The official re-investigation of these convictions occurred more than two years after the publication of On American Soil, by Jack Hamann, which cast doubt on the government’s case against the defendants and also revealed that the prosecutor had withheld critical evidence from the defense.

Just after 11:00 p.m. on August 14, 1944, a riot broke out at Fort Lawton between Black service members and Italian prisoners of war.

Fort Lawton, adjacent to Seattle, Washington, was a U.S. Army base, and served as a major military terminal and point of departure for troops and equipment headed for the front lines of the war in the Pacific. Italian prisoners of war supplemented American troops, providing necessary labor. They received pay, uniforms, and some privileges after completing an application that read in part: “I promise that I will work on behalf of the United States of America at any place, on any duty, excepting in actual combat, and that I will assist the United States to the best of my ability in the prosecution of its cause against the common enemy, Germany.”

The Army, like most of American life, remained segregated. The Italian Service Unit’s barracks sat next to the section of Fort Lawton where the Black soldiers lived. (The soldiers mingled at common areas, such as the Post Exchange, or PX.) At the same time, the American soldiers contributed to an undercurrent of resentment against the members of the Italian Service Unit for what the Americans thought was overly soft treatment for former enemies of the United States.

The Black soldiers in the 650th and 651st Port Companies were scheduled to ship out on August 15 to an overseas destination. There were several informal going-away parties on August 14 that included drinking and gambling. By all accounts, the riot began after a small group of Black soldiers and a handful of Italian soldiers who were returning from an off-base excursion into Seattle exchanged words.

The Black soldiers told the Italians to keep the noise down; the Italians muttered something back, and then one of the Black soldiers ran at the Italians. Corporal Willie Montgomery was hit in the jaw and knocked unconscious. The Italians ran away. The Black soldiers ran after them, then returned to the fallen soldier.

A few minutes later, two white military policemen drove up and saw the soldier on the ground, with a large group of Black soldiers crowded around him. They asked these soldiers whether the injured man needed help. The soldiers said they would handle things on their own. After an argument between the military police and the other soldiers, the injured man was placed in the police Jeep and taken to the hospital. By then, the Black soldiers had begun tearing down a fence around the mess hall and arming themselves with sticks, stones, and clubs.

The riot itself ended by midnight. Twenty-six members of the Italian Service Unit were injured. Many of the Italians tried to run to safety, scrambling out of the barracks and buildings toward the woods that separated Fort Lawton from Puget Sound.

In the aftermath, military police scoured the area looking for Italians hiding in the woods. On the morning of August 15, two military police – including one who had come across the initial skirmish – saw a man’s body hanging by the neck from a rope attached to an obstacle-course cable. He was barefoot, wearing only “GI” boxers, an undershirt, and a khaki shirt. A patch on his shirt said “ITALY.” Private Guglielmo Olivotto, who was 31 years old, was dead.

Later on August 15, the Army released a statement on the incident, which it described as an attack on the barracks of the Italian Service Unit. The release said that an investigation was underway to determine whether Olivotto’s death might have been a suicide. The statement also said that the attacking soldiers had been placed under arrest.

“The Italian Service Unit has been at Fort Lawton for several months, and there has been no previous trouble or appearance of ill will on the part of other military personnel at the post,” the statement said. “The unit is made up of volunteers who have been carefully screened and found to be neither pro-Nazi nor pro-Fascist. They are used in various labor capacities at the fort.”

Beyond the arrests, the military had concerns beyond the prosecution of these cases. It wanted to know how the riot had happened, and who should be held accountable for the event and the initial, lackluster response.

That task fell to U.S. Army Brigadier General Elliot Cooke. He arrived at Fort Lawton on September 10, 1944, less than a month after the riot, and left on October 5. During that period, he and his assistants interviewed 165 persons, including command staff, potential witnesses, injured Italians, and many of the defendants. The transcribed interviews ran to more than 1,500 pages.

Cooke issued his report on October 28, 1944. It did not address whether the defendants were guilty, but said that the riot could have been prevented. Fort Lawton’s command staff erred in placing the Italian soldiers in close proximity to the Black soldiers. The report said:

Since the colored soldiers had, prior to the riot, manifested a dislike for the Italians, which dislike was in the process of being fostered by many newspapers throughout the country, the placing of these two types of personnel so close together clearly indicates a lack of judgment, or a failure to appreciate the latent hostility with which many civilians and certain of our military personnel view these Italian prisoners.”

The report also said that the initial response by the two military policemen, Private Clyde Lomax and Staff Sergeant Charles Robinson, reflected “if not cowardice, a decided lack of proper training, and also a flagrant disregard of the Articles of War.” Cooke questioned why these men had not been censored for their conduct and recommended they be court-martialed.

Cooke and his team interviewed several white military policemen who quelled the riot and detained many of the rioters in an orderly room. But none of these military policemen could identify a single rioter. Cooke found this hard to believe: A Black military policeman made identifications; so did many of the Italians. “The investigating officers,” he wrote, “cannot help but believe that the MP’s had for some undetermined reason, agreed amongst themselves not to identify any of the rioters.”

The base commander, Colonel Harry Branson, came under withering attack in Cooke’s report. Branson, Cooke wrote, failed to quickly understand the seriousness of the riot, and then allowed the destruction of physical evidence, including fingerprints on broken glass and shoeprints found near Olivotto’s body.

Branson also impeded the criminal investigation by allowing troops potentially involved in the riot to leave before they could be found or identified. Based on witness interviews and other records, Cooke’s report said that Olivotto had been strangled. Cooke said that during the rioting, Black soldiers set upon Olivotto’s barracks without gaining entry. But Olivotto became scared, ran to a window, and leaped out. “He was immediately seized upon by five Negro soldiers and was last seen being dragged toward the woods.”

The government’s lead prosecutor was Lieutenant Colonel Leon Jaworski of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, who would later become the second special prosecutor during the Watergate scandal. Jaworski joined the case about halfway through Cooke’s investigation and took part in many of the interviews. On November 6, 1944, Jaworski charged forty-three soldiers, all of them Black, with rioting, in violation of Article 89 of the Articles of War.

Three of those soldiers, Sergeant Arthur Hurks, Corporal Luther Larkin, and Private William Jones, were also charged with murder in Olivotto’s death, a violation of Article 92.

The rioting convictions carried a maximum sentence of life in prison. The murder convictions carried a maximum penalty of death. The prosecution alleged that Larkin, Hurks, and Jones had been the ringleaders of the riot, and that Larkin had “blown a whistle” after the initial fight, in effect calling out the Black soldiers to avenge the attack on one of their own.

Jaworski had no witnesses to Olivotto’s death. There was no physical evidence connecting any of the defendants to the murder. Even the rope used to hang Olivotto was missing. The government appointed Major William Beeks of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps to represent the men – all of them. The court-martial opened on November 16, 1944, but Beeks pushed for a continuance.

I have had ten days to adequately prepare — well, actually nine days to prepare — from the time the charges were served on the defense and to interview witnesses for forty-three men. I have been busy all of the time. I have interviewed over one hundred people, one hundred thirty-two, to be exact. I just haven’t had time, even though I have employed all the diligence within my power, to properly prepare and thoroughly investigate and confer with my clients.” – Major William Beeks

Lieutenant Colonel Gerald O’Connor, in civilian life a New York attorney, served as one of the nine members (jurors) for the court-martial and also as the “law member,” handling motions and requests from the attorneys. He granted Beeks an extra four days. (Prior to the Military Justice Act of 1968, court-martials did not have a presiding judge.)

Four of the 43 defendants gave statements that could be considered confessions. In addition, five Black soldiers had been given immunity in exchange for their testimony.

Jaworski built his case methodically. His first witness was Major Giuseppe Belle, who testified that he hit Montgomery in the jaw and set the events in motion. Belle testified that after words were exchanged between the two groups, four Black soldiers rushed him and his friend. One of the soldiers had a knife, and Belle said he could see its blade flash from the streetlight overhead.

Each of Jaworski’s witnesses testified that they had seen some of the defendants at the time of the riot, although their testimony was often vague. For example, Corporal Willie Ellis, a Black soldier, identified 12 defendants as “standing around,” but also testified during cross-examination that he never saw any of the men hit an Italian soldier. Private Jesse Sims, one of the men offered immunity, identified 16 defendants as participants, and said that Hurks led the men down to the Italian area after Larkin blew a whistle.

Despite Sims’s assuredness in his identifications, he could not recall how any of the soldiers were dressed or what they had on their heads. In addition, he never testified that any of the defendants hit an Italian soldier.

Jaworski also presented the testimony of Sergeant Agosto Todde, who bolstered the identification of the Black witnesses. Even in the 1940s, there were questions about the difficulties in witnesses making cross-racial identifications, and Jaworski defused the problem by having Todde tell the court about his time working with Ethiopians in the years before the war.

As the trial proceeded, Beeks grew concerned that Jaworski failed to disclose relevant evidence to him. For example, while questioning Private Roy Daymond, a Black soldier, Jaworski referred to an earlier interrogation of another defendant. Beeks did not have any documentation of the earlier interrogation. This document was part of Cooke’s report and had not been turned over to Beeks. He asked Jaworski to provide the notes of the interrogation. Jaworski said the document remained in the possession of an Army investigator who had worked with him. O’Connor, the law member handling motions, did not press the issue.

Because Jaworski presented no witnesses who actually saw the murder of Olivotto, Beeks pursued an alternate theory of the crime suggesting that white soldiers might have killed the Italian, using the riot as a cover to conceal their actions. To do this, Beeks needed to show the simmering hostilities between those two groups. He thought he had a shot at getting this evidence during the testimony of Sergeant Robert Gresham, a prosecution witness. Gresham, a Black soldier, had been at the PX two days before the riot and witnessed a fight between white and Italian soldiers.

Jaworksi objected when Beeks attempted to cross-examine Gresham about this event. He said that it was immaterial. Beeks countered that the evidence would show that it was the white soldiers who were more hostile to the Italians, and that Black soldiers had often broken up the skirmishes. O’Connor asked Beeks for specific names of participants in that PX incident, but Beeks did not have them. O’Conner ruled that any testimony about the earlier fight would be excluded as “irrelevant and immaterial.”

As Jaworski wrapped up the government’s case, he called the doctor who had performed the autopsy on Olivotto to testify about the cause of death (strangulation) and the time of death (between 11:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m.). He also needed to address the matter of the missing rope. To fill in that gap, Jaworski called Lomax, the white military policeman who had come upon the initial fight and then also found Olivotto’s body at the obstacle course.

Over Beeks’s objection, Jaworski was allowed to present another piece of rope and then have Lomax tell the court-martial members that it resembled the rope found around Olivotto’s neck. Lomax also described the rallying cry uttered by a Black soldier after Lomax and another military policeman came upon the injured soldier who had been hit by an Italian. “They’ve got one of our boys and we’re going to mob them!”

On December 8, Beeks called the first defense witness. When his turn came, Jaworski sought to impeach the witness using testimony the witness had given to Cooke and his investigators. By now, Beeks had learned of the Cooke Report’s existence, but it was his understanding that neither side had access to the summary and the supporting documents. Beeks told O’Connor: “It appears for the first time, now, that the Inspector General’s investigation has been made available to counsel! And as the court will recall, there are several occasions when I have asked for these reports, and it has been told to me they were so confidential and highly secret that [Colonel Jaworski] has not even been allowed to see it!”

Beeks insisted that Jaworski give him the report. Jaworski said he didn’t have the authority to do so. Beeks then asked O’Connor to order Jaworski to turn over the report. O’Connor also said he lacked authority. That decision, he said, lay entirely with the Secretary of War. Beeks argued the report was no longer confidential once it had been used in court. “There is only one thing he can do now, if he uses it for impeachment purposes, and that is to bring it in here and make it available to us.”

The argument went back and forth without a decision from O’Connor. He was aware of the report’s contents and appeared disinclined to grant a delay and allow Beeks a thorough review.

Later that day, after the court adjourned, Beeks and Jaworski reached an agreement. Beeks would be allowed to see specific portions of the Cooke Report related to a witness’s testimony, but no more. Perhaps based on the risk of being impeached by their previous statements, 24 of the 41 defendants declined to testify in their own defenses. But 17 men did.

The list included Larkin, accused by the government of spearheading the riot and charged with murder. Larkin, who had hoped to become a medic, testified that he administered first aid to Montgomery and another soldier, Private Samuel Snow. Larkin testified that it was Gresham, the prosecution’s witness, who blew the whistle and started the riot. Larkin said he did not know why the prosecution’s witnesses had fingered him. “I was in no position to ask anyone for a whistle. There was a man hurt, and I knew how to render first aid, and I gave the man first aid, and when I got through working on these two men, the fight was over,” he said.

Hurks appeared as the final defense witness. Two prosecution witnesses had identified him as a key participant, but Hurks denied involvement. After the riot, the military deployed him to New Guinea, because none of the Italians had initially identified him. By the time he returned to Fort Lawton, he had earned a good conduct medal and assumed he was returning to testify as a witness. Hurks testified that he assisted two military policemen with securing the area and offering aid to the wounded during the riot.

I looked down the streets and saw John Hamilton coming up the street with a white American soldier. When Hamilton got up to my barrack, I ran out to see what was up. Hamilton told me to take this man to safety so no one would hurt him. While I carried him up the hill he told me that there were white soldiers . . . down in the Italian Area also. Right there I knew it would be trouble between the whites and the Colored. I know what trouble mean between the whites and Colored — that’s why I was willing to hold back the crowd for the MPs. I came from the South and have seen too many things happen; at the end of it the Colored man gets the worst end.” – Sergeant Arthur Hurks

The government dismissed charges against two defendants after the trial started. One produced an alibi for the night of the riot; the other was never identified by any witness at trial. During closing arguments, Beeks argued the government’s case was thin and relied too heavily on men given immunity in exchange for their testimony. He described the riot as a tragedy, caused by the Army’s mistake in placing the Italian soldiers at Fort Lawton. “I want to say that I have never known of a case that was prosecuted on more flimsy evidence, on more inadequate evidence,” than this case.

Beeks questioned the government’s theory of Olivotto’s murder. Why, he asked, did Olivotto die by strangulation, when other Italian soldiers were beaten or stabbed? And why was Olivotto taken to a remote location? Where were the cuts and bruises he would have sustained being dragged to the obstacle course?

I want to say to this Court, in all sincerity: If you find any of these boys guilty of murder, you will regret it and your conscience will bother you the rest of your life,” Beeks said. He reminded the court that “There is more on trial here today than these accused. The whole Army system of justice is on trial. It has been charged time and time again that a Negro cannot receive a fair and just trial before a military court. This case — as you all know — has received nationwide publicity. The eyes of the Nation are upon this Court.”– Major William Beeks

Jaworski argued that Beeks was unjustified in criticizing the Army for bringing the Italians to Fort Lawton. The men were prisoners of war and they were helping the United States win. “We might just as well scrap the Geneva Convention,” he said. By Beeks’s telling, Jaworski said, the remaining 41 defendants were simply bystanders; somebody else rioted and injured the Italians with sticks and bedposts. Jaworski argued that the trial was not about race but about justice.

I care not whether a human being be a Negro soldier, or whether he be a white soldier, or whether he be an Italian soldier. If his life is taken under the circumstances that Olivotto’s life was taken, it is murder! Just plain murder! And it is murder under the laws of this land. We cannot forget — we must not overlook — that, after all, it is a human being, a body, in which God Almighty breathed a soul, and no one — no one — has the right to take that life. And when that life is taken, it is murder!” – Lieutenant Colonel Leon Jaworski

The nine-member court-martial panel began deliberations on Saturday, December 16, 1944, and reached a verdict after eight hours of deliberations over two days.

At 5:45 p.m. on Sunday, December 17, the 40 defendants (one was in the hospital) returned to the courtroom. After calling the roll, a member of the panel recited the 13 names of those acquitted. These men were ushered out of the courtroom.

On Monday, the court sentenced the remaining defendants. Hurks was acquitted of murder, but convicted of rioting. Larkin was convicted of rioting and the lesser included charge of manslaughter, as was Jones. Larkin received a 25-year sentence; Jones received 15 years. The other 26 men received sentences ranging from six months to 10 years, an average of 7 years and eight months.

Riley Buckner, sentenced to six months, was the only defendant who received an honorable discharge. Ten other defendants, sentenced to between one year and five years, had the option of rejoining the Army after their incarceration and earning another chance at an honorable discharge.

On January 1, 1945, Lomax was found guilty at a court-martial of failure to repair at a fixed time and place for duty, based on his inaction during the riot. He was given a dishonorable discharge. On April 19, 1945, the Army’s Board of Review rejected the appeals of the Fort Lawton defendants. The board said in a one-sentence ruling: “The record of trial in the case of the soldiers named above has been examined and is held by the Board of Review to be legally sufficient to support the sentences.”

After appeal, the story of the Fort Lawton defendants slowly faded. The federal government gave a large section of the fort to the city of Seattle in 1973, and the property became Discovery Park. The rest of the fort closed in 2011.

Hamann stumbled upon the story in 1986, when he was a television reporter in Seattle, and someone told him about a strange headstone in the fort’s cemetery.

He produced a report in 1987 and would later write: “Over the years, however, Olivotto and Larkin and Jaworski were often on my mind. Friends who remembered the story would sometimes ask whether I ever had second thoughts about the verdict. Black men committing a lynching? An internationally infamous trial completely absent from the history books? It just didn’t add up. But that ship had long ago sailed. Or so I thought.”

In 2001, Hamann and his wife, Leslie Hamann, decided to pursue the story in earnest. During one of their research trips, at the National Archives, Leslie Hamann found the Cooke Report and its foundational interviews, all of which had recently been declassified. Witness statements contained in the report contradicted the trial testimony of prosecution witnesses and gave important context to the riot and the actions of its participants.

(An online version of the Cooke Report can be found at the Internet Archive, by clicking here.)

For example, while Belle testified at trial that four Black soldiers rushed him, he told Cooke that only one soldier came at him, and he also said that the glare of the streetlight made it hard for him to see faces. And according to Cooke, another Italian soldier, not Belle, hit Montgomery. Other prosecution witnesses also appeared to have given testimony that conflicted with the statements they gave to Cooke and his team. In addition, the Cooke Report would have given Beeks evidence demonstrating the extent of hostility between white soldiers and the Italians that preceded the riot.

The report said the incompetence of Fort Lawton’s command staff made the situation worse. Perhaps most critically, the Cooke Report took aim at Lomax’s credibility, and included the recommendation that he be court-martialed. Other witnesses failed to confirm Lomax’s activities during the riot and its aftermath, including the hours prior to the discovery of Olivotto’s body. The report noted that Lomax had been one of the military police officers breaking up fights between white soldiers and Italians in the days before the riot.

After the publication of On American Soil in 2005, two members of Congress, Rep. Jim McDermott, a Washington Democrat, and Rep. Duncan Hunter, a California Republican, asked the Army’s Board for Correction of Military Records to review the convictions of the Fort Lawton defendants.

On October 26, 2007, the review board vacated the convictions of the 28 defendants and dismissed their charges. The army also granted honorable discharges to the men.

At the time of the ruling, only two of the defendants were still alive: Snow and former Private Roy Montgomery. Snow told the New York Times: “Now people are going to see that I wasn’t a villain. And I’m not a villain.”

The Army initially sent Snow a check for $725, representing his loss in back pay. Snow said the gesture was insulting. He refused to cash it. The outcry forced the Army to add interest to other payments. Montgomery received more than $42,000. (Montgomery, who died in 2012, re-enlisted after two years in prison and left the Army with an honorable discharge.)

In a proclamation issued on July 21, 2008, Catherine Mitrano, a deputy assistant secretary of the Army, wrote: “The board found that the Army assigned only two defense counsel to defend the forty-three soldiers, gave them only 13 days to prepare their defense, and denied them access to evidence in the possession of the trial counsel that likely would have had a bearing on their defense and the probable outcome of the court-martial. After careful review of the proceeding of the court-martial, the Board determined the Army did not afford the defendants due process by the legal standards in place at that time, rendering the trial fundamentally unfair and improper.”

The Army held a ceremony on July 26, 2008, to publicly acknowledge the harm done to the defendants. Snow planned to attend, but he was too sick. He died the next day. He was 84 years old. At the ceremony, Ronald James, an assistant secretary of the Army, handed out certificates to family members and said: “The Army is genuinely sorry. I am sorry. Sorry for your husbands, loved ones, fathers and grandfathers, for the lost years of their lives.”

At the end, James said: “The usual closing is something like ‘God bless the Army, and God bless the United States of America,’ but frankly that doesn’t seem right or appropriate for this time – I have unpaid debts and unpaid dues. Therefore, I would like to close by saying: God bless Samuel Snow, God bless the Ft. Lawton 28, and God bless your family and friends.”

– Ken Otterbourg

The Registry wishes to thank Jack and Leslie Hamann for sharing their research and insight about the Fort Lawton case with our staff.

Members of the Fort Lawton 28

 

These are the men who were wrongfully convicted of rioting and manslaughter during a court- martial in 1944.

Cpt. Luther Larkin, Pvt. William Jones, Sgt. Arthur Hurks, Pvt. Richard Barber, T/4 John Brown Sr., Pvt. Jefferson Green, Pvt. Frank Hughes, T/5 Willie Prevost Sr., T/5 Arthur Stone, Pvt. Richard Sutliff, Pvt. Wallace Wooden, T/5 Willie Curry, Pfc. John Hamilton, Pvt. Robert Sanders, T/5 Leslie Stewart. Pvt. Booker Townsell, T/5 David Walton, Cpl. Johnnie Ceasar, Pvt. Loary Moore, T/4 Booker Thornton, Pvt. James Chandler Jr., Cpt. Russell Ellis, Pvt. Elva Shelton, T/5 Freddie Simmons, T/5 Nathaniel Spencer, Pfc. Roy Montgomery, Pvt. Samuel Snow, T/5 Riley Buckner.