Hidden Houston History 2: Race, Riots and Good Ol’ Texas Racism

By Alex Wukman

I’ve been thinking of writing a book on the fight for racial equality in Houston. To do the subject justice it would take at least 2-and-a-half years of research to produce book of no less than 700 pages. It’ll feature things like the Camp Logan Mutiny in 1918. This is one of the more interesting events in local history, what happened was that a black soldier stationed at an emergency training facility just east of what would become Memorial Park stopped two white cops after they used excessive force in arresting a black woman.

The cops pistol whipped the soldier and took him in as well, a second black soldier tried to stop the cops and he was arrested too. When word got back to the rest of the garrison at Camp Logan the soldiers deliberated for a while, some reports say they debated for a few minutes while others say they debated until almost midnight. In the end approximately 100 troops stormed the armory, armed themselves with rifles and marched on the police station to try and get their comrades back.

The soldiers were met by a phalanx of off-duty police, national guardsmen and armed citizens. The ensuing gun battle lasted into the next day and left 12 whites dead and 14 injured. Out of the black troops one was killed and 4 injured. The amount of public outcry this created caused all black troops to be taken out of Texas and a suspension of the enlistment all black troops in general. After the public outcry died down and the army had chance to investigate, there were three separate courts martial trying the soldiers for mutiny. Since it was during war time the sentences for the crime was very harsh. 110 were tried, 110 found guilty, 19 sentenced to death and many of the rest were sentenced to life in prison.

The book will also mention the TSU shootout in the early seventies—HPD heard that the Black Panthers were recruiting on the TSU campus and showed up in force, a ‘firefight’ ensued and quite a few unarmed college students were killed. It’ll mention that while the panthers were there they were teaching students how to screen for sickle cell anemia, hypertension, anemia and diabetes. It’ll go from there to the persistent rumors in the black community of a raid on a Black Panther safe house, this one located across the street from Emancipation Park and how that HPD raid supposedly ended with the structure burning to the ground.

It’ll then move into the part of the story that while intriguing just can’t be substantiated and doesn’t stand up to scrutiny—that after the fire the city wouldn’t let anyone build on the land and renamed the park Emancipation Park to quiet public outcry.

It’ll include the fact that the Menil family wanted to donate the statue “Broken Obelisk,” the one that is installed in front of the Rothko Chapel, to the city for use in a Martin Luther King memorial in 1968 but City Council refused. I was told to mention how the Menil’s even offered to pay to build the park but again Mayor Louis B. Welch and City Council refused.

The book won’t just deal with the black experience it’ll mention the death of Jose Campos Torres—a Hispanic Vietnam veteran killed in 1973 by HPD officers. He was walking home from a bar when two uniformed HPD officers stopped him, handcuffed him and threw him into a bayou.

He drowned, HPD denied any involvement. A few days later the body was fished out of the bayou and the handcuffs had HPD stamped on them. This led to the Moody Park Riots.

And the end of the book will deal with the Klan, how they were marching in Houston up into the ‘80s and how a coalition of like minded citizens was able to prevent those marches by turning out thousands of people and forcing the city to pass an ordinance making it too expensive for the Klan to hold a rally here in town. The Klan now has to carry a $1 million insurance policy and hire off duty cops for security if they want to march in Houston.

Yea it’ll be a great book; sadly I doubt I’ll get around to it. There are just too many beers to drink and too many pretty girls to talk to.