Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Battle of Seattle

WYTS: Seattle Seahawks. Original post here.

This is it. The final riot. I hope you had fun with everything. If you had a favorite of these 32, sound off in the comments. I just managed to get all of these reposted within minutes of the Broncos kick-off. Phew. Somehow all this history is why football teams are bad... I think we lost the plot somewhere. We conclude with The Battle of Seattle.

On January 26th, 1856, a coalition of Spokane, Yakama, Nisqually, and other tribes attacked the new settlement of Seattle. The town had been named in honor of a half-Suquamish and half-Duwamish native leader, Chief Seattle. But relations between the tribes and the increasing numbers of white settlers turned sour and there was war all across the Washington Territory through the 1850s. The Battle of Seattle was a short engagement, where the Natives were quickly repelled by land artillery and the guns of the nearby sloop, The Decatur. By the end, the pioneers had lost three men, mostly to friendly fire, while the enemy coalition had lost maybe 28. Their commander, Chief Leschi, was hanged in 1858. The Puget Sound and the rest of Washington was firmly in American hands forever after.

Anyway, that's one Battle of Seattle. There was another. I actually want to talk about the 1999 anti-globalism protest that was a big rallying cry for the political left for awhile. But we need context. Always we need context.

So, it's the 1940s, World War II is over, and we won, congratulations! After that, the United States had the opportunity to remake the global order in whatever form it wanted. At various conferences like Bretton Woods, Britain was sat down and politely told to retire as the global superpower. There's a new sheriff in town. The US had already been the economic powerhouse of the world since about 1890, and thanks to its European rivals destroying themselves in a couple big wars, it would rule the rest of recorded history unquestioned. Sure, there was the USSR... but the Cold War was never an even fight, economically. The important point of the post-war consensus is that old colonial empires were the past. You could try to hold on desperately to Vietnam if you were France, but you’d just end up getting Dien Bien Phu’d. The smart bet was in decolonizing now, such as with Britain and India. And if the old European powers got too big for their britches, America would simply remind the old guys of the pecking order, such as in the Suez Crisis of 1956. This new global empire would not need colonies. This was a post-modern empire, with sophisticated ideas like self-determination and globalization, and of course, free trade.

Also, it was very unsophisticated when it came to opposing Communism. Don't you fucking dare self-determine that your country wants Communism. We'll murder you and your whole family and a lot of priests too if you're in Latin America.

I can't explain the entire macroeconomic history of American hegemony because A) it’s too big, B) frankly I'm exhausted after 32 of these, and C) economics is uninteresting to me. Didn't care about the gold standard in the 1890s, don't care about the Nixon shock either. What is interesting to me is the effects of power, not the fancy graphs with the curves or whatever. I’ll greatly over-simply all of this.

Anyway, the US creates a system where the global economy would be ruled peacefully by non-state actors, a bunch of boring technocrats, all related to the UN. These are things like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and something called the "General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade". That last one will later be reborn as the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995. People use a very slippery term called "neoliberalism" around these organizations, which is a clue that nobody likes them. Whatever “neoliberalism” means, it’s bad, basically. All I remember out of the one PolySci course I took was that the IMF is an instrument of pure evil. It forces austerity and privatization upon the third world, keeping up the first world's neocolonial dominance. Somehow despite decades of IMF loans, things keep going badly for many countries, especially Argentina.

Now the issue of "Free Trade" is a rather thorny one. Back in the 1990s, the politics on this stuff was exactly in the opposite direction of where it is now. The global left was pushing for protectionism for labor, environmentalism, and human rights, while the entire mainstream political spectrum, Republican and Democratic, loved globalization and NAFTA and all that jazz. Most dominant powers through history want to have free trade because it is to their benefit, they have all the money and most of the goods, so let us knock down these barriers and get richer.

Is free trade good? I don't know, is gasoline good? Yeah, it could set me on fire, and might destroy the world in a few decades, but at this very second I need to go to work, so I dunno. It's good that we all have access to anime, it's bad that copyright protections extend infinitely and forever, backed up by limitless violence. Maybe if you’re an arch-racist you end up in the ballpark of the right answer for the wrong reason. But let’s get back to the 90s, *Smash Mouth riff plays*.

So, it’s the 1990s, the Cold War is over, and we won, congratulations! Communism is dead. Francis Fukuyama is telling a one-year-old me that it’s the End of History, while post-modern leftists such as Hardt & Negri are imagining this is the final phase of capitalism called Empire. Empire is so infinitely powerful that it is inescapable like gravity. Politics are not real anymore. The right choices have already been for us. We’re just pushing a few buttons and adjusting some dials to have free capitalism and democracy and goodness for everybody forever.

Except already people are unhappy with the End of History or Empire. Labor in the US has been losing ground for decades, in India free trade means Monsanto has IP control over their entire seed stock, and somehow after fifty years of American beneficence, most of the third world is still very poor. The WTO becomes instantly the corrupt Cryptid to be blamed for all these miseries.

Also, the 90s are a big decade for Seattle: Grunge, Starbucks, Sir Mix-a-lot, Ken Griffey Jr, Microsoft, Frasier, Boeing is still good at making planes, etc. etc. On November 30th, 1999, to finish the decade strong, it's even getting to host the 1999 WTO Ministerial Conference. Bill Clinton will be there!

Secretly this is already going poorly as the smaller economies have a lot of complaints about the richer ones. The third world wants to build their industries and protect their workers and maybe not give up their entire agricultural industry to Monsanto. And the first world wants them to shut up, privatize everything, and get back to making Nikes as cheaply and filthily as possible.

It's easy to come up with fantastic conspiracy theories about the WTO, especially when its meetings have terrifying-sounding names like "Ministerial Conference". That's bad branding, you sound like a Doctor Who villain. Something about unelected technocratic bureaucracies scare people across political lines. It is creepy to everybody from the AFL-CIO, to proper Bakunin-reading anarchists, to wacky Christian conservatives terrified of (((globalists))). Pat Buchanan will be on the same side as Ralph Nader on this one. There would be somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 protestors outside the WTO meeting at the Washington State Convention Center, a few blocks away from Pike Place Market. (Worth a visit!)

Seattle's police were unprepared on November 30th. There was no real leadership to this protest, it was all formless and “internet stuff”, which regular people were still safely sheltered from. Nobody really expected much of anything. Instead they got everything, all at once. The AFO-CIO might rally at 10 AM but meanwhile full-blown anarchists in black costumes would break Nike stores to cause trouble at 9 AM. This was not one protest but about a dozen happening at different places. Many protestors linked hands in chains to stop the proceedings inside, to make it as loud and clear as possible they were not happy with the direction the world was moving.

The police, lacking any good response, fired tear gas and pepper spray at the protesters, which turned mostly peaceful protests into frenzied chaos. (Nobody ever learns anything, do they? 32 of these and it is always the same damn song!) By the end of the day, the Mayor, Paul Schell, was calling a state of emergency. Bill Clinton had to sneak into the city at midnight. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright was stuck in her hotel room as streets were full of teargas. They had to cancel the big fancy opening ceremony on the 30th.

The next day of protests continued the same police vs activist frenzies on the street. The Seattle PD actually ran out of teargas. They came away looking like apes for corporate power and also completely incompetent at the same time.

The protests would continue for five days, the last of them focused on the Seattle PD. Many protesters were rightfully furious at the cops, demanding the 600 or so people arrested be freed. Inside the WTO conference, the discussions continued to go poorly. Being under siege never helps a tough conversation, see the 1968 Democratic Convention. Basically nothing had been achieved inside, and the protesters had made a big point: most people did not even know what the WTO was yet in 1999, and their introduction to it was mayhem in the Emerald City.

The WTO would reconvene in Qatar in 2001. That's in a petrol dictatorship, so there was no threat of protests this time. It still did not get much done. The organization still exists and can exert a lot of pressure on smaller nations, but its ambition of grand global trade deals seems like a lost cause now. The direction of the global marketplace today is just whatever an old man feels like. We haven’t yet boiled away the nation-state into transnational corporate rule as dreamed of by the villain from the movie Network.

Seattle's chief of police, Norm Stamper, resigned in March 2000. He was very apologetic about how his men acted, blaming himself for the chaos. Stamper became a big police reform guy in his retirement, opposing the death penalty and calling for drug legalization. Police departments did learn a lesson though: next time there were major urban riots, they needed to be much more aggressive and have a lot more army surplus heavy equipment.

In 1999, people thought the Battle of Seattle might be the first steps in shattering Hardt & Negri's Empire. Perhaps a real opposition could occur to neoliberalism and undemocratic corporate capture. Instead, the trends continued. Labor power continued to shrink, the environment continued to die, and "socialism" stayed a dirty word until right now, according to the US House of Representatives. The new left would try similar kinds of protests again in the 2010s with the Occupy Movement that... let's face it, failed. That battle against the 1% continues. Still, the Battle of Seattle had been demonstrated that online activism could affect change. Largely internet-based movements had indeed pushed the discussion in way neither political party would dare consider previously. And that went… great, right? How do we like our Twitter president?

Now in a quirk of history, the anti-free trade movement turned decidedly conservative. Any good leftist will still despise the IMF, of course. But post-modern imperialism was too complicated, people needed a more childish system of power, so now we have Trumpism. We've seen already the difficult line between foreign policy goals of open markets and hating foreigners, it's an incoherent position. But if you hate immigrants enough you'll choose to burn down free trade eventually, I guess. Tariffs are so back, baby! We've rewound that clock so far we're aiming for a 1700s mercantilism vision of global trade. (...Maybe? I'm probably assuming too much of an actual strategy or goal here.) The WTO, for all its faults, was meant to prevent big nations from shaking down their neighbors with trade warfare. And we decided that’s actually fine.

Nobody died in the Battle of Seattle. Not many injuries. A lot of arrests, but they did not stick. So, that’s a happy-ish note to end on.

... 

And now, Go Broncos! 

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Boston Desegregation Crisis

WYTS: New England Patriots. Original post here. 

One of the nice effects of going city by city for these riot stories that is that we get to attack America’s injustices from different angles. Western New York meant we could talk about prisons, Pittsburgh meant we could talk about railroads, and now we’re in Boston, the subject will be education. You ever wonder why we joke constantly that Boston is full of dumb racists? Is Robert Kraft helping that stereotype today? This is the Boston Desegregation Crisis.

In Fairfax County, Virginia in the Jim Crow era, Black students had to be driven 36 miles to go to the one high school available for them. That was much worse than the traditional 16 miles, uphill both ways, and it could even be in the snow! Entire classes got stuck in bus wrecks in the woods, terrifying their parents. Opposing integration was what they called "Massive Resistance" engineered by some of the worst politicians in American history. Virginia shut down Norfolk’s entire public school system for a few months in 1958, so nobody would get educated at all. The resistance to integration was horrible, extreme, and preposterous.

And yet, these battles over education did not happen only in Dixie. Racist rhetoric doesn’t just come from a corn bred good ol’ boy dialect, it also comes in a hilarious Southie accent. It is a kind of irony that in Boston, and in many other school districts, integration meant not the end of long bus commutes, but the implementation of them. Only this time it was not snowstorms attacking the students, it was moms with glass bottles and rocks.

In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education clipped the wings of Jim Crow forever. This was the single most important decision in America’s education history: it would define the course of schooling until today. All the politics around education from School Choice pseudo-capitalist schemes, home schooling, and yes, again racial issues, can be tied right back here to the ugly decades-long fight to desegregate schools. That's a battle we actually lost.

The clumsy assumption in Brown had been implicitly that Black schools were always going to be worse than white ones. They thought Black students needed access to white schools, not the other way around. However, by 1971, in many urban districts, integration needed to be a flow in both directions. We need more than merely “don’t segregate” but rather “do integration”. In 1971, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education was just as big of a landmark case as Brown, forcing the school district of Charlotte, NC to bus its students in every direction. By 1973, West Charlotte High, a previously overwhelmingly Black school, was something of a model success story. Somehow the district found a lot of money to improve it the moment white kids had to go there, and the lives of all the students improved. We’ll never know how that happened, must have been just good luck, or Santa Claus did it.

If it could work in Charlotte with relative ease, how was Boston such a disaster?

Boston built the first public high school in the nation in 1821. The school district here was already 300 years old by Brown. One of the great successes of public schools is that they are felt to be core parts of their communities. Parents love their local schools and are very protective of them. (Kids, less so, going to school sucks.) But Boston, like everywhere else in the US, was a heavily segregated city, with a large Irish population in South Boston and Black populations in areas like Roxbury. These were both rough working class neighborhoods, but the color difference meant a lot even to those at the bottom. Informal segregation patterns were seen as the natural state of the things for most Americans, even as they did not really have a choice in the matter. People hoping to dissolve the races into a light brown slurry were extreme outliers.

One of the problems in Boston was that the city lacked many Black teachers. About 1 in 200 teachers in this era were Black, the vast majority were white. Schools in Roxbury and other neighborhoods were overcrowded and neglected. The school district itself may have drawn its lines specifically to segregate. The housing authority in the city was complicit with all of this, continuing segregation in public housing well past the point that had been made illegal in the 1960s. Roxbury was partially bulldozed to build the I-695 highway that was never completed. (Highways in Boston are a disaster, even the Big Dig did not fix anything, but say it with me, "we don't have time for that now".) Of the 55 schools in the state with severe segregation issues, 46 were in Boston.

In 1965, Massachusetts’ legislature passed the Racial Imbalance Act, to fix the state’s segregation issues. However, no movement was actually accomplished in Boston. The all-white school board did nothing at all for an entire decade while Black organizers moved their case through the various courts. Leading the resistance, the Orval Faubus or Harry Byrd Jr of the North, was school board chairwoman Louise Day Hicks. She was a mother with a college degree from a wealthy family. Sounds like a nice lady until you learn she was completely intransigent on every level. As far as Hicks was concerned there was no segregation, and when she admitted there was, it was good actually. No matter what the court said, she was not going to budge. In 1967, she’d run for mayor on a segregationist platform, and Hicks would serve in Congress in the 70s. She’d found a movement called ROAR, Restored Our Alienated Rights, a parents’ organization to push for Massive Resistance to desegregation a la Virginia a decade earlier. While Hicks resented comparisons to George Wallace, her rhetoric was the usual dog whistles, I don’t need to quote any of her bullshit.

Ironically, by the mid-70s, Boston's schools were more segregated than Southern cities. We can thank Hicks for that.

This case continued to work its way through the court system, eventually ending up in federal hands. In 1973, it reached the bench of Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. Judge Garrity was a WWII veteran, an Army Sergeant in the Signal Corps, who served in the Normandy Campaign. He probably did not think he’d spend decades of his career as basically dictator of Boston education at any point in his legal training. In 1974, he ruled in Morrigan v. Hennigan that Boston’s school system was indeed segregation and that integration would have to happen. In Charlotte, this had taken months. In Boston, this took years, with this federal judge forced to run the school district at certain times. He’d be working on this case until 1990.

Judge Garrity’s ruling demanded that in the next school year, 17,000 or so students should be bused, a crude forcing of the issue. He also demanded the school committee create a real plan to integrate by 1975, hopefully with a better, long-term solution. Instead, the school board did nothing at all. The board was found to be in contempt of court on December 27th. By 1975, the Judge and the federal government had taken control of the integration due to such ugliness from the local government. For the ROAR parents, this meant effectively federal occupation of their schools, and they raged all the further. In the case of South Boston High School, the feds did take over, with Garrity himself having to assume personal control of the school.

South Boston High School and its counterpart Roxbury High School were both had very poor student bodies, but each had severe racial disparities. Judge Garrity ordered them mixed-together. Maybe that was not the best solution, but it was *a* solution, of which none were coming from Boston itself.

On the ground, ROAR and other family groups resisted in every way they could. Their politicians like Hicks had promised this would never happen, and they were lying. This all started badly when two days before the integration was to begin, Senator Ted Kennedy tried to make a speech, only to be met by thrown tomatoes. The crowd then surged after him. He fled indoors before he was forced to join his brothers in martyrdom. (I should note that his own children went to private school, not public, which was an option not afforded to the Southies.)

South Boston and the similarly heavily-white Hyde Park were the main battlefields of these riots. On September 12th, 1974, the busing began, and in most schools, it was orderly with business as usual. However, in South Boston High, many white students stayed home in protest, and their own busing assignments to Roxbury High were ignored. Eventually they relented thanks to truancy laws forcing them to go to class. Through October, there were hundreds of arrests outside schools. You can imagine how this felt for the Black students traveling across the city, having to be escorted by police motorcades. Then they met furious crowds of white families throwing rocks at the sides of their vehicle. It was scenes out of Little Rock, 1957 but in New England minus Jerry Jones. Many of these students would report PTSD symptoms well into their adulthood, having seen their very existence turn so many white faces bright red.

There were about 40 separate small riots in the mid-70s in Boston around the busing issue. Most were outside the schools, forcing Judge Garrity to outlaw any congregations of three or more people within 100 yards of a school. Many were inside schools, however, as students fought each other, with a giant 1,300 student rumble happening in Hyde Park. There were a few near-fatal stabbings and a bomb threat. Still the majority of students simply went to class and interacted calmly, heroic teachers held the city together despite what their reckless politicians were doing. Outside the schools, the hatred only kept growing uglier. A teacher in South Boston reported the mood as, "This school is DEATH. The mood of the school is black."

Anti-racism rallies in winter 1975 were attacked repeatedly. By the summer, the city of Boston was a powderkeg of random racial violence. A Black lawyer was assaulted by white teenagers in 1976, beaten with an American flag. In response Black youths stoned a white auto mechanic in Roxbury, who never recovered from his coma. The city never exploded completely, thankfully.

Things were so bad that Boston TV stations thought the sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter might be too spicy for their audience, so refused to air it for a time.

Through the 80s, Judge Garrity continued to devolve his control of the system to the state and city of Boston. Louise Day Hicks and her ROAR organization began to fade away by the mid-70s. People got tired of this fighting, or simply left the city. By 1990, the Judge gave his “final ruling” in the Morrigan v. Hennigan case. He could declare a kind of victory and go home.

Unfortunately, integration in Boston was largely a failure. Even by the 90s, at the height of peaceful integration and busing, white schools remained heavily white and Black schools remained heavily Black. One issue was White Flight, as families left the city in droves, fleeing to safe suburban districts. The 1974 ruling of Milliken v. Bradley about the Detroit segregation issues stated that integration had to end at the district border. If say, the entire town had a racial disparity, the courts could not help anybody. In Detroit, with white populations fleeing in the millions, they could not force the suburbs to accept busing. The urban schools became Blacker and poorer and more terrible in many cities.

Boston was not the worst of these busing crises, in places like Louisville, KY, whole buses were burned. On September, 6th, 1975 there was riot of 1,500 people there. This was such a large national issue that a junior Senator from Delaware, Joe Biden, made opposing busing his first major concern. He got better once in the White House, but he would always be a disappointment.

One of the grim things of this research is reading about Pre-Civil Rights schools and the “horror stories”: old books, bad equipment, no funding, students going hungry, and realizing… well, nothing has improved. Urban schools became more heavily policed and were effectively prisons by the 2000s. I grew up in North Jersey, so segregation was obvious, town by town. In one place the schools would be beautiful and modern, then within mere miles, they were covered in barbed wire fences. My own high school had heavy internal segregation, the “smart kids” were being prepared for college in one part of the building, while the “bad kids” were prepping for prison in other places. Even in Charlotte, the “model busing story”, by the 2000s had worked so well that the busing program ended. Within a decade the once-thriving West Charlotte was facing closure thanks to No Children Left Behind’s idiotic demands, sub-standard scores on the dreaded standardized tests.

We’ve seen a million crackpot solutions for solving America’s school problems: charters, magnets, vouchers, faith-based programs, STEM-fetishization, terrible reform plans, now all anybody seems to care about is that school sports have the right genders. Really the issue is a lot simpler: we need to fund the schools we have.

Also, to get up on a soap box for a moment: there are good reasons to want diverse schools and classrooms across racial and economic lines. Studies have shown diverse classes have better outcomes - for everybody. One of the goals of public education is to break down the barriers of our society, so people can understand that other people and other cultures exist. Same reason Affirmative Action is good, DEI is good, and children having the freedom to be human beings and not dolls for dictator parents is good. I know the current government is overtly segregationist, but we don’t need to agree with their underlying assumptions. Yeah, it sucks to have culture shock but it’s good for those with means to see real poverty and understand those are real people, and the other way around. Otherwise, you end up with horrible tribalism, and avoidable tragedies. Say, in Boston in 1974, when poor whites and poor Blacks attacked each other, while missing the key truth: the suburbs were plundering the schools, not integration.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Colorado Mining Wars

WYTS: Colorado Broncos. Original post here.

We have forty years of labor history to go over here. This is Colorado Mining Wars. Yeah, plural. Three of 'em.

Mining! It’s ugly. It’s hard. It’s extractive. It’s dangerous. From the moment the Colorado Territory's was conquered from Mexico and the Natives, mining was what brought people here. There was the gold rush in 1858, which is when Denver was founded, followed by a silver boom in 1879. As the 1800s wore on, the easy minerals at the surface were pulled out, forcing deeper and deeper extraction methods. That required a lot of capital and organization, which meant that major corporations began to take control of the industry. With mass corporate capitalism comes... logical, efficiencies, and betterment for everybody, right?

Right?

Colorado’s main industry around the turn of the century was coal, which was the engine of the Industrial Revolution. Thanks to these lovely little black rocks, you get trains, heat, electricity, vast Great White Fleets, and shiny steel. But also with mass burning of carbon we get global warming going - which was not so bad in the freezing 1800s, but is a problem now. The more the easy coal disappeared, the worse conditions got. A miner’s life was cheap, a mule was worth more than a human laborer. You could die in a thousand horrible ways, and that was just a matter of course for the industry.

By the Progressive Era, we are 30 years into the labor rights movement in the US and we have not had much... progression. One of the most backwards industries was mining. Miners were paid in company script, which had to be used in company stores, living in company towns, where you read company literature, and your family was locked in by company barbed wire fences. This is effectively serfdom, not all that different from the Black experience with Sharecropping in this same era. Owners were completely crooked and shameless with how they screwed you over with wage theft. Many of the workers were from very poor regions of Southern and Eastern Europe, just one train ride away from being literally just off the boat. The companies would travel to the most destitute places they could find to for a diverse and thus disorganized labor force. These hungry masses still got a better deal with Rockefeller patronage than under bored incompetent Habsburg rule, but obviously we could ask for more.

Our (top) villain today is John D. Rockefeller Jr, the son of the robber baron who built the Standard Oil octopus kaiju from the political cartoons. By the 1900s, John Sr had largely retired at a reasonable age of 63 to focus on philanthropy and his growing health problems. In 1911, the Rockefellers had their family control over much of the world’s oil supply broken apart, leading to today's beloved companies such as ExxonMobil and parts of BP. However, that didn't make the Rockefellers poor, they could still put on the ritz, their wealth only increased. The Rockefellers took a controlling interest in Colorado Fuel & Iron (CF&I) in 1903. That was a conglomerate that controlled the Colorado steel industry, and much more: it included the coal mines, iron mines, and even a railway. The whole Colorado business seems to have been a birthday present from John I to John II.

As a classic failson, John Jr had to prove himself an equal to his stern hard-working no-nonsense no-thrills Mainline Protestant half-mummified father. He could build great monuments to the family name in Manhattan, Rockefeller Center, while his agents made America a place where hundreds of workers could die at once. John Jr was the prince of the elites, far away from the ugliness happening under him, such as kidnapped grandmas or whole families being burnt alive. I don’t think I like this guy.

The first major strike took place in the gold mines in Cripple Creek, Colorado in 1894. The overtly socialist union, Western Federation of Mineworkers (WFM) were the main organizer in this battle. The WFM are distinct from another major union in our story, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). The UWMA had fewer ambitions about class warfare and revolution, so were the more "moderate" option. The WFM focused on hard rock mining: zinc, iron, gold, that kind of stuff, while the UWMA focused on coal mining. These are different trades and require different skills. Coal dust could explode, it killed your lungs, but coal lives in softer rock and needs fewer sticks of dynamite to pull out. Really both unions were active in every one of these battles, miners from different sectors would strike in allegiance with their brethren. But in certain eras the UMWA would lead, or the WFM would lead, and then there's the IWW at the end, I can't get into that right now. They're another very socialist union, but the WFM were even more extreme. The UMWA was also compromised by Pinkerton infiltration in the early 1900s, that might be why they started quietly. Coal mining was a side-story at first but would be the main front by the 1910s.

In 1894, the big labor man was the WFM's leader Big Bill Haywood. The Pullman Strikes and Haymarket Affair had inspired his hatred of the wealthy. Big Bill was a giant, cruel-looking, cyclops of a man who fought for a unified worker class across crafts and ethnic lines. In 1894, Haywood had the support of the Populist governor, Davis Waite, so the five-month strike ended with a victory, the much-dreamed-of 8-hour workday. However, Governor Waite lost his re-election. He was the best political leadership we'd see for decades. The next round would not go so easily.

In 1903, the new governor, a Republican, James Peabody, was not at all friendly to the union. When the mining companies suddenly demanded their employees work 10 hours – with no pay increase – the battle was back on. The strike would continue from May 1903 into summer 1904, not officially ending until 1907. It happened in various mines across the state, in places like Idaho Springs, Durango, Colorado City, and again in Cripple Creek. Eventually the labor fight became quite literal, Governor Peabody found a tin pot dictator through which to install military rule. That was General Sherman Bell, a former Rough Rider, with an ego so huge he designed his own extravagant uniform complete with lace, tassels, and cords, as if he was a High Seas Admiral. This guy wanted to be Nelson at Trafalgar while he ran a single state’s militia. He would not get a column built to his greatness in Denver, however.

"To hell with the constitution, we aren't going by the constitution!", said a Guardsman officer. Hundreds of strikers would be rounded up in mass arrests, and some spent weeks in pens without legal recourse. While Bell paraded around in his dress uniform, the actual dirty work and combat command went to John Chase, a former football player, who put up Gatling guns (drink!) in front of court houses in case any writs of habeas corpus were actually issued.

Bell would later add, "Habeas corpus be damned, we'll give 'em post mortems." The WFM made a poster asking “Is Colorado in America?”, and the answer they got was “not right now”.

There were several terrorist bombings, the worst of which killed 13 people at a train platform in Independence, CO. Sherman deported hundreds over the state lines without a trial. Two strikers were killed, 17 strikebreakers died in return, all claimed by a pro-union terrorist named Albert Horsley, alias Harry Orchard. Another 15 scabs died in a mining accident again in Independence in June 1904. By the end, the bosses had won. It was a complete defeat for the WFM, who would remain under government watch for decades. They were just too Communist for the mainstream CIO or even the IWW. Haywood would later flee the country during the Red Scare of 1919. He died a guest of the USSR in 1929. Orchard meanwhile went on to assassinate the governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg in 1905. That governor had flipped positions on labor rights so received a traitor's justice. Orchard might have been nuts. I can't prove he made up his terrorist claims, but I suspect he might have exaggerated his body count.

Governor Peabody would lose the election in 1904, but would also resign, in a weird political mix-up that saw Colorado have three governors in a single day. That also cost Sherman his military commission. Lacking the funds to make himself $1000 custom uniforms, he left Colorado. In 1909, the fascist tactics of the National Guard finally made their way up to the US Supreme Court. In Moyer vs Peabody, they decided that a governor can just suspend the Constitution whenever they personally felt threatened enough. Unanimous decision too.

So that’s the end of the story, right? Umm… no. Not even close! This is a long one. Let’s go to 1913.

Over the next ten years of CF&I domination, safety standards in Colorado only continued to deteriorate. In 1910, three separate explosions in Colorado coal mines killed about 50-75 miners each. Most deaths were less spectacular but no less horrible. Colorado's fatality rate was twice or thrice that of other states. Even in these barbaric times, the safety standards were blatantly illegal.

So that meant peace forever? No, the next round of battle would have to begin. The UMWA had started this decade focused in West Virgina, fighting the Paint Creek Mine War, with maybe as high as 50 deaths (again, can't get into that now). After that failure, they turned to Colorado.

The main UMWA leader was Elias Anastasios Spantidakis, Anglicized to 'Louis Tikas', a former Cretan revolutionary. He had joined a revolt in 1905 against Crete's Ottoman overlords, hoping to unify with Greece. Once that revolt had been crushed, Tikas traveled to the US, gaining his citizenship in 1910. In late 1913, Tikas got to read about his old political dream coming true in the papers. However, he was busy fighting another war in his new home, now against John Jr Rockefeller. He'd compare CT&I frequently to "the Turks". Through 1912 and 1913, Tikas and the UMWA had been infiltrating Colorado mines, and gaining support for the union. On September 23rd, 1913, the strike began.

Since CF&I policy was to immediately fire any worker who unionized, that meant 20,000 miners and their families were evicted from company towns, sending these people off with nothing. They had to move en mass to tent colonies set up between the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. There they did their best to fight against hunger and typhus, while harassing scabs and protesting. The miners did all they could to make the settlements livable, many dug fox holes under their tents to expand the space and survive the winter. Most had nothing to do, so they played a lot of baseball while pro-company armies were watching with guns ready. The newest governor, Elias Ammon, called the Guard in early, but the real battle was a long way off.

One of the first labor organizers on the scene was the famous and beloved activist, Mother Jones, a little old lady and "the most dangerous woman in America". She would get arrested by General John Chase, now the big man (presumably not wearing that wild poncy uniform though), and he kicked her out of Colorado. When Mother Jones came back, Chase put the 76-year-old woman under armed guard for two months. She described him as having “ice water in his veins”.

The National Guard and Chase were not the problem. The problem was the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. They are what happens if the Pinkertons are even more psychopathic. Their main strikebreaking tactic involved simply murdering people. They would drive around in a custom box-shaped armored car with a mounted machine gun, the “Death Special”, firing at the tents to spook people. Meanwhile, on October 22nd, in Dawson, NM, just to the south, 263 miners died in an accident at a Phelps Dodge mine (Cardinals fans may remember that company). That made the strike seem like literally a case of life or death, and the miners dug in further. All through the fall and early winter were small skirmishes and murders. Things quieted down in 1914, but the stand-off continued until April without major attacks. That is until the events at the main strike in Ludlow, CO, on April 20th, 1914.

This event is called the Ludlow Massacre and is the worst moment of Colorado's long bloody mining history. Louis Tikas was meeting with National Guardsmen that morning to discuss a truce when shots began to ring out. Tikas was grabbed by the enemy, smashed over the head with the butt of a rifle, shot in back three times, and murdered. Meanwhile, the Ludlow camp became a running fire fight, with miners and pro-company forces shooting back at each other, only interrupted by a train running through the center of the battlefield. That gave cover for many to escape. When the Guardsmen took the camp, they burned everything. However, this also included 12 women and children, hiding in a fox hole when the tent around it went up in flames. In total, 19 people were killed. Maybe the attackers lost one.

After Ludlow, the strike ceased to be really a labor action and became a guerilla war. For hundreds of miles there a long front of combat, extending from Las Animas County to well north of Denver. Some historians call it the largest uprising since the Civil War. This period is called the "Ten-Day War", where the company took dozens of casualties. Eventually about 1,500 federal soldiers made their way to Colorado, the undermanned US military was a little busy fighting in Veracruz during the Mexican Revolution at this same moment (so many tangents we have to avoid!). President Wilson kept trying to organize a proper truce and a clear end to the strike. But what actually ended things was simpler: the UMWA ran out of cash. The miners had to give up and go back to work. The strike was largely over by November 1914, the last holdouts were gone by January, and Colorado returned to "normal".

Including Ludlow, both sides took over 30 casualties. Again, the company came out worse in terms of total deaths, 37 to 32, both very rough estimates. Many of the company forces were court-martialed after the fact for various crimes. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about the Ludlow Massacre.

Rockefeller Jr had won. 2-0 in his favor in the mining wars so far. However, this time the imagery was so bad he had to make concessions. In the CF&I, there was expanded labor rights, they actually started following the safety laws, and they instituted a "company union", which was surprisingly effective at fixing problems. John Jr hired Ivy Lee, an early pioneer of pro-corporate spin to help him rehabilitate his image. That included meeting Mother Jones in 1915, making more promises of philanthropy, and also not hiring Detective Agencies to murder people. (Ivy Lee would work for many interesting clients such as the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Nazi Party.) However, coal battles just kept happening in the US.

In the early 1920s, UMWA tried again in West Virginia, with a lot of success. But after Baldwin-Felts agents murdered a mayor, it all led to the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest single labor battle in American history (but again, something we don't have time for). Colorado itself only had peace for 15 years.

In 1927 into ‘28, the IWW (our third union in the batting order!) led the final mining war. This saw the (first) massacre in Columbine, where the state militia fired machine guns at protesters, killing 6 of them. In the end, the Colorado coal industry relented and let the workers have a union... just not the socialistic IWW or the communist WFM, it had to be the UMWA. Major coal combat ended in the US after the New Deal enacted most of the reforms they had wanted for half a century or more. The eventual victory took a lot of effort, a lot of willingness to shoot back, and a lot of stamina. You can lose every battle and still win a revolution.

The WFM was too spicy for the larger unions in the 20th century, and it ceased to exist by 1963. A distant remnant of it is part of the Canadian Auto Workers Union today. The UMWA is the largest coal mining union in the country, though coal mining has been in vast decline for decades. (And that's a good thing, read up on mountaintop removal mining sometime if you want to not sleep at night.) The union has a fantastic health insurance plan, and coal miners need it based on that line of work. The IWW barely survived the Cold War, but it is still working to this day in the radical frontlines of labor, and their small surviving numbers have been growing lately. They just started unionizing fast food workers a few years ago.

There are still eight open coal mines in Colorado today. Even the Cripple Creek gold mine is running.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Rodney King Riots

WYTS: Los Angeles Rams. Original post here.

You can probably do yourself a favor and just watch the LA 92 documentary released by National Geographic, made entirely out of footage and news reports from the event. If you ever need primary sources, this is a good trove of them. But if you want my inferior version of these events, read on. This is the 1992 Rodney King Riots.

When we last left Los Angeles, the LAPD were turning a blindeye to US servicemen beating the shit out of Mexican teenagers in1943. Now let’s see how the next fifty years of racial harmony unfolded… okay, redlining, urban decay, increasing police violence... The post-WWII prosperity is not including many minority groups. There’s a bitter realization in LA’s African American community that they’ll never be accepted as full citizens… now it's 1965, in the heavily Black neighborhood of Watts… August 11th to August 16th... oh, one of the largest riots in American history. Oh dear...

Only days after the 1965 Voting Rights Act was signed into law, a Black man, Marquette Frye, was pulled over by the LAPD for drunk driving. So many of these tales start with small interactions and escalate, don't they? (Free idea for a research project: the 20th century correlation with car ownership, police interactions, and urban riots.) The LAPD fought with Frye’s mother, and his brother. The cops beat Frye over the head, the whole family were arrested, and everybody on the street saw it happen. And boom, five days of chaos: 34 dead, thousands injured, thousands arrested. MLK arrived on the scene a few days afterwards, calling it “the beginning of a stirring of those people in our society who have been by passed by the progress of the past decade.”

After Watts, King became more vocal about his “Northern strategy”, to focus not on merely negative rights in the Jim Crow South, i.e. freedom from segregation, freedom from violence, but on positive rights, your freedom to have economic opportunities, or seek housing, education, etc. LA was a perfect exactly example of those kinds of dreams deferred. Black people had moved here in great numbers, around 450,000 in LA County (it would be twice that in 1991), and received only squalor and abuse. That was the strategy King was employing when he was murdered in 1968. As for LA, the Watts Uprising shocked the city to its core. The rest of the nation would follow quickly with wave after wave of urban riots, nearly all of them generated bypolice misconduct.

LA could relax. They already had their turn. At least it could not happen again.

A different, unrelated King, Rodney, was a few months old when the Watts Rebellion began. He grew up in Altadena, just outside LA. King was not a man of God, nor an inspirational figure. He never finished high school, then spent a year in prison for robbing and assaulting a Korean store owner. He had three daughters with three separate women, two divorces. Just after midnight, in the early hours of March 3rd, 1991, Rodney King was speeding on the highway while intoxicated when the California Highway Patrol flashed their lights for him to pull over. Still under parole, King did not want a DUI which would return him to prison. Instead, he sped away in a failed chase, reaching speeds of 117 miles per hour, until getting caught. He was not a model citizen, but also... not somebody who deserved what happened next.

After Rodney King was subdued, the two Highway Patrol officers were waved away by LAPD cops, who claimed control of the scene. King was tasered but continued to try to get up and flee. Five police officers: Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno and Rolando Solano, then swarmed around King and beat him horribly with batons, with viscous blows and some extra kicks to the side. This went on for over a minute. You can see in the footage the officers putting their weight into every blow.

Rodney King was arrested, then taken to the hospital for his numerous injuries including a concussion, a black eye, and a horribly fractured skull. Even with this medical report, there was still nothing special about what had happened. This was just another incident amongst thousands that had occurred over the decades in LA. Nothing about King’s life was particularly significant so far. “I haven’t beaten anyone this bad in a long time.”, said one of the cops, with a mixture of pride and maybe some ability to feel shame. I don't need to quote the other overtly racist comments. It was all business as usual in LA.

From 1978 to 1992, Los Angeles’ police was run by Daryl Gates, the Frank Rizzo of the West. He helped found D.A.R.E., a bizarre problem popular that peaked in the 1990s that thought the way to fight the drug war was to introduce seven-year-olds to the concept of black tar heroin. There are claims he helped found the first SWAT teams, but Gates himself denied that. However, really what he is known for is running the LAPD during what I’ll call its nadir of race relations. He expanded the force, really innovated in terms of turning cops into a more military organization, but also a more violent one. The Gates era of the LAPD involved vast illegal sweeps of gang members whenever they were inconvenient, such as during the 1984 Olympics, probably habeas corpus violations here. Gates was also a media horndog, making smug claims that he could rescue hostages out of Iran, or that African American vein structure made them more likely to die during a chokehold. The department simply had gotten reckless with their misconduct, feeling invincible, and the man in charge was proud of his work.

However, what happened to Rodney King was caught on video. A nearby person, George Holliday, caught the whole thing on his home camcorder, the footage saved onto a Sony Video8 cassette tape. (This is 8mm, not VHS - but the difference does not really matter anymore since all this technology is Flintstonian-levels of ancient.) Within a few days, Holliday had given the tape to his local TV station. And after that, the entire world would see what had happened to Rodney King. They'd see what had been happening in LA for decades.

King was ultimately not tried for anything. The LA district attorney knew after this, they’d never be able to get a conviction for even reckless driving. Instead, focus turned towards the arresting police. Chief Gates was immediately targeted by the media and angry protestors demanded his resignation. Instead, he ranted “I didn’t invest 42 years of my life to go down the tubes over an incident that I had nothing to do with!”, the buck did not stop there. We’ll see how long he holds out for. It is also at this point that Gates basically stops talking with the African American Mayor of LA, Tom Bradley. They hated each other long before this.

Meanwhile, on March 16th, 1991, an unrelated but also very important incident occurred. A 15-year-old Black teenager, Latasha Harlins, was killed by a Korean shop owner, Soon Ja Du, in a suspected shoplifting incident. (1989's Do the Right Thing, minus some details here or there, predicted all of this. It's eerie.) There had been a lot of tension between Black and Korean communities in LA: remember why Rodney King was in jail in the first place. Koreans were the merchant class in poor neighborhoods and treated their Black customers with contempt and suspicion. For Harlins' killing, Du was convicted of Manslaughter on November 15th, 1991. However, to the shock of everybody, Judge Joyce Karlin only gave Du a sentence of five years probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $500 fine. A man in Glendale a week earlier had got gotten a harsher sentence for kicking a dog.

Back to Rodney King's case, four of the assaulting officers were tried in court. This trial was not held in LA, but in a distant suburb thanks to a change in venue. This was Simi Valley, CA, home to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, and doesn't that just tell you everything? The jury was nearly entirely white. The historical parallels to Jim Crow lynching cases feel unavoidable. On April 29th, 1992, the jury acquitted the four officers of every charge, with just one left undecided. But that didn't really matter, all the cops were getting away with it. To the cynical people of Los Angeles, the result was a bitter reminder that there was no justice.

With the one-two punch of the Latasha Harlins and Rodney King cases, the justice system had made a clear statement about who mattered in America and who did not.

There was probably no way to safely handle such a bad decision with tensions as high as they were. But Chief Gates' force seemed completely unprepared on the 29th for any disturbances. Once the verdict was read at 3:15 PM in the afternoon, the city howled with rage. Protests began instantly, some in Simi Valley outside the courthouse, most were in LA itself, there were even protestors outside the White House. Between the chanting and organized protests, there was also violence. At Tom's Liquor at the corner of Florence Ave and Normandie Ave in South Central, rioting began around 6 PM. This was the first big disturbance and quickly became one of the most iconic. A white trucker was pulled out of his cab and beaten bloody on the street. Furious young men began tossing rocks and bottles at cars, shattering windows. The LAPD had no way to deal with the situation in terms of optics - they had caused all this after all - but it seems neither Gates or Mayor Bradley or even President Bush had a plan for what might happen if the jury returned the wrong verdict. There were no cops in the area of the rioting as the sun began to set.

Where was Gates at this point? At a political fundraiser in Brentwood. He was fighting political change that might give City Hall more power to control him and his police force. His HQ at the Parker Center was under siege by rioters, but he needed to hobnob and sip champagne. Great dude. If Gates were still alive, he'd be in the Cabinet right now.

With the apparent success of riots on the 29th, the next day saw even worse violence. Unrest spread as far north as Hollywood, as far south as the Harbor Area, a distance of about 40 miles. You could stand up on a peak and see fires all across LA County. Particularly badly hit was Koreatown, as brutal random vengeance wrecked retribution for the Latasha Harlins case. As police focused on wealthier and whiter areas, Korean business owners took to their rooftops with weapons, taking on all comers. Half the property damage of the riots were on Korean property, making this event an Anti-Korean pogrom.

As the riots wore on, heavy military response came from dozens of armed forces, everything from the National Guard to the Union Pacific train cops to Marine veterans who had just gotten home from the Gulf War. They all traveled to LA to retake control of the city. By the time the uprising was quelled on May 3rd, the 1992 riot might have been the largest in American history that can we verify. The NYC Draft Riots are sometimes counted as bigger, but the records are much muddier. In 1992, 54 people were killed, mostly unsolved homicides. 12,200 people had been arrested. Total damages were too great to calculate, it was guessed at a nice round billion dollars.

Just as the last terrible LA Riot was punctuated by an important statement by a man named King, so was this one. Rodney King, who stayed private and out of the public discourse through all of this, made a short statement on May 1st: "Can we all get along? Can we get along?" It was a desperate plea for the city to find a way to come back together. To somehow be a community again, agnostic of politics and race.

Chief Darryl Gates resigned from the police in June 1992. He went on to be a radio host, briefly, and a video game character, also briefly, in the unfathomably tone deaf PC game, Police Quest IV: Open Season. President Bush opened a DOJ investigation on Rodney King's assailants, leading to a civil rights case. That did finally get two of the cops, Koon and Powell, a couple years of jail time. That was a very lenient sentence, due to Judge John Davies siding with the defense's version of events. The other two got to go home immediately. King was awarded $3.8 million in a civil suit against the City of LA. He struggled with substance abuse and legal troubles for the remainder of his life. He drowned in a swimming pool in 2012 while under the influence of narcotics, tragically.

Nobody in the justice system was particularly apologetic about the various miscarriages of justice. For example, Judge Karlin complained to the media about needing to make "politically correct verdicts”. She could be on the Supreme Court with that attitude.

In 1994, an abusive ex-husband named OJ Simpson murdered his ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend, Ron Goldman. Simpson, being a famous Black actor in the Naked Gun movies, was able to spin his destructive behavior as a replay of the LAPD's racism. He got his trial moved to a friendlier, Blacker courtroom in Downtown LA, an ironic counter to the Rodney King venue change. When Simpson was acquitted, it became a kind of symbolic revenge for the failures of the Simi Valley trial. You might remember this case for being parodied in half the episodes of Seinfeld. Also, I'm to understand Simpson might have played sports at some point...

Racial tensions in the US continued to simmer for decades, as the necessary reforms were not completed. Policing only became more aggressive, while poverty-stricken urban neighborhood continued to decay until the 2000s when cities rebounded in uneven fashion. LA remained a notorious gang-ridden and police-ridden area of violence and mayhem, but also was a cultural capital all through the 90s, seemingly both dismal and extremely cool at the same time. One rioter looting a store in the 1992 Riot Footage yelled out "gangsta!", predicting the dominant wave of Black culture that would last 20 years or more. Black and Korean tensions quieted in LA after this riot, but there was violence between the two groups in 2015 in Baltimore during the Freddie Gray Riot. LA did not disintegrate like Detroit had in 1967, at least.

Meanwhile, stuffy white politicians would continue to think the only answer to any problem was being "tough on crime" even after 1992, proving they have no ability to understand cause & effect. Therefore, the wave of police brutality cases of the 2010s was the inevitable result. In 2020, another Black man was caught on video in Minneapolis being brutalized by the police. But we've already told that story.

Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! 1917 Houston Riots

WYTS: Houston Texas. Original post here.

The Greater Houston area is prone to explosions. Texas City likes to turn ships full of ammonium nitrate or towers full of oil raffinate into massive fireballs about once every fifty years. In today's story, the explosion is more a metaphor for racial tensions. This is the 1917 Houston Riots.

Three years into the Great War, faced with an unwinnable situation, Germany decided to gamble with Unrestricted Submarine Warfare and bring the United States into the party. This was extremely stupid, so stupid that Germany would repeat this blunder all over again in the 1940s, having learned nothing. In 1917, the US was the richest nation in the world, and had been propping up the Allied Powers for years with loans and shipping supplies. On April 2nd, President Wilson declared war, the first time the American military would sail to Europe to fight a major global power. Its army was untested for modern war, but sheer numbers alone would make a major difference.

Houston, being a major port city, was intimately involved with all of this. WWI was incredibly disruptive to the entirety of American society. It would require the mobilization of the entire nation, and the nation has its own problems, which trench warfare was not going to make disappear. Where is Houston again? Oh yeah, Deep Deep South: you can see where this going.

In 1917, Houston was a booming city (sometimes literally) and the oil industry was only just getting started. It had been untouched by the Union Navy in the Civil War and had not too much difficulty enforcing segregation after Reconstruction. The city had been undergoing a major engineering project to widen and deepen its shipping channel, making it a more and more strategically important place. Since Houston was the biggest port in Texas, it was going to be home to a lot of newcomers about to go off to Europe to discover how much fun you could have with the Kaiser's army in Belleau Wood.

Many of those soldiers were Black, despite the best efforts of Southern politicians to keep them out of the war. They knew Black enlisted men would disrupt this order. Near Houston, a new training base called Camp Logan was under construction in the spot where Memorial Park sits today. The 3rd battalion of the all-African American 24th Infantry Regiment, 634 men in total, were there on guard duty. Important note: even the military was segregated in this era as they made the world safe for democracy.

This Infantry Regiment had quite a history already. The 24th started off as Buffalo Soldiers in the still-Wild West. They fought at the Battle of San Juan Hill in 1898 and saved a politician on an ego-trip, Teddy Roosevelt from getting himself killed by Spanish defenders. Roosevelt called them "shirkers" after the fact as he wanted all the glory for himself. They would go on to fight in America's first or second "Vietnam", the war against Filipino guerillas, with four tours served between 1899 and 1911. Most recently, they had been part of the Pancho Villa Expedition. The ungrateful citizens of Houston were uninterested or unimpressed with their service record.

The 3rd battalion of the 24th sat on a gray line in the racial caste system, and lines are usually where violence is at its worst. They were Black in Houston, so in the eyes of Texas culture and law, inferior. However, they were soldiers in uniform, so inherently demanded respect. Arriving in July of 1917, these soldiers had to deal with all kinds of social problems: where do you sit on the streetcar? Can the Houston police still treat you as a child? Do you still ignore random slurs that are to be expected when you're just walking around? Their experienced commanding officer, Colonel William Newman, had already seen racial violence incidents. One of his men had been murdered by a Texas Ranger in April 1916. Unfortunately, Newman was replaced just two days before the riot by Major Kneeland S. Snow. A fresh new commander probably did not help the feeling of distrust and confusion. (Both of these officers were white, of course.)

On August 23th, around noon, two Houston PD officers, Rufus Daniels and Lee Sparks, were in the Black San Felipe neighborhood. They disrupted a dice game, and while chasing some suspected criminals, broke into the home of a woman, Sara Travelers. She had done nothing wrong, nobody was in her house, but still, the cops dragged her out onto the street in her sheer sleeping clothing, without shoes to humiliate her. One of the 24th Regiment soldiers nearby, Private Alonzo Edwards, got involved with the arrest, and the police beat him via a pistol whipping. A Corporal, Charles Benjamin, considered a goodie two-shoes model soldier, now got involved. You can see how this just keeps getting worse, these two cops pick the wrong option at every turn. Benjamin is also beaten, and as he flees, he is shot at three times (I'm unclear if he was hit). Rumors fly back at the base that Benjamin has been murdered by the police, when in fact, he's actually just been arrested. Everybody becomes panicked that a white mob might march upon Camp Logan, and they want to fight back first.

Major Kneeland, who again, has been on the job for two days, barely has time to figure out what is going on. He does not know whether Corporal Benjamin is alive or dead, or what is happening with his unit, before events get out of control. The Major tried to collect his soldiers' guns and ammo, but when wild rumors circulate, about 100 or 150 of them rush the weapons tent. Now armed, they march towards the city. Their unofficial leader became Sergeant Vida Henry, a Black non-com officer.

The 3rd Battalion now began a 2.5 mile fighting march to the San Felipe area. Along the way, they encountered a confused and unorganized Houston PD response. The cops expected just a few angry unarmed men, not a firing line of well-armed veterans, and they took casualties. One of those killed was patrolman Rufus Daniels, who had started all of this by breaking into Ms. Travelers' house in the first place. A bit of justice. After three cops were killed, the 3rd also killed a National Guardsmen, believing him to be of the HPD. Several civilians were also hit and died, including a white child.

Once they reached San Felipe, it seems the Battalion realized they had gone way too far and their situation was hopeless. Morale plummeted as it hit them they were now basically at war with the entire world, and they were not going to win this one. Sergeant Henry told the men he was leaving and would shoot himself. His body was found the next day. Some sources say it was self-inflicted gunshot wound, other reports make it sound like Henry was beaten to death. Many soldiers went back to base. Others just deserted and hid wherever they could around San Felipe. On the 24th, Houston was under martial law, and the police did a thorough search house by house to find every one of the rebellious 3rd Battalion members. The Army gathered the whole group and sent them by train out to New Mexico. Many would return to Texas to face one of the largest court martial trials in American history.

After the dust cleared, the death toll was 17 civilians, police or otherwise, and the 3rd Battalion took five dead, mostly by friendly fire.

In San Antonio, during the next few months, there were three separate trials for 118 men charged with mutiny and rioting. 110 were convicted. 19 of the soldiers were hanged. On December 11th, 13 soldiers were hanged at once. War justice is brutal justice. President Wilson commuted another ten death sentences on August 31st, 1918 to merely life in prison. Patrolman Lee Sparks, the other cop that started everything, was acquitted of all wrong-doing.

Quickly, the Houston Riot became an embarrassing mark on the US military’s history, even for the ultra-conservative 1920s. Calvin Coolidge made several soldiers eligible for parole. FDR released the last ones in the late-30s. One of the released soldiers, Roy Tyler, would be a professional baseball player in the Negro Leagues in the 20s, but only for a little while. Tyler ended up serving time in Leavenworth a few years after gaining his freedom, ending his career. On November 13th, 2023, a century late, the Army posthumously overturned all the convictions.

The 24th Infantry did not go to France. They would continue as a segregated unit into the Korean War, where they distinguished themselves with hard front line fighting until 1951. It ceased to exist once the US military was finally 100% integrated, the last all-Black unit was dissolved in 1954. A new Regiment by this number was created in 1994.

More importantly for Black soldiers immediately after WWI, 1919 would see a host of troubles in the Red Summer, as Black veterans had their second-class citizen status beaten back into them. The 10th Cavalry, who had also fought in Cuba with the 24th Regiment, were nearly massacred in Bisbee,Arizona, if you remember that story from many episodes ago. Wikipedia calls this era "the nadir of race relations in the US". White supremacy was never more certain of itself and its power to inflict violence with impunity.

Now in 2026, the current civilian leadership is doing their best to erase all history of Black service in US military history. They’re threatening to rename the USS Doris Miller, a war hero, after Donald Trump, who is… as far as I know, not one. These policies are on their face pro-segregationist. There is an active effort to turn the clock back to this awful era.