Correcting the Record:

The Houston Riot of 1917

The Chief’s Corner

WM. Shane Story

Article published on: April 1, 2024 in the Army History Spring 2024 issue

Read Time: < 4 mins

Man smiling with bookshelf filled with books behind him.

In November 2023, the Army Board for Correction of Military Records cleared the records of 110 soldiers who had been convicted on various charges arising from the Houston Riot of 1917, including 19 who had received death sentences and were executed. Besides changing their discharges from dishonorable to honorable, the decision was a reminder of the legacy of racism.

What happened in Houston in 1917 was a deadly confrontation between the city’s almost exclusively White police department and soldiers of the 3d Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment. Referred to at the time as a “colored” regiment, all its soldiers were Black. The clash was rooted in segregation, which was upheld through prejudice, the legal system, mob violence, and lynchings.1 America’s entry into World War I threatened segregation because the nation needed to mobilize men of all races and backgrounds to expand the Army, and African Americans expected military service to help them put an end to segregation. In Houston, the police enforced segregation, and Black soldiers opposed it.

For Mississippi senator James S. Vardaman, the thought of arming and training African Americans to fight was a nightmare. “One of the horrible problems which will grow out of this unfortunate war,” he said on the Senate floor on 16 August 1917, “is the training as a soldier which the negro will receive. Impress the negro with the fact that he is defending the flag, inflate his untutored soul with military airs, teach him that it is his duty to keep the emblem of the nation flying triumphantly in the air—it is but a short step to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected.” This, Vardaman argued, creates a “problem far-reaching and momentous in its character.”2

That “problem” erupted a week later. The Army had stationed the 3d Battalion in Houston to guard a mobilization site. The city police were zealous about segregation and ensuring the battalion’s soldiers did not inspire troublesome behavior among the city’s minorities. Hence, 3d Battalion soldiers endured daily “insults from white streetcar operators and abuse from white police officers”; police habitually denigrated Black soldiers “as a prelude to a beating”.3

The soldiers’ resentment exploded on 23 August. It began late that morning when a police officer, reputedly one of the “meanest” on the force and known for abusing Black people, was searching for a Black teenager fleeing an illegal craps game and barged into a Black woman’s home looking for the suspect. She took offense at the police officer’s behavior and talked back to him, so he slapped her and pulled her into the street to send her to jail on charges of resisting arrest.4 Seeing the officer being rough with the woman, a 3d Battalion soldier offered to pay her fine if the officer would release her, at which point the officer beat and arrested the soldier for interfering with an arrest. When a second soldier intervened on behalf of the first soldier, he too was beaten and arrested. After a false rumor swept through the battalion that the second soldier had been beaten to death, other soldiers’ pent-up frustration and fear turned to anger before escalating to rage. That evening, against orders, a sergeant led over a hundred armed soldiers out of camp to seek vengeance against the police. The resulting melee—a series of chaotic shootings in an urban area after dark—left nineteen dead, including four White police officers and four Black soldiers, but most were civilian bystanders.

In December, after lengthy investigations and the largest courts-martial in American history, the Army convicted fifty-eight 3d Battalion soldiers on charges of mutiny, assault, and murder. It condemned thirteen to death by hanging and executed them in secret the following day. The Army sentenced the rest to prison. Subsequent courts-martial convicted an additional fifty-two soldiers, six of whom were executed.

Controversy over the Army’s handling of the mutiny would linger. Embarrassed by the hasty executions, the War Department issued a new general order, which stated that a soldier could not be executed until after the judge advocate general had reviewed the case. Over the next two decades, the Army gradually paroled the soldiers who had received prison sentences. More recently, the soldiers’ families built a memorial for them in Houston and have spent years seeking pardons. Finally, in November 2023, the Army set the convictions aside because, as Secretary of Army Christine Wormouth stated, they had been “wrongly treated because of their race.”5

History is always about correcting the record. Some things, however, can never be fixed, like the loss of men who killed, and were killed, because of racism.

Endnotes

1 . Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri, The Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World War I (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1974), 21.

2 . Statement, James S. Vardaman, Recent Disturbances in East St. Louis, Ill., 65th Cong., Congressional Record 55, pt. 6 (16 Aug 1917): S6063, cited in Chad L. Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War 1 Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 32.

3 . Robert V. Haynes, A Night of Violence: The Houston Riot of 1917 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), 58, 200.

4 . Haynes, A Night of Violence, 92–94.

5 . U.S. Army Public Affairs, “Army Sets Aside Convictions of 110 Black Soldiers Convicted in 1917 Houston Riots,” 13 Nov 2023, https://www.army.mil/article/271614/army_sets_aside_convictions_of_110_black_soldiers_convicted_in_1917_houston_riots/.