The Camp Logan Uprising
Actors hit streets to mark black troops’ Houston rebellion in 1917
The nondescript shopping strip at 1009 Moy Street hardly looks like hallowed historical ground. A cheerful, retro sign for Pink’s Pizza is its most notable landmark.
But on Thursday, artist Jefferson Pinder and his Middle Passage Guerilla Theatre Company hope to stir up feelings about what started there 102 years ago, when one of the U.S. Army’s most-respected black units rebelled and killed local citizens — the deadliest night of racially motivated violence in Houston’s history.
Pinder’s “Fire and Movement,” an outdoor performance commissioned by the nonprofit DiverseWorks, will travel four miles, moving on foot eastward toward downtown to retrace the route of the Camp Logan Uprising. Pinder doesn’t aim to relive the past so much as to reframe perceptions about it, provoking conversation about what happened on that sweltering August night, why it happened, and why it still matters.
“We’re thinking of this in a contemporary art context — about how we bring this history into our bodies,” Pinder says. “We’re choreographing empa
thy. You’re going to see the exhaustion and fatigue. … We mourn with our feet. It’s a specific way of paying homage.”
The public can watch for free, from four locations along the route, including a grand finale inside the old Gregory School in Fourth Ward.
The issues that sparked the uprising are still “absolutely current,” says Houston storyteller Vinod Hopson, who has created tours that cover the same ground. “It makes the lesson worth knowing.”
Hopson advised Pinder on particulars that haven’t been tangible for decades. He knows, for example, that three people died in front of what is now the Velvet Taco.
Hopson’s tours include a bus ride along with minor walking. Taking a performance to the streets can put history in a “psychic space” where no physical proof remains, he suggests. Although landmarks are absent, he feels vestiges of the 24th Infantry’s environment in the narrow streets around Moy.
With a film crew, a drone overhead, safety teams, a police presence and volunteers walking ahead of them to explain what’s going on, “Fire and Movement” will not be an actual assault, but the group will look look alert, wary and capable of firing. They’ve had weapons training from a U.S. Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War.
“The performers are going into this spiritual, mental journey of being in the footsteps of these soldiers who took matters into their own hands,” Pinder says, noting that he couldn’t have staged such a show — with real rifles —in cities like Chicago or Washington, D.C., where laws don’t allow the open carry of long arms. “Maybe it’ll wake people up, what we’re capable of doing,” he says. “We’re not loading these rifles, but it’s within our right to do it.”
The 3rd Battalion of the 24th Infantry weren’t allowed to carry guns. That’s one of the reasons they rebelled. Fresh from defeating Pancho Villa on the Texas-Mexico border under General John J. Pershing, they had been in Houston only a month, assigned to guard the construction of Camp Logan, which was to their west, where Memorial Park is now.
Tensions exploded after police assaulted one of them, a last straw after many humiliations. During five horrible hours in the dark, with no eyewitnesses, 16 people died and 22 were injured. Soon afterward, dozens of accused perpetrators were executed or imprisoned, starting with 19 who were quickly and secretly hanged in San Antonio with no due process.
“Fire and Movement” is a segment of Pinder’s national “Red Summer Road Trip” project, which was funded partly by a Gughenheim fellowship. Since May, other works created for the tour have sparked conversations at sites across the South and Midwest where race riots and lynchings took place in 1919, after proud black veterans of World War I returned home to Jim Crow injustices.
“These individuals were trained and empowered by the U.S. government, and communities had to somehow acknowledge that,” Pinder says. He views the Camp Logan event as a precursor. “We like to think that civil activism began 40 or 50 or 60 years later, but it’s stunning to see how these individuals pioneered a particular kind of activism,” he says.
Hopson doesn’t call the uprising a riot, because it was organized, and the results were unlike those of any of the 1919 riots or lynchings. “Number one, more white people than black people died,” Hopson says. “There was talk about the soldiers being drunk and blaming the violence on other things. No one talks about how it was provoked by institutional racism, police, street car drivers, laborers and average Houstonians who rejected this show of black force in the city.”
Curator Ashley deHoyos has been doing groundwork on the performance for months. “There’s a lot of emotional labor that goes into building a piece like this,” she says. “Originally it was going to be 15 people of color on the streets with some type of rifle. What does that mean? The performance would have a different tone if it were white people on the streets with weapons. The organization has had to figure out its role and responsibility: How do we keep the performers safe and let the artists have their vision?”
Pinder isn’t the first to try to recontextualize the uprising history. Houston Community College history professor Angela Holder, a great niece of one of the first soldiers executed, has worked for years to keep the Camp Logan story alive. Two years ago, she participated in a group that sought posthumous presidential pardons for their ancestors.
“There was this knee-jerk reaction, if you will,” Holder told the Chronicle in 2017. “The court should have taken its time and looked at what is happening here, and if we are going to take lives, make sure you are doing so in accordance with the law. “
A trained actor based in Chicago, Pinder has staged performances around the U.S. for more than a decade. About half of his Houston group are local volunteers. Four, including him, are military veterans. The performance has required intense conditioning; the leaders have trained since January. They rehearsed a few days in Houston holding two-by-fours instead of rifles.
Four miles in so many other cities means nothing, Hopson adds. “But four miles in Houston in July — that’s an incredibly physical task.”