Posted on 12/11/2021 6:59:21 AM PST by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 1917, thirteen black soldiers were secretly hanged at dawn at a military camp outside San Antonio for their parts in a Houston race riot four months earlier.
During the nadir of American race relations and just months after America’s entry into World War I, the soldiers of this historic all-black unit had been dispatched to build military facilities in Harris County, where they met animosity from whites beyond the everyday insults of Jim Crow law. Here, the service of “arrogant, strutting representatives of black soldiery” was hated and feared.
When white police arrested a black infantryman who tried to prevent their detaining a drunk black woman, then beat up and shot at a black corporal sent to inquire after him, hostility boiled over. Over one hundred soldiers marched through the city — confronting a mob of white citizens and police who had likewise armed themselves. Fifteen whites and four blacks were killed in the ensuing confrontation.
The next day’s Houston Chronicle knew just what to do about it.
Their lenient treatment has led negro soldiers to believe that the government is in sympathy with their arrogance and impudence toward white people …
A COURT MARTIAL, A HOLLOW SQUARE AND A FIRING SQUAD WILL SETTLE THE MATTER FOR ONCE AND FOR ALL.
No white Houstonian was ever prosecuted for the day’s events, but the largest court-martial in U.S. military history tried 63 black soldiers and condemned 13 to die:
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
You have to wonder if Teddy or Taft had been president if they would have made sure a black unit was never sent to area of the country that was a cauldron waiting for fire to be lit under it, never mind the fact a lot of WWI history might have turned out differently.
That was then, this is now.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-chicago-shootings-violence-labor-day-weekend-20210907-6zaipcheqnbr5aivqnzyrxbooa-story.html?outputType=amp
Blacks were safer then than they are now after 50 years of relying exclusively on democrat patronage.
I’ll confess that I had never heard of this massacre of Texans by US troops.
“Over one hundred soldiers marched through the city — confronting a mob of white citizens and police who had likewise armed themselves.”
Strikingly similar to what happened in the so-called “Tulsa Massacre.”
This wasn’t a massacre by U S troops.
This was a riot where some if the participants happened to be in the Army
A very sad tragic event all around
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