This week the US Army overturned the convictions of 110 soldiers of the Black 24th Infantry for a “riot” in Houston in 1917. The new judgement came 106 years late for the 19 men who were hung. It came late for those who were imprisoned, too.

The full story doesn’t fit in a Facebook post. It includes Houston Police invading a

Black woman’s house and dragging her out half dressed because they lost track of an unrelated man in a foot chase. It includes a Black soldier arrested and beaten for asking those officers to allow her to put on some clothes. It includes Black Military Policemen who were ordered to patrol unarmed because white Texans were offended even by the sight of Black men in uniform, not to mention carrying their weapons. It includes a Black MP beaten and shot for asking white police the whereabouts of that arrested soldier.

This story is not a major plot point in my historical novel Though An Army Come Against Us. It is more of a looming and ongoing presence in the lives of my characters: a concern that everybody has on their minds.

Lt. Flipper c. 1877

H.O. Flipper, who by that point (as in real life) was working as an engineering consultant and confidential informant for Senator Albert Fall, reported to him (in my novel) about the reasons for what he described as the “mutiny”:

“First, is the abusive behavior toward them of white Houston, and especially the Houston Police Department. In my presence a white police officer bragged that in Texas the fine for killing a vulture is $25 but killing a n----- only costs $5. The mutiny itself began when two white police officers pistol-whipped and shot a colored military policeman for asking where they were holding a soldier they had arrested.”

Flipper in 1923

His second reason is the incompetence and racism of the men’s own (white) officers. And Flipper suggests that if he (a West Point graduate) were reinstated in the Army, he could immediately make the 24th a better unit.

My character Major Walter Loving was - like the real Walter Loving - a Black military band leader who is recruited at the outset of the First World War by Military Intelligence to report on the readiness of the Black regiments. In the novel he visits Camp Des Moines, where African American non-commissioned regulars and college graduates who volunteered were trained as officers. In the novel he writes to headquarters:

Walter Loving, c. 1890

“You asked in your letter of 16th last how the candidates are responding to the mutiny by some members of the 24th Infantry in Houston. A few dozen members of the class here are detached from the 24th for this training and everybody else relies heavily on them for both facts and opinion. The most important source of both appears to be a young Regular Army sergeant named Osceola McKaine. He corresponds both with members of his own battalion, who remained in Columbus, New Mexico throughout, and with some in the Third Battalion, including Corporal Charles Baltimore of I Company, the Military Policeman whose beating and arrest by Houston police precipitated the affair.  Sgt. McKaine’s version is that Cpl. Baltimore’s arrest was an example of race prejudice by local law enforcement, but that marching into town to free him was both a gross dereliction of duty and bad for the Negro race. He has urged all his questioners to demonstrate their loyalty to the United States by excelling as officers and thereby to make a case for just treatment.”

Osceola McKaine was a real-life person. It is my fictional McKaine who addresses
a contentious gathering in Charleston, South Carolina on this subject, saying:

Osceola McKaine, by Orlando Rouandl

“The 24th Regiment in Houston is not an abstraction or a debater’s point to me. That was my unit. I served alongside those men. They are my comrades and my friends and if they are executed, then I will mourn them personally and by name."

Near the end of the novel my character Joey Quintana, a union organizer, is imprisoned at Leavenworth for opposing the war. He had previously been deported from Bisbee, Arizona along with about 2,000 striking copper miners and held in an Army camp guarded by… the 24th Infantry. And who does he re-encounter?

“He worked, as usual, with his cellmate, Gabriel
Joyner, #12252. The other prisoners were always surprised to learn that Joey and Gabriel knew one another prior to their incarceration. They asked where a Negro soldier crossed paths with a Mexican-American union organizer. Neither ever elaborated. Joey would sometimes say they met over a card game, but nothing more. Both Gabriel and Joey found it too painful to think about the fate of the other players who had been at that table.”

#12275 Jessie Sullivan

And a couple of pages later we find the inmates singing to make the work go by more easily:

"When Ralph’s song was done, Jessie Sullivan picked up the lead. Sullivan had been a career soldier, a corporal in the 24th Infantry with Joey’s cellmate, Gabriel. Nineteen of their barracks mates were executed in secret for the so-called 'mutiny' in Houston against racist police violence. Jessie, like Gabriel, was spared that. Now he was inmate #12275, sentenced to life in prison.  He led them in the army song, 'Mama, Mama Can’t You See?' The prisoners liked the soldier songs: they were new every day, with lyrics that made them laugh about where they were and what they were doing."

I wrote Though An Army because I believe we cannot understand our present without knowing our past. We are in a moment where white supremacists and monopoly capitalists alike are actually passing laws against the teaching of history. But history like the Houston, Texas affair of 1917 with the 24th Infantry and the Brownsville, Texas affair of 1906 with the 25th Infantry were really never taught. The mass court martial in the one case and the mass discharge without trial in the other, like the mass sedition trials of IWWs, were never really taught.

I published Though An Army in the fall of 2019. I am still hoping to find my readers.