Source: wvtf.org

Hurricane Harvey put Houston back in the headlines, but a hundred years ago the city made news for a very different reason. Black soldiers at Fort Logan had gone on a rampage, prompting the largest murder trial in U.S. history. Now, a Virginia man is trying to clear their names. In the summer of 1917, a regiment of respected black soldiers made their way south to Houston where they were assigned to guard a military base under construction. They were greeted by insults from local residents and racist regulations. The soldiers grabbed their rifles and headed into Houston – vowing to kill as many policemen as they could. Instead, they killed 15 white civilians – some of them innocent bystanders. The army then put 63 of them on trial, providing them with a single person to defend them – a man who had studied law at West Point but was not a lawyer. Fred Borch, a military historian and archivist at the Judge Advocate General’s Corps School, says that made a fair trial impossible. He has made it his mission to set the historic record straight by telling the true story.