Nineteen soldiers from an all-Black infantry regiment were hanged at Fort Sam Houston for their role in the 1917 Houston Riot, which left 18 dead.
In all, 110 African American soldiers were convicted of mutiny and other crimes tied to the eruption of violence.
However, the case against them was anything but clear-cut. It largely ignored the racist pressure cooker the regiment had been living in before the riot, and their fear that a white mob attack was imminent the night they rioted.
In the courts-martial that followed, the soldiers had poor and scant legal representation, were given little time to prepare for trial, and couldn’t appeal their convictions.
The military acknowledges as much — 106 years later.
The Army will announce Monday at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum in Houston that it has granted clemency to the soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, U.S. 24th Infantry Regiment, setting aside their convictions and changing their service records to reflect that they served honorably.
Army Secretary Christine Wormuth’s decision is unlike any other in the services’s history.
“This is not only the largest murder trial in American history, this is also the largest court-martial in American history, and no case this large or this serious, with this many death penalties, has ever been completely overturned by the Army on review,” said historian John Haymond, of Tacoma, Wash., who along with retired Army lawyer Dru Brenner-Beck wrote the petition that Wormuth based her decision on.
“When you deprive an American of their presumption of innocence and you absolve the government of proving them to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt — and force them to prove their innocence — the wrong doesn’t get much worse than that,” said Brenner-Beck, a one-time lieutenant colonel. “And when it’s done because you are African American, that betrays everything the nation and the Army stand for.”
The riot
The outbreak of violence on the night of Aug. 23, 1917, had roots in Houston’s racial strife.
After weeks of racist taunts, harassment and beatings, soldiers at the 24th’s billeting area 2 miles from Camp Logan — now part of Memorial Park west of downtown Houston — marched toward the San Felipe district, the historic Black Freedmans’ Town in the 4th Ward, and shot and killed nine civilians with Springfield rifles. They wounded at least 13 others. Five police officers were killed, three during the riot, and two later died from their wounds. Four soldiers were killed in the melee.
In all, 103 of the soldiers were tried at Fort Sam Houston’s Gift Chapel in two courts-martial, while 15 faced trial in a band rehearsal building on the post. The 118 soldiers were charged with mutiny, willful disobedience of orders, murder and assault. All but eight were convicted.
Transcripts from the first trial, preserved at South Texas College of Law in Houston, described ongoing disputes at Camp Logan involving white workers, police and soldiers that sometimes flared into violence. The police frequently arrested and beat soldiers who stood up to them when words were exchanged.
A common racist epithet for Black people “appears to have been employed in connection with almost every case of disorder,” a witness stated. The use of the word “was invariably met by angry responses, outbursts of profanity and threats of vengeance.”
The match was lit on the morning of Aug. 23, when police officers Lee Sparks and R.H. Daniels raided a craps game led by young Black men at San Felipe and Wilson streets. A few hours later, an on-duty military police officer, Cpl. Charles Baltimore of Company I, talked with Sparks and Daniels about their arrest of a soldier during the raid.
The conversation ended with Sparks pistol-whipping Baltimore, who ran, was shot at three times, and was later arrested and again beaten. A rumor that Baltimore was dead reached the camp, sparking talk of revenge among the soldiers. But he eventually returned to camp, bloodied but alive.
That night, a shot rang out and someone cried, “The mob is coming!” Soldiers rushed for their rifles and set up a defensive perimeter around the 24th’s camp, a couple of miles from Camp Logan, which was under construction.
The white battalion commander abandoned his post, leaving other officers to try to control the panicking troops. At that point, Sgt. Vida Henry ordered soldiers in Company I to march out of the camp in formation.
Henry and privates Bryant Watson, Wiley Strong and George Bevens were killed.
One of the police officers killed in the confrontation was Ira Rainey.
“I grew up being told my great-grandfather had died in the line of duty,” said Sandi Hajtman, Rainey’s great-granddaughter, 71, of Galveston. “I didn’t know about the riot or all the details. But we were told he did something heroic, where these soldiers’ families grew up being ashamed.
“I saw that it was wrong a long time ago, and I was taught to stand up for what I believed in,” she said. “I believe it was a miscarriage of justice from the very start, and I was disappointed it took this long to have the federal government realize that.”
The effort to clear the soldiers’ names has been underway for years.
Starting in 2016, Clyde Lemon, then chair of the Houston NAACP’s veterans and military section, and Angela Holder, a Houston Community College professor, worked to win pardons for the executed soldiers. Holder is related to Cpl. Jesse Moore, one of the first soldiers hanged at Fort Sam.
But the pair couldn’t convince the Army to revisit the convictions.
They then asked Geoffrey Corn, a South Texas College of Law professor at the time, if anything could be done to address the injustices of the Camp Logan trials. His answer was yes.
In 2019, Corn asked Brenner-Beck, the retired Army lawyer, of Denver, to head the “clemency initiative,” as it was called. Working with Haymond, the military law historian, they assembled a group of experts from across the nation to conduct a painstaking research effort.
The Army put their petition under a review process that started under President Donald Trump and carried over to the Biden administration.
“What this is, is a recognition and demonstration that the institution failed to ensure these men had a truly fair trial even under the standards of 1917,” said Corn, who is currently the director of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University School of Law.
Cloud hung over generations
Holder was only 6 when she saw Moore’s photo hanging on a wall in the home of her great-aunt, Lovie Ball Kimble.
“This one day I must have gotten bored playing, and I looked up and saw this picture of this man, and I think it was in one of these old, kind of oval-shaped frames that they used to have years ago — that may have been what caught my attention,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Who was that? Why do you have this picture?’”
“When you’re 6 years old, you ask 50 million questions, and she told me this story that he had been killed by the Army, but they didn’t know where he was buried. And she was very sad when she told me that. I made up my mind that I was going to find him.”
Sadness rippled through generations of the families of those executed and imprisoned.
Charles Anderson, a descendant of Sgt. William Nesbit, a Punitive Expedition veteran who was among the first 13 soldiers to be executed, said the Black soldiers never should have been sent to Houston.
“I feel like, yes, this is some justice for them,” he said. “You wish things hadn’t have happened the way they did, but like I said it’s just the climate back then. It was unbearable for them to get through this type of racism and the things that sparked this incident.”
The 13 condemned soldiers, hanged in December 1917, had no right to appeal their sentences because they were handed down during a time of war — World War I. But news of their executions prompted an uproar that led to changes.
The Army’s General Order No. 7, which took effect in January 1918, required all military death sentences and dishonorable discharges to be reviewed by the service branch’s judge advocate general. That action led to the creation of an appellate procedure in the 1920 Articles of War, which ultimately resulted in the establishment of a Court of Criminal Appeals for each service.
The initial changes made a difference. President Woodrow Wilson commuted 10 death sentences given in the Houston Riot’s third trial, reducing them to life in prison.
Other wrongs, though, went unredressed.
When Lt. Col. Edward Kreger reviewed the case of Pvt. Abner Davis, who was given a life sentence for the murderous rampage, the military lawyer found little evidence that Davis left the camp that night, let alone killed anyone. His sentence, however, wasn’t reduced or tossed because Army lawyers were concerned that other Camp Logan defendants would seek reductions in their sentences.
Davis served his time in the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan.
Soldiers in the 24th Infantry Regiment traced their heritage to the famed “Buffalo Soldiers” who fought in the American West during the 1880s and 1890s, as well as Cuba in the Spanish-American War. Proud of their heritage, they nonetheless lived in an Army where Blacks were never treated the same as whites.
Told to take the battalion to Houston, its commander, Lt. Col. William Newman, tried to change the orders.
“I had already had an unfortunate experience when I was in command of two companies of the 24th Infantry at Del Rio, Texas, April 1916, when a colored soldier was killed by a Texas Ranger for no other reason than that he was a colored man; that it angered Texans to see colored men in the uniform of a soldier,” Newman wrote.
Racially motivated violence against Black soldiers in Texas also occurred in El Paso, Del Rio, San Antonio, Brownsville and Waco between 1900 and 1917.
The Black soldiers who risked their lives on Houston streets would find the military legal system as unfair as the society they were sworn to defend.
Four Army prosecutors had months to prepare for the trials while a lone officer, Maj. Henry Grier, who wasn’t a lawyer at all, had 10 days to map out a defense. On the second day of the initial trial of 63 soldiers, Grier said prosecutors had proven mutiny — contrary to his clients’ interests. One of the prosecutors commended Grier, a law instructor at West Point from 1907 to 1910, for keeping the Army’s interests in mind by not raising race issues during the trial.
The case drew the interest of Sam Houston’s son, Andrew Jackson Houston, who told the NAACP’s national headquarters he could join the defense.
“If my reasonable expenses were provided I would gladly appear for the soldiers charged with rioting and mutiny as reported in the enclosed clippings,” Houston wrote Aug. 30, 1917, from LaPorte.
He did not join the defense after some of the soldiers raised concerns that using civilian counsel would make them look guilty.
Brenner-Beck and Haymond noted in their petition that it was impossible for Grier to prepare defenses for 118 soldiers with significantly less time than prosecutors had. They noted that the defense had no investigative support, while the prosecution was backed by multiple lawyers and had access to the results of probes by the Regimental Board of Investigation and the Army’s Inspector General.
‘Final salute’
The first 13 soldiers were hanged at 7:17 a.m. Dec. 11, 1917, at a site on the San Antonio post near Salado Creek called “Hangman’s Grove,” or “Hangman’s Slough.” They were buried nearby. Five soldiers were executed on Sept. 17, 1918, for their roles in what became known as the Camp Logan Mutiny.
A week later, Pfc. William Boone, too, was hanged; he was the last of the 19.
“They forgot him,” Brenner-Beck said. “They didn’t get the paperwork right. Imagine how hard that was. At least the others had their comrades in arms.”
The soldiers’ bodies were in unmarked graves for 20 years, with two of them eventually reclaimed by their families. The rest were reburied in another part of Fort Sam in 1937 — an action that unintentionally integrated the cemetery.
The site of the hangings is now the 15th green at the Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston golf course.
Their guilty verdicts erased, the 17 soldiers buried at Fort Sam can receive new headstones listing their rank, unit they served with and war zones they deployed to, including the Philippines and Mexico.
Today their headstones list only their names and dates of death.
Relatives of the soldiers welcome the Army’s decision even if it comes so long after Camp Logan faded from America’s memory.
“I will speak to you from my Aunt Lovie’s perspective, a woman born in 1895 who was a very strong Pentecostal-praying woman,” said Holder, the Houston Community College professor related to Jesse Moore. “She would say that she would be thankful, that God was able to touch hearts and touch people’s minds to do what they’re doing to bring peace to the souls of these men.”
Jason Holt, whose uncle, Pfc. Thomas C. Hawkins, was executed in December 1917, said clemency comes as a relief.
“It’s an acknowledgment that what took place was wrong and that justice was not served, and it serves to help to clean up any besmirchments on their record — and not just their record in the service but their record as human beings. So perhaps in some respects their souls will find peace,” Holt said.
An attorney in Essex County, N.J., Holt imagines Hawkins standing at attention once more as the Army sets the record straight in Houston.
“I think he would give a final salute because he kept his honor and he didn’t break, and at the point of his execution, he forgave those who were executing him,” he said.