Houston Riots - Camp Logan Mutiny

In the summer of 1917 the Army sent the Third Battalion of the all-Black 24th Infantry Regiment, one of the units known as Buffalo Soldiers, to guard the construction of Camp Logan on the edge of Houston. The soldiers arrived in a segregated city where white workers, police, and civilians harassed them for wearing the uniform. On August 23, 1917, Houston police officer Lee Sparks broke up a gathering in the Fourth Ward, forced his way into the home of a Black woman named Sara Travers, and dragged her into the street. When Private Alonzo Edwards questioned the arrest, Sparks pistol-whipped him. Later that afternoon Corporal Charles Baltimore, a Black military policeman, asked about the arrests; Sparks beat him, fired at him as he ran, and jailed him. A rumor reached camp that police had killed Baltimore. Believing one of their own was dead, more than 100 soldiers took up rifles and marched on the city. In the shooting that followed, roughly 19 people were killed, most of them white residents and police, along with several soldiers. The Army tried 118 men across three courts-martial and convicted 110. A single officer who was not a lawyer defended the 63 men in the first trial. Nineteen soldiers were executed; the first 13 were hanged in secret at dawn on December 11, 1917, before any higher review. The outrage forced the Army to require War Department and presidential review before later executions. For more than a century the convictions stood, and many of the soldiers' families lived with the stigma in silence. On November 13, 2023, the Army set aside all 110 convictions, and Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth said the soldiers "were wrongly treated because of their race and were not given fair trials." Their service was restored as honorable to the extent possible.