Let us give thanks to the historians, who refuse to let the things we would just as soon forget be forgotten. I am reminded, for example, of Steve Lehto, an attorney who wrote a seminal 2006 book on the 1913 tragedy in which seventy-three people, including about sixty children, were crushed to death at a union holiday party in Calumet, Michigan, after someone caused a panic by screaming “Fire!” into a crowded room. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about it, but got some things wrong; Lehto felt the need to get them right.
This is a book that manages to be both dark and enlightening.
Richard A. Serrano, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter for The Los Angeles Times, is cut from the same cloth. His new book, Summoned at Midnight, tells the important but overlooked story of the role of race in the fates of former soldiers sentenced to death by the military. It’s a book that manages to be both dark and enlightening.
From 1955 to 1961, the U.S. military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, housed a total of twenty U.S. soldiers condemned to die. Eight of them were white; all were eventually released. The remaining twelve were black, nine of whom were put to death.
Summoned at Midnight—the reference is to the military’s practice of conducting executions as soon into the prescribed day as possible to prevent any last-minute reprieves from mucking things up—tells the stories of these soldiers, in particular that of a black convict named John Bennett.
Bennett, who clearly suffered from mental disorders, was convicted of rape, despite real doubts about his guilt and the reliability of his confession. In Austria, where the rape occurred, death was not even a prescribed punishment, but it was allowed under military law. The jury that court-martialed Bennett and sentenced him to death consisted of nine military officers, all white.
From 1955 to 1961, the U.S. military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, housed twenty U.S. soldiers condemned to die. Eight of them, all white, were eventually released. The remaining twelve were black, nine of whom were put to death.
According to Serrano, two other U.S. soldiers had recently been court-martialed for rape in Austria. “They were imprisoned for twenty years, matching the Austrian punishment for sexual assault. They were white soldiers though, and the death penalty was never considered.”
Even those convicted of the most egregious crimes—like Master Sergeant Maurice Schick, who admitted to killing an Army colonel’s eight-year-old daughter by placing his boot on her head while she drowned, a crime he said was occasioned by the fact “that she was there”—were not sent to the gallows. (Schick was released in 1979 at age fifty-six, after President Gerald Ford lifted his no-parole status.)
The white soldiers sentenced to death benefited from vigorous legal representation and outpourings of calls for leniency, Serrano writes, while the files for the condemned black men “are thin and bare, often a mere smattering of letters, typically from a frightened mother or perhaps a wife.” Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy both rejected pleas to spare Bennett’s life.
Today, Serrano notes, “The nation’s prisons and death rows are bursting with a disportionately high number of black and Latino inmates,” suggesting that little has changed in the nearly sixty years since Bennett’s execution. But he argues that the protests that have erupted over police killings in the Black Lives Matter movement have “encouraged activists and academics to retrace our footsteps and reveal the painful disparities between how the military, the White House, and the courts have historically treated our nation’s white and black soldiers.”
Unequally, of course.