A century later, seventeen wrongly executed black soldiers are honored on graves

More than a century ago, 110 black soldiers were convicted of murder, mutiny and other crimes during three military trials at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Nineteen were hanged, including thirteen on one day, December 11, 1917, in the military’s largest mass execution of American soldiers.

The soldiers’ families fought for decades to show that the men had been betrayed by the military. In November, they won a measure of justice when the Army Secretary, Christine E. Wormuth, overturned the convictions, acknowledging that the soldiers were “mistreated because of their race and did not receive a fair trial.”

On Thursday, several descendants of the soldiers gathered at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery as the Department of Veterans Affairs dedicated new headstones for 17 of the executed service members.

The new headstones recognize each soldier’s rank, unit and home state – a simple honor bestowed on every other veteran buried in the cemetery. They replaced the previous gravestones that only had their name and date of death written on them.

(The families of the other two who were hanged claimed their remains for private burial.)

The headstones were unveiled after an honor guard fired a three-gun salute, a bugler played “Taps” and officials presented the descendants with folded American flags and certificates declaring that the executed soldiers had been honorably discharged.

“Can you balance the scales by what we do?” Jason Holt, whose uncle, Pfc. Thomas C. Hawkins was among the first 13 soldiers hanged in 1917, he said at the ceremony. “I don’t know. But it’s an attempt. It’s an attempt to make things right.”

The soldiers were members of the 3rd Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, an all-black unit. They had been assigned to monitor the construction of a training camp for white soldiers in Houston.

White residents called them racial slurs and physically harassed them. After two black soldiers were beaten and violently arrested, a group of more than a hundred black soldiers, hearing rumors of additional threats, grabbed guns and marched into Houston, where violent clashes broke out on August 23, 1917.

Nineteen people were killed – including white police officers, soldiers and civilians and four black soldiers.

At their trials, the members of the 24th Infantry Regiment were represented by one officer who had some legal training but was not a lawyer. The court deliberated for only two days before sentencing the first 58 soldiers.

Less than 24 hours later, with no chance of appeal, the first thirteen soldiers were hanged from a hastily constructed gallows on the banks of Salado Creek, which runs through San Antonio. By September 1918, another 52 soldiers had been convicted and another six hanged.

Angela Holder, whose great uncle, Cpl. Jesse Moore, one of 13 soldiers hanged on Dec. 11, 1917, said stories about his service told by her great-aunt prompted her to research his military career. She heard, she said, that he had served in the Philippines.

“He served with pride and the fact that the headstone has now been restored is a recognition of who he was,” Ms Holder said. “He was a very proud soldier.”