he survived, word reached Camp Logan that he died, prompting fed-up soldiers to grab their guns and embark on an angry march toward downtown.
None of that mattered in court, or in this newspaper. Dozens of Black soldiers were represented in a sham trial by one man who wasn’t even a lawyer. They were swiftly condemned to death on the testimony of witnesses whose already biased accounts of the violence on a dark, rainy night were further muddled by a lack of visibility or compromised, in the case of some supposed participants, with promises of immunity. For their alleged crimes, 110 soldiers were convicted, 29 were sentenced to death and 13 were hanged in a rushed, clandestine affair on Dec. 11. Six more were hanged later. Public outcry spared 10 more soldiers from execution after presidential pardons.
Last month, the U.S. military attempted to make amends, overturning the convictions of 110 soldiers in a somber ceremony at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum on Caroline Street. We wrote then that more entities should follow their lead and atone for historic wrongs. Now, it’s our turn.
The day after the riot, in a front-page editorial, the Houston Chronicle beat the drum for military authorities to “act with vigor and determination,” arguing that there was no need for “finespun litigation” and that all the soldiers should be tried together. Set in all caps: “A COURT MARTIAL, A HOLLOW SQUARE
AND A FIRING SQUAD WILL SETTLE THE MATTER ONCE AND FOR ALL.”
Reading these words today is a chilling reminder of the deeply entrenched role of racism in Houston’s past, including in this publication. Through a series of at least nine pieces in the month after the riot, Chronicle editorials used the violence and trial as an opportunity to excuse Houston’s “customs” — and encourage a reckless conviction not unlike the mob violence they sought to condemn.
The institutional voice of the Chronicle editorial board blamed the violence entirely on a lack of order at Camp Logan, including what it described as drinking, gambling and women-carousing. It had nothing to do, the newspaper insisted just hours after the riot, with any “trouble” between white Houstonians and Black soldiers. Black people simply required a more severe kind of discipline, the board argued. “[T]he negro temperament is such as to require absolutism on the part of those who command,” lest Black soldiers be led to believe that “the government is in sympathy with their arrogance and impudence toward white people and civilian authorities, but especially in the South.”
It was an extreme position, even for the time. Indeed, when the Houston Post, a rival newspaper, asserted a widely held opinion that Black soldiers from the North simply shouldn’t be stationed in the South — a tacit acknowledgment, perhaps, that Southern laws and customs were inhospitable to Black people — the Chronicle scoffed, branding its competitor “demure” and “lady-like.”
Yes, “laws and customs” differed in the South, the Chronicle board wrote the following day, but “[t]his segregation is a means of protecting both races, and was instituted for the maintenance of law and order.” Editorials gave little acknowledgment to violence, threatened and otherwise, that maintained the oppression of Houston’s Black communities on a daily basis. Streetcars, in particular, became a battleground, even before the out-oftown Black soldiers arrived and reportedly began pushing back on the color line, occasionally removing signs indicating where Black people could sit. From 1903-1905, Black Houston residents boycotted the system in protest. At one point, the streetcar company even lobbied City Hall to overturn the ordinance requiring segregation, but the city refused.
With the soldiers’ guilt predetermined, the Chronicle editorial board agitated for broad, harsh punishments. When a civil inquiry board released its own “impartial report” of the riot and recommendations to the city, editorials used it to clear Houston and its police officers: “[W]e feel that the whole country has already acquitted Houston of any and all responsibility.” The board briefly acknowledged the police beating of the Black sergeant that had sparked outrage before the riot, but dismissed it as “an irritating detail.” After all, the board wrote, “the spirit of mutiny and murder was already afoot.”
Opposing voices, meanwhile, were stifled. But the stakes were clear to Black residents, that they could be punished in their own way, too. The day after the riot, the Chronicle published a statement from the secretary of the Houston Negro Business League admonishing Black Houstonians to, “Stay off the streets…Talk as little as possible about this regrettable and horrible happening.” Keep a low profile, J.J. Hardeway promised, and white citizens and officers would protect them.
Today, this editorial board acknowledges and deeply regrets the role the Chronicle played in the deadly miscarriage of justice that followed the 1917 riot. We offer our sincere apology, not just for coverage of the riot itself but for the board’s defense of racist policies that had long fed inequality and stoked fear and animosity between whites and communities of color.
Tuesday, Harris County offered an official apology as well for the events that happened “under the watch” of its government and promised to create a more equitable justice system. A Houston Police Department spokesperson told us Saturday that Chief Troy Finner plans to announce his own apology for the events that helped spark the riot.
Though the city acknowledges one of the most horrific events in its history in a small plaque commemorating Camp Logan in an out-of-the-way corner of Memorial Park, city leaders have not officially owned up to the racist landscape that helped set the stage for the violence.
There are stories from our past that will never see the light. But with the stories we do have, and editorials, we must illuminate as much truth as we can — to learn, to heal and to progress in our proud, dynamic city. This editorial board will do our part.