The 24th: Camp Logan, Houston and the Sad History I Never Knew
By LONNIE KING
Even though I’ve lived stretches of my adult life in San Antonio and the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, I still think of myself as a lifelong Houstonian. Houston is the place I’ve always come back to, the city I’ve defended, bragged on, and quietly believed was better than the rest of Texas when it came to race.
That’s the myth I grew up with: Houston as the more diverse, more “worldly,” more tolerant cousin in a state that often makes national headlines for all the wrong reasons. I’ve carried that story for decades.
And then, on a quiet night scrolling Netflix, I discovered there was a 1917 race riot in my own hometown (sparked by the mistreatment of Black soldiers in uniform), one I had never been taught, and never even heard mentioned.
The Riot Under Memorial Park
The movie was The 24th, a historical drama about an all‑Black Army regiment stationed in Houston in 1917. I expected the usual “based on a true story” disclaimer to mean “loosely inspired,” maybe set in some generic Southern town with a name you could swap out for anywhere.
Instead, the story pointed straight at Camp Logan—ground that would later become Memorial Park—and at a real event historians call the Houston Riot of 1917.
Black soldiers, Buffalo Soldiers, sent here to guard a training camp during World War I, living under Jim Crow, harassed and humiliated by white police officers and some white citizens, and pushed past the breaking point.
On the night of August 23, 1917, after repeated incidents of police brutality against Black Houstonians and soldiers, rumors spread that a Black soldier had been killed by Houston police. A group of soldiers armed themselves and marched into the city.
Chaos followed: gunfire, dead and wounded soldiers, police officers, and civilians. In the aftermath, the Army convened massive courts‑martial. At the time, it was the largest murder trial in U.S. military history and, ultimately, 19 Black soldiers were executed and dozens more were imprisoned for life.
In the December 12, 1917 edition of the Houston Post, the paper printed a line summarizing the court‑martial report and listing the men who had been executed the day before. The version I found named ten soldiers: Sergeant William C. Nesbitt; Corporals Larnon J. Brown, James Wheatley, Jesse Moore, and Charles W. Baltimore; and Privates Ira B. Davis, James Divins, Frank Johnson, Risley W. Young, and Pat McWhorter.
But the first court‑martial had condemned thirteen men.
The fuller record shows that three soldiers—Private William Brackenridge, Private Thomas C. Hawkins, and Private Carlos Snodgrass—were also hanged that day, even though their names did not appear in that particular report.
Maybe it was only a newspaper error. But it felt like more than that to me.
Even in death, some of these men could slip partly out of view, reduced from named human beings to an incomplete list in the paper of record, simply because of the color of their skin.
All of that happened here. In the city I love. On land I’ve driven past, walked through, and talked about, without ever being told why it mattered.
Embarrassed at 65
I was born in 1961. I’ve taken Texas history classes, lived through countless local news segments about Houston’s “rich past,” and sat through more civic pride speeches than I can count.
On one level, I’m not shocked that white Houstonians in 1917 acted like white Southerners in 1917. Jim Crow didn’t skip our city. Police racism wasn’t some rural anomaly.
I’ve become more pragmatic about that over the years, slowly letting go of any fantasy that Texas somehow floated above the uglier currents of American history.
But I am embarrassed that I could live 65 years as a Texan and a self‑described Houstonian and never hear a word about a night when Black soldiers, who had committed themselves to the service of this country, were pushed to the brink by racist violence and then punished with extraordinary severity.
I can’t tell yet how much of that embarrassment is “I didn’t pay attention,” and how much is “nobody bothered to teach this.”
It’s probably both.
My eighth‑grade self wasn’t choosing which chapters of Houston’s history to omit. Adults were. Curriculum committees were. City boosters were. And I moved through that world assuming that if something this big had happened right here, surely someone would have mentioned it.
They didn’t. Or if they did, it was a sanitized version tucked somewhere under the label “mutiny” and quickly moved past.
And, if this was something glossed over as a disgraceful part of Texas history in the 1970s, imagine how it might disappear in today’s educational climate in this state, where leadership in the state capital is moving unchecked to erase anything remotely negative in the Lone Star State’s past.
The Myth of “Houston Is Better” Cracks
For years, I’ve quietly romanticized Houston. I’ve treated it like the sensible cousin in a dysfunctional Texas family: more diverse, more “worldly,” less swallowed by the worst parts of Southern white culture.
Learning about Camp Logan and the 1917 riot doesn’t make me stop loving this city. But it destroys the illusion that Houston has always been “better” in some morally comforting way.
The truth is more complicated. Houston could host a military camp where Black soldiers were abused and humiliated, where their resistance was met with deadly force and mass execution, and then those events could be paved over, landscaped, and rebranded as Memorial Park and River Oaks, with barely a whisper in the story we tell about ourselves.
Historians who’ve dug into the record now describe Camp Logan as a “forgotten Houston story” and “beyond the veil of memory.”
It proves that a city can be economically dynamic, culturally rich, and still choose to forget its ugliest chapters.
“Better than the rest of Texas” turns out not to be a fact, but a myth I built on a selective memory, and this is one of the pieces that was missing.
Hearing “Make America Great Again” Differently
One thing this story does for me is reinforce how I hear certain political slogans.
When a white person hears “Make America Great Again,” they might picture some vague better time: solid jobs, familiar culture, fewer things that feel chaotic. It’s nostalgia, even if it’s uninformed and oversimplified.
But for Black Americans, “…again” has a ledger attached.
It includes nights like August 23, 1917 in Houston, when Black servicemen in uniform—men who had sworn to defend this country—were treated as disposable. It includes Jim Crow laws that said their bodies and rights were negotiable, and police departments that enforced segregation with violence.
It also includes the long silence afterward, where their story got boxed up and stored in archives instead of on the classroom wall, while the city above them congratulated itself on growth and progress.
When you’ve lived with those chapters, “great again” sounds less like a promise and more like a threat: a desire to roll back to times when white violence was normalized and Black resistance was crushed.
Learning about the Houston riot doesn’t make me an expert in Black experience, but it does make it harder for me to pretend I don’t understand why so many Black neighbors recoil from that slogan.
As a white Texan who benefited from a heavily edited version of local history, I have to admit that my “great again” was built on someone else’s erasure.
What I Do With This Now
I can’t go back and fix the lessons I didn’t get in junior high. I can’t undo what happened at Camp Logan or erase the pain it carved into Black memory. Even today, if institutions or industries finally begin to revisit the trials and talk about setting the legal record straight, it’s more than a century late.
What I can do is refuse to keep the silence going. I can let this story complicate my love for Houston instead of retreating to the myth that “we were better.” I can use the platforms I have—as a writer, a broadcaster, a neighbor—to say out loud, “This happened here, and it matters.”
Maybe part of grace, at this stage of my life, is letting my hometown be fully itself in my own mind: beautiful and brutal, generous and unjust, capable of hospitality and of forgetting.
Maybe the grit is in not looking away, and in listening more carefully to the people whose history wasn’t printed in my school textbooks.
I’m still embarrassed that it took me this long to learn about the Houston riot of 1917.
But I’d rather be embarrassed and awake than comfortable and uninformed.
Grace and grit to you! —LK
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Randomly Rudimentary Life Stuff 
The 24th: Camp Logan, Houston and the Sad History I Never Knew
By LONNIE KING
Even though I’ve lived stretches of my adult life in San Antonio and the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, I still think of myself as a lifelong Houstonian. Houston is the place I’ve always come back to, the city I’ve defended, bragged on, and quietly believed was better than the rest of Texas when it came to race.
That’s the myth I grew up with: Houston as the more diverse, more “worldly,” more tolerant cousin in a state that often makes national headlines for all the wrong reasons. I’ve carried that story for decades.
And then, on a quiet night scrolling Netflix, I discovered there was a 1917 race riot in my own hometown (sparked by the mistreatment of Black soldiers in uniform), one I had never been taught, and never even heard mentioned.
The Riot Under Memorial Park
The movie was The 24th, a historical drama about an all‑Black Army regiment stationed in Houston in 1917. I expected the usual “based on a true story” disclaimer to mean “loosely inspired,” maybe set in some generic Southern town with a name you could swap out for anywhere.
Instead, the story pointed straight at Camp Logan—ground that would later become Memorial Park—and at a real event historians call the Houston Riot of 1917.
Black soldiers, Buffalo Soldiers, sent here to guard a training camp during World War I, living under Jim Crow, harassed and humiliated by white police officers and some white citizens, and pushed past the breaking point.
On the night of August 23, 1917, after repeated incidents of police brutality against Black Houstonians and soldiers, rumors spread that a Black soldier had been killed by Houston police. A group of soldiers armed themselves and marched into the city.
Chaos followed: gunfire, dead and wounded soldiers, police officers, and civilians. In the aftermath, the Army convened massive courts‑martial. At the time, it was the largest murder trial in U.S. military history and, ultimately, 19 Black soldiers were executed and dozens more were imprisoned for life.
In the December 12, 1917 edition of the Houston Post, the paper printed a line summarizing the court‑martial report and listing the men who had been executed the day before. The version I found named ten soldiers: Sergeant William C. Nesbitt; Corporals Larnon J. Brown, James Wheatley, Jesse Moore, and Charles W. Baltimore; and Privates Ira B. Davis, James Divins, Frank Johnson, Risley W. Young, and Pat McWhorter.
But the first court‑martial had condemned thirteen men.
The fuller record shows that three soldiers—Private William Brackenridge, Private Thomas C. Hawkins, and Private Carlos Snodgrass—were also hanged that day, even though their names did not appear in that particular report.
Maybe it was only a newspaper error. But it felt like more than that to me.
Even in death, some of these men could slip partly out of view, reduced from named human beings to an incomplete list in the paper of record, simply because of the color of their skin.
All of that happened here. In the city I love. On land I’ve driven past, walked through, and talked about, without ever being told why it mattered.
Embarrassed at 65
I was born in 1961. I’ve taken Texas history classes, lived through countless local news segments about Houston’s “rich past,” and sat through more civic pride speeches than I can count.
On one level, I’m not shocked that white Houstonians in 1917 acted like white Southerners in 1917. Jim Crow didn’t skip our city. Police racism wasn’t some rural anomaly.
I’ve become more pragmatic about that over the years, slowly letting go of any fantasy that Texas somehow floated above the uglier currents of American history.
But I am embarrassed that I could live 65 years as a Texan and a self‑described Houstonian and never hear a word about a night when Black soldiers, who had committed themselves to the service of this country, were pushed to the brink by racist violence and then punished with extraordinary severity.
I can’t tell yet how much of that embarrassment is “I didn’t pay attention,” and how much is “nobody bothered to teach this.”
It’s probably both.
My eighth‑grade self wasn’t choosing which chapters of Houston’s history to omit. Adults were. Curriculum committees were. City boosters were. And I moved through that world assuming that if something this big had happened right here, surely someone would have mentioned it.
They didn’t. Or if they did, it was a sanitized version tucked somewhere under the label “mutiny” and quickly moved past.
And, if this was something glossed over as a disgraceful part of Texas history in the 1970s, imagine how it might disappear in today’s educational climate in this state, where leadership in the state capital is moving unchecked to erase anything remotely negative in the Lone Star State’s past.
The Myth of “Houston Is Better” Cracks
For years, I’ve quietly romanticized Houston. I’ve treated it like the sensible cousin in a dysfunctional Texas family: more diverse, more “worldly,” less swallowed by the worst parts of Southern white culture.
Learning about Camp Logan and the 1917 riot doesn’t make me stop loving this city. But it destroys the illusion that Houston has always been “better” in some morally comforting way.
The truth is more complicated. Houston could host a military camp where Black soldiers were abused and humiliated, where their resistance was met with deadly force and mass execution, and then those events could be paved over, landscaped, and rebranded as Memorial Park and River Oaks, with barely a whisper in the story we tell about ourselves.
Historians who’ve dug into the record now describe Camp Logan as a “forgotten Houston story” and “beyond the veil of memory.”
It proves that a city can be economically dynamic, culturally rich, and still choose to forget its ugliest chapters.
“Better than the rest of Texas” turns out not to be a fact, but a myth I built on a selective memory, and this is one of the pieces that was missing.
Hearing “Make America Great Again” Differently
One thing this story does for me is reinforce how I hear certain political slogans.
When a white person hears “Make America Great Again,” they might picture some vague better time: solid jobs, familiar culture, fewer things that feel chaotic. It’s nostalgia, even if it’s uninformed and oversimplified.
But for Black Americans, “…again” has a ledger attached.
It includes nights like August 23, 1917 in Houston, when Black servicemen in uniform—men who had sworn to defend this country—were treated as disposable. It includes Jim Crow laws that said their bodies and rights were negotiable, and police departments that enforced segregation with violence.
It also includes the long silence afterward, where their story got boxed up and stored in archives instead of on the classroom wall, while the city above them congratulated itself on growth and progress.
When you’ve lived with those chapters, “great again” sounds less like a promise and more like a threat: a desire to roll back to times when white violence was normalized and Black resistance was crushed.
Learning about the Houston riot doesn’t make me an expert in Black experience, but it does make it harder for me to pretend I don’t understand why so many Black neighbors recoil from that slogan.
As a white Texan who benefited from a heavily edited version of local history, I have to admit that my “great again” was built on someone else’s erasure.
What I Do With This Now
I can’t go back and fix the lessons I didn’t get in junior high. I can’t undo what happened at Camp Logan or erase the pain it carved into Black memory. Even today, if institutions or industries finally begin to revisit the trials and talk about setting the legal record straight, it’s more than a century late.
What I can do is refuse to keep the silence going. I can let this story complicate my love for Houston instead of retreating to the myth that “we were better.” I can use the platforms I have—as a writer, a broadcaster, a neighbor—to say out loud, “This happened here, and it matters.”
Maybe part of grace, at this stage of my life, is letting my hometown be fully itself in my own mind: beautiful and brutal, generous and unjust, capable of hospitality and of forgetting.
Maybe the grit is in not looking away, and in listening more carefully to the people whose history wasn’t printed in my school textbooks.
I’m still embarrassed that it took me this long to learn about the Houston riot of 1917.
But I’d rather be embarrassed and awake than comfortable and uninformed.
Grace and grit to you! —LK
This is SO good, I've gotta share it!
Related