Cleared 64 Years Later, 2 of 28 Black Soldiers Hear of Apology
It took 64 years, and only two of 28 African-American soldiers wrongfully convicted of rioting charges connected with the lynching of an Italian prisoner of war in 1944, in the midst of World War II, were still alive to hear of the apology.
But on Saturday, at the Ft. Lawton Army base in Seattle, a senior military official handed out certificates to surviving family members reversing their convictions and their dishonorable discharges from the service, reports the Los Angeles Times.
The 1944 court-martial of 43 African-American soldiers in the Ft. Lawton case was widely publicized at the time, but had been largely forgotten as the decades passed. It now appears that a white soldier was responsible for the crime, and that a military prosecutor—Col. Leon Jaworski, who later became famous as a special prosecutor in the Watergate case against the Nixon administration—fought to keep out of the defense’s hands an investigative report that would have helped to exonerate them at trial, according to the newspaper.
There were only two defense lawyers for all 43 men, and those lawyers had only 10 days to prepare their case.
One of the two survivors, Samuel Snow, 83, had hoped to attend the ceremony, traveling across the country to do so, but was prevented by last-minute health problems. He died Sunday, hours after it was held—and his son read him the exoneration certificate, the Times reports in another article.
“He had talked incessantly about how important this weekend was going to be, and while I’m tremendously sad—more than you know—that this man is no longer with us, I do have the sense that he had a tremendous amount of fulfillment,” says Jack Hamann. He is the author of a book, On American Soil, that helped expose the issues in the case.
