13 soldiers
In the first of three courts-martial, 63 Black soldiers were charged with mutiny and murder. They shared one defense counsel, who wasn’t even an attorney.
The Veterans Cemetery at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, looks like many others – headstones with name, rank, dates of birth and death, and wars fought. Headstones that each tell a story. Until you reach the row in which headstones, including one for Angela Holder’s great-uncle, Cpl. Jesse Moore, are memorialized only by a date: December 11, 1917.
“Ours don’t have a story; they just have name and date of death,” said Holder. “The first time I came here I touched the headstone and I said, ‘Oh, man, this should not have happened to you, but I’m going to do something about that.'”
She first heard what happened to Jesse Moore from her Great-Aunt Lovie: “She had a photograph of him in her home. And I was a six-year-old kid running through the house, and on this particular day it caught my attention and I asked my aunt, ‘Who is that? Why do you have his picture?’ and all. I was told that that was her brother who had been killed by the Army.”
Killed in the largest mass execution in the history of the Army – 13 Black soldiers convicted of mutiny and murder, and hanged with no chance of appeal. Six more hangings would follow.
“My great-uncle, to think that he was standing on a trap door that was going to fall out from under him and his body weight snaps his neck? That really gets to me,” Holder said.
John Haymond, a former soldier-turned-historian, said, “The post engineers had worked all night erecting a scaffold with a fairly unique design because it was a one large, single trap door for a simultaneous hanging. Just before sunrise they were hanged. Once the execution was over, their bodies were each placed in plain pine coffins.”
The gallows were erected on what is today the Fort Sam Houston golf course. The bodies were buried a short distance away, for 20 years their graves marked only by a number.
Haymond said, “While they were being buried, the engineers began dismantling the scaffold, and by noon there was no sign that there had been anything that happened.”
They were members of the all-Black 24th Infantry Regiment, which had served in Mexico and the Philippines.
The first and largest of three courts-martial was held – 63 soldiers charged with mutiny and murder. According to Haymond, “Sixty-three men is the largest murder trial not only in the U.S. Army’s history, it’s the largest murder trial in American history.”
THOSE WHO WOULD DECIDE THE CASE WERE ALL WHITE. THE LONE DEFENSE COUNSEL, MAJOR HARRY GRIER, WAS NOT EVEN AN ATTORNEY. HE WAS ALLOWED ONLY TEN DAYS TO PREPARE HIS CASE FOR THE DEFENSE. “IF YOU SAY THAT ONE PERSON WHO’S NOT EVEN A LAWYER DEFENDED 63 PEOPLE AT ONE TIME, ON ITS FACE IT’S A MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE,” SAID HOLT.
