[Ravensfort] FW: Symposium on Houston Mutiny & Courts-Martial of 1917-18

[HOFFPAUIR, DAVID R]

Not Period, but may be of interest to some.  Check below.
 
regards,
DSD
 
David R. Hoffpauir
Program Development Associate-
Incident Command Simulation Training Center,
Bill Blackwood Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas,
College of Criminal Justice,
Sam Houston State University,
Huntsville Tx 77341-3926
936-294-4995
www.incosit.org 


________________________________

From: David C Mayes [mailto:his_dcm at shsu.edu] 
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2007 8:20 AM
Subject: Symposium on Houston Mutiny & Courts-Martial of 1917-18



Dear Members of the College of Criminal Justice,

On behalf of the History Department I would like to invite all of you to
join us next Thursday evening (April 5) for the 3rd Annual Joan Coffey
Symposium. This year's Symposium is on the Houston Mutiny and
Courts-Martial of 1917-18. An armed confrontation between Black U.S.
soldiers and Houston police & citizens on the evening of 23 August 1917
resulted in the deaths of 20 people, the largest Courts-Martial in U.S.
history, and the hanging of 19 soldiers for their alleged participation
in the riot.

The Symposium will start at 7:30pm in the Olson Auditorium (AB4 room
#220). Flyer link: http://www.shsu.edu/~his_www/coffee2007.pdf

The Symposium program features 3 speakers and will last approximately 90
minutes (with probably Question-and-Answer to follow). The first
speaker, John Britt, is an historian at Lee College and his presentation
will concentrate on the historical events before, during and after the
Mutiny. He will also discuss how ongoing research into the Mutiny has
uncovered surprising evidence that contests certain judicial rulings
handed down in 1917-18. The second speaker, Celeste Walker, is an
African-American playwright in Houston who has written a theatre drama
on the Mutiny. Her presentation will focus on how she transformed this
historical event into a script and drama, the challenges associated with
such a task, and the issues in particular she wanted to address with the
drama. The third speaker is Mike Kaliski, a private investigator in San
Antonio and former officer in its police department. He is currently the
project director for the documentary film on the Mutiny.

The Symposium is named in honor of Joan Coffey, an esteemed member of
the History Department faculty for about a dozen years until her death
in 2003 after a long battle with an illness.

I've attached below the Introduction from a booklet on the Mutiny put
together by various people who have been working on the project for a
number of years.

Please invite your students to come as well!

With best regards,

David Mayes
Asst. Prof. of History
Sam Houston State University
Huntsville, TX 77341
(936)294-1485

________________________________

Introduction -- Storm In August
On the night of August 23, 1917, during a sudden last-summer storm,
about a hundred members of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Regiment gathered
up their Springfield rifles and marched to the west end of Houston from
their bivouac at the construction site of Camp Logan. Along the way they
fired on startled civilians who blundered into their path. When they
arrived in the San Felipe district, they fought a running battle with
members of the Houston police, elements of other military units
stationed in the city, and some of the community's leading citizens, who
had armed themselves at word of the Twenty-Fourth's approach.

The men of the Twenty-Fourth were Black, their opponents White. Before
the confrontation ended, 20 persons were dead or mortally wounded in the
only racially motivated plot in U.S. history to claim more White lives
than Black.

Less than four months later, 13 soldiers of the Twenty-fourth were
hanged on a hastily erected scaffold on the banks of Salado Creek at
Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, under sentence by the largest
court-martial ever convened in the United States. They were executed for
their alleged participation in the riot, without appeal or review of the
case by the president or the secretary of war, before the verdicts in
the highly publicized trial were even divulged to the outside world.
Within a year, six more soldiers were hanged on the same spot under
sentence by two subsequent courts-martial.

In summary the disturbance and its aftermath appear as inexplicable as
they are horrifying -- on closer inspection, the events are all the more
horrifying because they are anything but inexplicable, unfolding instead
with the inevitability of a Shakespearean tragedy. Despite their
unprecedented magnitude, the Houston Riot of 1917 and its tragic
conclusion were but two episodes in a series of such incidents that were
shockingly routine in the experience of Black military men at the turn
of the century.

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