Soldier's Camp for 3rd Battalion 24th Infantry

When the men of the 24th Infantry landed in Houston, they arrived in a city with unfamiliar and highly demeaning Jim Crow laws that were only exacerbated by a police force with a long history of unchecked racist brutality. With proven skills in the field of battle in Cuba and three tours of the Philippines, members of the 3rd Battalion were seasoned career military men. But racial tensions were especially high in the South with the white mobs targeting the Black community in the East St. Louis riot only a month before and the ongoing dark cloud of lynchings looming overhead.

Even with these concerns in mind, stepping off the train in Texas from Columbus, New Mexico, these soldiers could scarcely have anticipated the bloodshed that they would encounter only weeks after their arrival at the camp—both on the streets of Houston and in the gallows in San Antonio. Life in Houston was a battle unlike any they had faced yet as a unit with daily verbal and physical abuse from white construction workers, police officers and Houston citizens. Even those soldiers raised in the segregated South had expected some level of respect as commissioned soldiers but hadn't anticipated their arrival sparking as a means to maintain racial harmony within their city. Instead of treating the Black soldiers with respect, city leaders and citizens remained openly hostile, perhaps in an attempt to ensure Black Houstonians wouldn't begin to expect better treatment themselves. 

 After weeks of clashing with racist Houston police and civilians, on August 23, 1917, word made it back to camp that Cpl. Charles Baltimore - one of the Battalion's highly regarded military policemen - had been beaten, shot and killed by Houston police officers after attempting to retrieve Private Alonzo Edwards, who had been arrested after attempting to diffuse the violent arrest of an innocent Black woman in town. Tensions were high in the camp, even after news that he was still alive but wounded. After rumors that a white mob was headed their way, a group of 100 soldiers raided the supply tents for rifles and ammunition and began their retaliatory march towards Houston. 

The 1917 Houston Riots/Camp Logan Mutiny, Prairie View A&M University. Accessed November 1st 2020. https://www.pvamu.edu/tiphc/research-projects/the-1917-houston-riotscamp-logan-mutiny/ .

Robert V. Haynes, “Houston Riot of 1917,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed November 01, 2020, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/houston-riot-of-1917.Published by the Texas State Historical Association.