BLACK SOLDIERS, WHITE LAWS

A vivid, thoroughgoing account of the largest mass execution of American soldiers in U.S. Army history.

In August 1917, more than 100 Black infantrymen, members of a famed “Buffalo Soldiers” regiment, left their camp and marched into the largely Black San Felipe district of Houston. The proximate cause, later testimonial revealed, was that the soldiers feared that an attack by a white mob was impending, and indeed they met with a confrontation that led to the deaths of 20 people. In response, military historian Haymond recounts, the Army charged 118 soldiers with mutiny. Hammond chronicles, corroborated by a later Army inquiry, that the soldiers’ defense was sorely inadequate; the officer conducting it was not a lawyer, and the trial was laced with perjurious testimony and racist rhetoric. The trial also revealed incompetence, at the very least, of the white officers who commanded the 24th Infantry Regiment, with the officer in charge being “willing to ­either abandon his junior officers to death at the hands of mutinous troops or, assuming that they ­were still alive, leave them to ­handle ­things without him.” Whether there was a mutiny, strictly speaking, remains controversial. If self-defense, then, as Haymond notes, it “can be seen as a legitimate, if hasty, military response to a perceived threat,” but if a vigilante action by Black soldiers, then “a criminal act for which­ there is no excuse or exculpation.” In the end, 110 soldiers were found guilty, with 19 executed and the rest sentenced to life in prison. Thanks to the efforts of historians, including Haymond, and the support of numerous retired flag officers with “extensive experience with military justice,” however, the Army granted clemency more than a century later, returning those Buffalo Soldiers to honorable status—too little, too late, of course, but something.

Testimonial to the arc of justice’s slow turning, and a somber, ably told story of race and racism in America.