More than 100 years after they were convicted of mutiny and murder and hanged for the 1917 Houston Riot, 17 Black soldiers have finally received military burial honors along with new headstones reflecting the honorable discharges the Army awarded them last year.
In a solemn ceremony Thursday at the Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio, Department of Veterans Affairs and Army officials gathered with relatives of the soldiers, members of the 3rd Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, to honor their service and replace gravestones that had marked the men as unworthy of being in a veterans’ cemetery.
Rather than focus on the history of the riot, the courts-martial that followed or the Army’s decision last November to overturn the convictions, Thursday’s ceremony aimed to restore “dignity, honor and respect” to the soldiers who were executed and more than 90 others who were wrongly convicted, said VA Deputy Secretary Tanya Bradsher.
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“These headstones are more than just physical markers. They are a symbol of promise and progress. These headstones uphold the promise enshrined in the Constitution that in the eyes of the law, all Americans have equal rights and equal worth,” Bradsher said.
In 1917, the troops, members of the Buffalo Soldiers, were sent to Houston to guard a training camp. According to the Texas State Historical…
