The True Story of The 24th: Houston 1917, Trials, and Exoneration

The 2020 film The 24th dramatizes a real event: the August 23, 1917 mutiny of more than 100 Black soldiers from the 3rd Battalion of the U.S. Army’s 24th Infantry Regiment, who marched armed from Camp Logan into Houston after months of racist abuse by white civilians and police. The true story of the 24th runs from that two-hour uprising, which left at least 15 white people and four soldiers dead, through the largest murder courts-martial in American military history, the secret hanging of 13 men in December 1917, and the Army’s decision in November 2023 to overturn all 110 convictions.¹²

Who the Soldiers of the 24th Were

The 24th Infantry was one of the all-Black regiments created after Congress reorganized the Army in 1866 and formally organized in 1869 at Fort McKavett, Texas.³¹⁴

Jim Crow Houston and the Abuse of the Soldiers

Houston in 1917 was a segregated city, and the uniform earned the soldiers no exemption. Black troops were forced to the rear of streetcars even when the white section was empty. White laborers at the Camp Logan site hurled slurs at them daily. Houston police treated armed Black soldiers as a threat to the city’s racial order, worried that if the men were treated like white troops, Houston’s Black civilians would expect the same.⁵

Harassment escalated in the days before the mutiny. On August 18, two officers beat two soldiers who protested the arrest of a Black youth; later the same day, two more soldiers reported being beaten by police after objecting to racial slurs.⁶

What Happened on August 23, 1917

On the morning of August 23, Officers Rufus Daniels and Lee Sparks arrested Private Alonzo Edwards for interfering in the arrest of a Black woman in the Fourth Ward. When Corporal Charles Baltimore, a military policeman from the 24th, went to inquire about Edwards, Sparks pistol-whipped him, fired three shots at him as he fled, chased him into a house, and hauled him to police headquarters.⁶⁵ Baltimore was eventually released back to camp, but a false rumor had already spread that he had been killed.

Around 8 p.m., with reports also circulating that a white mob was heading toward the camp, Sergeant Vida Henry confirmed the rumor of Baltimore’s death to the men. More than 100 soldiers seized rifles and ammunition, defied their officers, and followed Henry on a march from Camp Logan into the Fourth Ward and downtown Houston.⁵

Over the next two hours, the soldiers clashed with police, National Guardsmen, and civilians. Fifteen white people were killed, including four officers: Rufus Daniels, shot and bayoneted; Ira Raney, shot, bayoneted, and beaten; E. G. Meinke, killed when soldiers fired on his car; and Horace Moody, who died after a bayonet wound led to amputation. A fifth officer, Ross Patton, died of gunshot wounds 16 days later.⁶ Four Black soldiers also died, two from accidental fire by their own comrades. The mutiny ended after the soldiers mistakenly killed Captain Joseph Mattes of the Illinois National Guard. Henry told the men to return to camp in the darkness, then shot himself in the head.⁵

The Largest Murder Trials in American Military History

On August 25, the Army moved the 3rd Battalion to San Antonio. Between November 1, 1917 and March 26, 1918, three courts-martial were held in the chapel at Fort Sam Houston. In all, 118 enlisted men were charged with mutiny, murder, assault with intent to commit murder, and disobedience of lawful orders.¹⁷

The proceedings were badly flawed. All defendants in all three trials were represented by a single officer, Major Harry Grier, who was not a licensed attorney. Grier had less than two weeks to prepare, roughly half the time given the prosecution, and he faced experienced judge advocates with full staff support.⁸ A key defense witness, Captain Bartlett James, died under circumstances officially ruled a suicide days before the first trial, which forced the only other qualified defense officer, Captain Haig Shekerjian, to recuse himself and testify for the prosecution instead.⁹ Seven Black soldiers testified against their fellow defendants in exchange for clemency, and no prosecution witness could identify a specific soldier as having fired any fatal shot.¹⁰

Of the 118 men charged, only eight were acquitted. The other 110 were found guilty. Nineteen were sentenced to death, 50 to life in prison.¹¹ No white civilian or police officer was ever tried. Two white Army officers were court-martialed but released.⁵

The Secret Hangings and the Law That Followed

The first court-martial convicted 13 soldiers of capital murder. Major General John W. Ruckman, the Army’s Southern Department commander and the convening authority, approved every death sentence, ordered the verdicts kept secret, rejected a clemency recommendation the panel itself had made for one soldier, and scheduled the hangings immediately so no appeal or outside review was possible.⁹ At 7:17 a.m. on December 11, 1917, all 13 men were hanged on a gallows hastily built beside Salado Creek in San Antonio. Ruckman did not announce the executions until after they were carried out.¹² Corporal Charles Baltimore, whose beating had set the whole chain of events in motion, was among them.¹³ The soldiers were buried in unmarked graves at Camp Travis, next to Fort Sam Houston.

The speed and secrecy drew national outrage. African American leaders and much of the public called the hangings a federal lynching.⁷ The wartime Articles of War technically permitted Ruckman to carry out the sentences without presidential review, though under Article 51 he could have suspended them pending the president’s decision. He chose not to.⁹ He was never officially censured, but was relieved of his command in May 1918, reverted to brigadier general, and sidelined for the rest of the war.¹⁴

The backlash forced an immediate change in military law. In January 1918, the Army issued War Department General Orders No. 7, which required that no military death sentence within the continental United States could be carried out without War Department review and presidential approval.⁷¹¹

The NAACP had sent investigative journalist Martha Gruening to Houston within days of the uprising. Her report, published in the November 1917 issue of The Crisis under editor W.E.B. Du Bois, concluded that “the primary cause of the Houston riot was the habitual brutality of the white police officers of Houston in their treatment of colored people.”¹⁵ After the trials, the organization’s sustained advocacy helped secure the eventual early release of most of the roughly 50 men serving life sentences, though the detailed timeline of those releases is not well documented.¹¹

How Accurate Is the Film

The 24th, written and directed by Kevin Willmott and co-written by Trai Byers, premiered on demand on August 21, 2020 through Vertical Entertainment. The 101-minute drama follows a fictional soldier named William Boston, loosely based on Corporal Charles Baltimore, through the escalating police violence that leads to the mutiny and the courts-martial.¹⁶ Trai Byers plays Boston, with Thomas Haden Church as Colonel Norton; the cast also includes Aja Naomi King, Mo McRae, Mykelti Williamson, and Bashir Salahuddin.¹⁷

Willmott, a University of Kansas professor who has written for Spike Lee, described the film as “very accurate” about the event and how it unfolded, while noting that elements of Boston’s personal life and romantic relationship were fictionalized.¹⁷ Variety called it a “lightly fictionalized retelling” of an obscure chapter of Black history.¹⁶

The 2023 Exoneration

For decades, the convictions stood. In 1937, the remains of 17 of the 19 executed soldiers were reinterred at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery; the families of Corporal Larnon Brown and Private Joseph Smith had reclaimed the other two. Their headstones listed only names and years of death, with no rank, unit, or acknowledgment of service.¹⁸

A coalition that included the NAACP Houston Branch, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, and South Texas College of Law Houston pressed a campaign called Justice for the 24th.¹⁹ In October 2020, Adjunct Professor Dru Brenner-Beck of South Texas College of Law, working through the school’s Actual Innocence Clinic, filed a 129-page clemency petition with the Secretary of the Army titled Returning the 24th Infantry Soldiers to the Colors, with a supplemental addendum in December 2021.²⁰ The petition argued that the courts-martial were marred by racial inequities and due process failures, including the single unqualified defense counsel, the rushed timeline, and the denial of appellate review, and that those very deficiencies had prompted the reforms built into the 1921 Articles of War.⁹

On November 13, 2023, Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth formally approved the unanimous recommendation of the Army Board for Correction of Military Records to set aside all 110 convictions. The Board found the proceedings “fundamentally unfair” and marked by “significant deficiencies,” concluding that the soldiers “were wrongly treated because of their race and were not given fair trials.”² Wormuth said: “By setting aside their convictions and granting honorable discharges, the Army is acknowledging past mistakes and setting the record straight.”⁸ The soldiers’ records were corrected to reflect honorable discharges, and the Department of Veterans Affairs opened survivors’ benefits to families who had been denied them for over a century.²¹

On February 22, 2024, the VA dedicated new headstones at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery for the 17 executed soldiers buried there. The updated markers show each man’s rank, unit, and home state, the standard honors given any veteran with an honorable discharge.²²

1
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Houston Riot 1917 Remembrance
2
U.S. Army. Army Sets Aside Convictions of 110 Black Soldiers Convicted in 1917 Houston Riots
3
BlackPast. 24th Infantry Regiment (1866-1951)
4
Texas Historical Commission. Camp Logan Historical Marker
5
Texas State Historical Association. Houston Riot of 1917
6
City of Houston. Officer Rufus H. Daniels Memorial Page
7
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. 3-24th Cemetery History
8
Smithsonian Magazine. U.S. Army Overturns 110 Black Soldiers’ Convictions After More Than a Century
9
National Institute of Military Justice. Returning the 24th Infantry Soldiers to the Colors
10
The World. Remembering Black Soldiers Executed After Houston’s 1917 Race Riot
11
Equal Justice Initiative. Army Overturns Racially Biased Convictions of 110 Black Soldiers
12
San Antonio Express-News. Black Soldiers Executed at Fort Sam Houston
13
Zinn Education Project. Black Soldiers Executed
14
HistoryNet. Tempest in Texas: The Controversial Courts-Martial of an All-Black Regiment
15
Prairie View A&M University. The Crisis Report on the Camp Logan Mutiny
16
Variety. The 24th Film Review
17
University of Kansas. History of Police Brutality Informs Willmott’s The 24th
18
U.S. Army. Army Honors World War I Buffalo Soldiers With New Headstones
19
Justice for the 24th. Justice for the 24th – Home
20
South Texas College of Law Houston. Camp Logan Soldiers Clemency Announcement
21
South Texas College of Law Houston. Camp Logan Project
22
Houston Public Media. VA Dedicates New Headstones to Honor Black Soldiers Executed After Miscarriage of Justice