Inside the U.S. Army’s Wrongful Executions of 19 Black Soldiers

Under cover of darkness, thirteen Black soldiers of the United States Army 3-24 Infantry crouched in a cavalry barrack in San Antonio, and, alongside Army chaplains and ministers, composed final messages to their families. Weeks earlier, they had been found guilty of mutiny. Finding comfort in Scripture and memories of their loved ones, the men stayed awake for most of what was to be their last night this side of death. 

Meanwhile, white members of the same army worked by the light of bonfires, hammering and nailing together wooden gallows on the edge of the camp near Salado Creek. Only a few onlookers were allowed near their worksite, among them a few sheriff’s deputies: Only they knew how to tie a hangman’s knot.

By the next morning, on December 11, 1917, the Black soldiers were driven by prison guards through still-dewy grass. Each found a chair waiting for them, and a rope. At exactly 7:17 a.m.—at sunrise—the chairs fell through the floor and the men were hanged. Neither President Woodrow Wilson nor Secretary of War Newton D. Baker learned about the hangings until days afterward. Months later, six more soldiers from the same unit were executed on the same charges. 

More than a century later, the United States Army overturned the convictions of the nineteen executed soldiers, gave them retrospective honorable discharges, and admitted that the circumstances that had led to their deaths were marred by racial prejudice. But in the 106 years before the Army’s concessions, in 2023, the story of its infantry unit remained largely untold—in effect, it was swept under the rug. And even today, the circumstances that brought about the charges and the hangings are clouded by uncertainty. Had there even been a mutiny in the first place?

That Black soldiers were murdered by their white counterparts was horrific but hardly unfeasible. In the early twentieth century—with slavery still relatively recent in the rearview mirror and America in the midst of the Jim Crow era—Black Americans were subjected to institutionalized racism and pervasive pseudoscientific claims about to their so-called nature. Nathaniel Shaler, a Harvard professor in the late nineteenth century, is credited with advancing the theory that Black individuals would “revert to their ancestral conditions” without the systemic confinement provided by slavery. Those “conditions,” as author Joel Williamson writes in his book A Rage for Order, were those of “savages.”

This belief was widespread at the time. Consider D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, the 1915 film in which Black Americans are portrayed as uncivilized and evil beings that prey on white women, which was popular upon its release and is considered to be partly responsible for the Ku Klux Klan’s revival. Many newspapers reflected similar attitudes. The Houston Chronicle published a review of The Clansman, a play based on the book that inspired The Birth of a Nation, in 1906. It wrote that the author, Thomas Dixon Jr., was “to be commended for his delicacy in dramatizing the story of negro crime,” and that no one could see “the confession of the black beast” within the narrative “and fail to understand the vengeance of the Ku Klux Klan of the past and of the Southern lynchers of the present.” 

Suffice it to say, this kind of racist characterization presaged instances in which white groups targeted Black communities—often violently. One such incident took place in the first days of July 1917, when as many as two hundred Black Americans were brutally murdered by a violent white mob in East St. Louis, Illinois, and at least six thousand more were displaced from their homes. The belligerents were incited by a rumor that a Black man had murdered a white man; they beat or shot seemingly any Black individual in sight as revenge. Houses were set on fire to “drive out the Negro occupants,” according to a national wire reporter. “It was stay in and be roasted, or come out and be slaughtered.” The National Guard was in the vicinity but did little to stop the attack. Ida B. Wells, the famed Black investigative journalist, reported that in at least one case, National Guardsmen actually joined in on the violence, shooting two Black individuals and leaving them for dead.

The attack has since become known as the East St. Louis massacre. Just weeks after it, 654 members of the Third Battalion of the U.S. Army’s 24th Infantry Regiment—a subset of the Buffalo Soldiers—were transferred to Houston to guard the construction of Camp Logan.

The camp was founded in June 1917 as a training ground to account for the influx of enlistments after the start of World War I (which the United States had entered the month prior). Designed to accommodate more than 30,000 soldiers, the camp made ample use of Texas’s sprawling landscape, and it therefore required security to ensure no unauthorized civilians crossed its boundaries. In late July of 1917, the 3-24 Infantry unit arrived to provide that security. The soldiers were bunked in tents about a mile away from the camp’s construction site, on the then-outskirts of Houston, near the present-day Memorial Park Golf Course and the River Oaks neighborhood.

Conflict began soon after the unit entered Texas. White Houston locals weren’t pleased with the sudden influx of hundreds of Black men, soldiers or not: 3-24 Infantry members routinely had their access to city streetcars limited or were forcibly removed from the cars to make room for white passengers. They were also harassed and beaten by Houston police officers—especially those from the mounted division—and not always well defended by their Army superiors, all of whom were white. 

Soon to be at the helm of those superiors was Kneeland Snow, a 38-year-old Army captain from Ohio who was promoted to major and appointed the Black battalion’s commander in mid-August and who—despite a strong standing in the Army—had little previous leadership experience. To make matters more contentious, shortly after the 3-24 Infantry settled in Houston, the United States Department of War assigned the same National Guard companies that had been involved in the recent East St. Louis massacre—those whose inaction had enabled the violence—to Camp Logan to be trained for deployment in the world war. 

It’s fitting that tensions in Houston—tensions that would ultimately seal the Black soldiers’ fate—boiled over on the hottest day of that year. 

On August 23, 1917, temperatures reached 102 degrees at Camp Logan. As chronicled by historian John A. Haymond in Black Soldiers, White Laws, at around 1:30 that afternoon, Sara Travers, a Black woman and mother of five living in the San Felipe district—a Black neighborhood originally called Freedmantown—stood ironing her laundry when a Houston police officer named Lee Sparks burst through her front door. Sparks had a reputation within Houston’s Black community for indiscriminate violence and brutality. He demanded to know the location of a Black man who had been seen playing dice. Sparks and his accompanying officer, Rufus Daniels, who entered the home shortly after, subjected Travers to a torrent of abuse and intimidation as she stood in her kitchen, innocent of any crime.

Sparks loaded Travers into a wagon headed to the police station. Private Alonzo Edwards, a member of the 3-24 Infantry, saw Travers with the officers and reportedly offered to pay any fine she might have incurred in exchange for her release. Sparks, perhaps enraged that a Black man dared make such a proposition to him, lashed out at Edwards, striking him multiple times with the barrel of his revolver.

A little later, Corporal Charles Baltimore, also of the 3-24 Infantry, who had heard about the beating, stepped onto the street from a streetcar and asked Sparks and Daniels what Edwards had done wrong. Sparks once again became outraged at being queried by a Black person; he struck Baltimore with his gun too. Baltimore ran. Sparks then shot at him with his revolver multiple times before chasing Baltimore, beating him again with his firearm, and then taking him, bleeding badly from the head, to the police station.

Word spread around Camp Logan that the police had killed Baltimore. The Black soldiers there took stock of the situation: They were isolated in a town populated mostly by white residents, surrounded by white military men who had recently failed to prevent (and, in some cases, allegedly contributed to) the murders of innocent Black people in East St. Louis, and a local policeman had just brutally attacked—seemingly killed—one of their ranks without provocation.

Things escalated. A rumor began circulating among the barracks that a white mob had formed to subdue any response by the Black soldiers to the killing of Baltimore. After 4 p.m., Major Snow chatted with a fellow white officer at the police station, waiting for an update on Baltimore’s status. The chief detective warned Snow of unrest spreading within the 3-24 Infantry ranks. Snow shrugged him off. Returning to the camp with Baltimore, Snow assembled the first sergeants and showed them that their compatriot was alive (though injured), in the hope that they’d spread the news and thus quell any anger brewing in the ranks.

If his attempt to cool his troops’ fear and growing outrage had succeeded, Snow might’ve prevented the horror to come. But he failed to consider that his noncommissioned officers—all of them Black—were themselves infuriated by the altercation between Baltimore and the police officer, not to mention the ongoing abuse they’d faced since arriving in Houston. Soon after he got to Camp Logan with Baltimore, Snow was told over the phone that a soldier had been heard saying the Third Battalion was going to “shoot up the town.” He wasn’t worried—he’d already told the NCOs to collect all of the 3-24 Infantry unit’s weapons. But when his NCOs ordered their troops to relinquish their weapons, not all of the men did.

Exactly what conversations took place among the Black soldiers after Snow’s order are unknown, but at around eight o’clock, after the sun had set, a few 3-24 Infantry members turned toward a supply tent. It was guarded by just one company supply sergeant. The group members made a charge, breaking into the tent and grabbing all the ammunition and rifles they could get their hands on.

By the time Snow realized what had happened, the chaos had already begun. 3-24 Infantry members had pillaged the ammunition tent—their pockets were filled with thousands of rounds; firearms were slung over their shoulders. At some point, a private ran past the men screaming, “Get your guns, boys, here comes the mob!,” in reference to the supposed white mob that had formed in opposition to the unit. These soldiers weren’t assembling simply to avenge Baltimore and their own mistreatment—they felt they were defending their lives. 

At around 8:30 p.m., an initial shot rang out at Camp Logan. Snow—the commissioned officer ostensibly tasked with commanding, and dispersing, the now-armed battalion—ran for the camp gates and was not seen by the men again for hours. In his absence, First Sergeant Vida Henry, an NCO, organized his men into a column of fours. Several other NCOs pleaded with him, finding the idea of marching into the Houston streets foolish. But with Snow gone, Henry was the ranking officer present in his company—the pleas fell on deaf ears, and the company fell in under Henry’s orders. 

Between 150 and 160 men of the 3-24 Infantry left Camp Logan and marched through the dark, ultimately filing into the Houston city center. Some soldiers proceeded down Lillian Street in pursuit of a group of four uniformed police officers, one of whom they wounded. At the intersection of San Felipe and Wilson, the still-marching men opened fire on two mounted policemen. One later died from his wounds. Police officers were the soldiers’ main targets, but unknowing civilians—like Fred Winkler, who was shot on his porch—were also caught in the crossfire. 

As the men continued through Houston, it became clear that there was no white mob for them to battle, no lynching party out to kill them—the rumor was unsubstantiated. It didn’t take long for many of the soldiers to recognize the severity of their actions: They had wounded and even killed police officers and citizens. Many retired to camp; as night stretched into morning, the 3-24 Infantry’s crusade evaporated. 

By dawn the next day, fifteen people were dead, including Sergeant Henry, whose body was found near the railroad tracks. (Four more would die of their injuries in the next two weeks. Henry’s death was reported to be a suicide; coroner’s records indicate that he suffered a stab wound to his chest and that his skull was entirely crushed.) Houston was placed under martial law.

The United States Army quickly learned what had transpired. It immediately launched an investigation and moved the 3-24 Infantry from Houston to Columbus, New Mexico. The Army would eventually court-martial 118 of the soldiers involved.

By mid-September, the Houston mutiny, as it was called, was on the front pages of newspapers around the country, most of which berated the soldiers. Many Black publications took a different stance. “It is difficult for one of Negro blood to write of Houston,” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote at the time. “Is not the ink within the very wells crimsoned with the blood of black martyrs? Do they not cry unavenged, saying:—Always WE pay; always WE die; always, whether right or wrong. But here, at last, at Houston is a change. Here, at last, white folk died. Innocent, adventitious strangers, perhaps, as innocent as the thousands of Negroes done to death in the last two centuries.”

From New Mexico, the soldiers were transferred to Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio. Although Andrew Jackson Houston (the son of Sam Houston) expressed interest in taking on the soldiers’ case, Major Harry S. Grier—whose name carried nowhere near the weight Houston’s did, and who had extremely limited relevant experience—was assigned to their defense. On November 1, 1917, 63 members of the 3-24 Infantry were tried—in the first of three trials—in Fort Sam Houston’s Gift Chapel before an all-white panel. (The Supreme Court had held in past civilian trials that a Black man could only be tried for a capital offense before a jury with at least one other Black member. Grier never objected on that ground.)

The trial was rushed and one-sided. Grier’s case hinged on the racism the soldiers had endured and the argument that the riot had been spontaneous. Soldiers also testified that they would have followed Snow’s order if he had been present, and that they only followed Henry’s because he was the officer in charge. Grier failed to put forward a self-defense case that the 3-24 Infantry members feared for their lives in the wake of the racially motivated harassment and violence they had been subjected to. Snow may have been an incompetent leader—he was arrested during the trial for consorting with a prostitute—but his absence was only one reason the soldiers took up their weapons that day, and perhaps not the most justifiable, considering the men had both been following orders and were reacting to a presumed threat. (Snow was later charged with desertion but not convicted. He was, however, found guilty of  “bringing discredit upon the military.”)

On the morning of November 25, 1917, Major Dudley Sutphin—part of the prosecution—rose to begin delivering the closing arguments. His position rested on the idea of collective guilt: Any soldier proven to have participated in the alleged mutiny would be held equally responsible for every act that took place on that chaotic August night. The white panel gave its verdict: guilty on all charges for 54 of the men who stood trial. Thirteen of those were sentenced to death—but which 13, the court declined to announce. (Who received the sentence was likely based on each person’s alleged role in the event.) That night, the sentenced soldiers returned to their barracks, unsure whether they faced life imprisonment or death.

The thirteen men in question were convicted of mutiny, one of the most serious offenses within a military context. And yet the Uniform Code of Military Justice’s definition of mutiny stresses that offenders must intend to “usurp or override lawful military authority.” The men of the 3-24 Infantry did not override military authority—they obeyed it, as it was passed down to them by the superior officer present, Sergeant Henry. 

Could what took place on August 23, 1917, be called a riot? Yes—a deadly riot. But a mutiny? If former Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth’s statement on the matter two years ago is any indication—“these Soldiers were wrongly treated because of their race and were not given fair trials”—such a charge was made hastily and without due consideration. If the trial had been conducted without racial bias, it’s unlikely that a mutiny charge would’ve been levied. One hundred and six years after the fact, Wormuth formally overturned the soldiers’ convictions (spurred by the NAACP) and changed their discharge statuses to honorable. “The Army,” Wormouth continued, “is acknowledging past mistakes and setting the record straight.”

It was only on December 10, when the thirteen soldiers were separated from their unit, that chaplains informed them they’d be the ones to die. “There was no ‘right’ way of telling them,” Chaplain R. R. Fleming later reflected. “I have been told by the commanding officer,” he said to the men, “that each of you will be hanged tomorrow at sunrise.” It was on that night that the soldiers wrote final letters to their families, who they were unable to see before their deaths.

The thirteen soldiers walked to the banks of Salado Creek. The Houston Chronicle would later report that the condemned men “went to their death with the same reckless daring that characterized them as madmen in uniform the night of August 23,” breaking into a “dolorous hymn they chanted in a nasal monotone.” Their nooses were tightened; the men were hanged. 

The executions sparked outrage even within the military, prompting the War Department to issue new orders requiring presidential approval for all future death sentences. In the two trials that followed, sixteen additional men of the 3-24 Infantry were condemned to death; these sentences were passed to President Wilson for review. He commuted ten of them and approved six.

By the spring of 1918, nineteen members of the 3-24 Infantry had been killed: a number equal to those who died on August 23 the year prior. The original thirteen executed men were hastily buried along Salado Creek, in graves marked only by small blocks. Later, one soldier’s remains were returned to his family; the other twelve’s were reinterred in a military cemetery. Today visitors to Fort Sam Houston can find their graves, though few know to look for them. The creek still flows past the spot where thirteen men died on charges brought by their own army—charges that army now disavows.

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