A veteran remembers Seattle's 1944 race riot
Six decades ago, when Snow got his draft notice, he saw a tour of duty as his ticket to freedom, a way out of Leesburg and the citrus plantations, and a lifetime of muted expectations.
Instead, his stint as an Army dockworker brought him to Fort Lawton in Seattle, where he would play a minor role in a historic event: a riot that still stands as one of the bloodiest conflicts between whites and blacks in city history.
Snow is believed to be the last surviving witness to the disturbance, the only living link between the present and a forgotten part of Seattle's past.
Resentful that Italian war prisoners held at the base enjoyed better living conditions than they did, and angered after a fistfight with the Italians felled one of their own, dozens of black servicemen stationed at Fort Lawton stormed out of their segregated barracks and began attacking POWs on Aug. 14, 1944.
Bloodshed in Seattle
One Italian was lynched and a dozen injured. Three months later, the Army convened the largest court-martial of World War II.
For Snow, the impact of the riot was clear and long-lasting:
"I was drafted at 19 years old," he says. "I thought I could get ahead. But that didn't happen. I got behind, way behind. Seattle kind of derailed everything."
The riot's place in Seattle's history is much less certain.
Black clergy and civil-rights leaders in Seattle say they know little about the bloodshed in what is now Magnolia. None of the black soldiers came from here, and none stayed. The Italians went home. Fort Lawton became Discovery Park. People forgot.
"The story ought to be told," said the Rev. Samuel McKinney, retired pastor of Mount Zion Baptist Church. "Too many things like this happened and people sat on them."
Exploring the unfairness and segregation of the past is important to improving race relations today, said McKinney.
Yet it was black leaders at the time who wanted the ordeal to disappear. It was considered an embarrassment, a thoughtless provocation when the most pressing concern was protecting black jobs at factories and shipyards before the war ended and thousands of veterans returned home to their former jobs.
Throughout the 1940s and '50s, leaders of the African-American community walked a thin line between breaking down desegregation and affirming that blacks could be trusted employees and responsible citizens. The civil-rights struggle in that era moved not in a smooth arc but in a flip-flop between advocacy and acquiescence. Caught in a period of compliance, the Fort Lawton troops were left to live out the consequences of their actions in anonymity.
Lasting effects of discharge
Though Snow never laid a hand on an Italian, he was convicted of rioting, dishonorably discharged and sentenced to a year in the stockade.
The dishonorable discharge hurt the most, making him ineligible for an education under the GI Bill. Looking back, Snow believes his life could have amounted to much more than 50 years of sweeping floors in his hometown, a place where properties in black neighborhoods are worth much less than others and where the local heritage center displays only one photograph depicting the African Americans who make up a third of its residents.
Snow's father worked in a Leesburg lumber yard, making fruit crates, and Snow dropped out of the segregated high school to pick oranges. For him, as for thousands of blacks, military service looked like the opportunity of a lifetime.
When America entered the war after Pearl Harbor in 1941, black leaders saw the nation's need for both soldiers and factory workers as a chance to break down Jim Crow segregation. But the enlistment of thousands of black servicemen did not bring immediate results. In the Navy, black sailors were relegated to the mess halls and servant quarters. The Red Cross segregated blood plasma, and white drivers would often refuse to transport black soldiers to and from base. In the South especially, blacks in uniform were considered a threat to the way things had always been.
In 1941, a black private was found bound and lynched in Fort Benning, Ga. In the next two years, race riots erupted on bases across the country.
But by mid-1944, racial agitation had largely quelled. Allied troops were racing across Europe, and the collapse of Germany was imminent. National black leaders switched strategies that summer, and instead of advocating the end of segregation, focused on racial harmony and preserving jobs for returning soldiers.
On Aug. 2, 1944, the Northwest Enterprise, a prominent black newspaper in Seattle, ran an editorial from the Pittsburgh Courier, considered the nation's leading black paper. The editorial, headlined "Have you got a chip on your shoulder?" dismissed anyone challenging segregation as bad-mannered:
"There is an increasing number of colored people who have racial prejudice and are as HYPERSENSITIVE on the subject as some of the white people they condemn.
"It is the duty of the MAJORITY of self-respecting, well-mannered colored people to restrain the little minority of hoodlums and ill-bred folk that are undermining our future in this country."
Preferential treatment for POWs
Despite the fact that they were not allowed to return to Europe, the 5,000 Italian prisoners billeted at Fort Lawton enjoyed an enviable life.
Soon after Italy surrendered in 1943, Italian prisoners were formed into work brigades that swore allegiance to the United States. The POWs wore blue armbands and came and went pretty much as they pleased.
They went to ballgames and took trips to Mount Rainier. They courted local girls, who found them exotic and charming. Growing up in Rainier Valley, Ralph Alfieri remembers his parents inviting Italian POWs for Sunday dinner. "There were a few Mussolini fascists, but most were mild guys who just wanted to go home," says Alfieri.
The preferential treatment of Italians on the base created tensions with both white and black enlisted men. A day before the riot, a group of white soldiers shoved some Italians for crowding them at the post's market.
Black servicemen, accustomed to segregated quarters and white commanding officers, bristled that former enemies enjoyed freedoms they could only imagine. The Italian soldiers were given run of the camp, welcomed in the officer's clubs, markets and mess halls. Off base, the Italians could drink at local bars that legally excluded blacks. The black troops complained about being assigned the worst jobs around the fort, including sweeping snow during the winter.
Despite their grumbling, Snow says he never thought the friction between the two groups would end up taking a stranger's life, and transforming his own.
On the evening of Aug. 14, Snow was in his barracks, putting his name on his uniform. On another floor, a group of men played craps. Others milled around the base.
The black troops were being shipped out the next day, and rumor had it the men were going to haul equipment across the mountains of Japan. It was tense, remembers Snow, like a high-school locker room before the biggest game of the year.
Around 11 p.m., four black soldiers walked by the camp entrance, passing three Italians along the way. Words were exchanged. One of the soldiers, possibly carrying a knife, stepped toward the Italians.
An Italian prisoner threw the first punch, leveling the soldier. His buddies carried him, unconscious, back to their barracks. Onlookers thought he might have been killed.
Witnesses said a black corporal blew a whistle and hundreds of men tumbled from their barracks and headed to the Italian area for revenge. Some of the soldiers tore down a wooden fence along the way and took picket posts as weapons. They hurled rocks at the Italian barracks and chased POWs under latrines and into the woods surrounding the base.
Four white officers and 20 Italians were injured as black soldiers swarmed through the Italian quarter.
The next day, the body of Pvt. Guglielmo Olivotto was discovered hanging from a cable in the base obstacle course. No one saw how he had died, or who took his life.
After the corporal's whistle, Snow says he came out of his barrack to see what was going on and followed the crowd to the Italian area. He was knocked unconscious, and he woke up in the hospital. He says he never intended to harm anyone, and he never saw who hit him, but he signed a confession admitting that he was fixing for a fight.
Charges brought against 43
Reaction in the local black press was swift.
A Northwest Enterprise editorial began with the headline: "Race soldiers smear interracial relations."
"The afray accomplished nothing of value to our Negro soldiers — if anything they lost the ball. Soldier, don't forget your responsibility!"
War Department officials briefed President Roosevelt. Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall followed the incident as legal counsel for the NAACP in New York.
After a short investigation, 40 men were charged with rioting. Three others who allegedly directed the attack were charged with murder.
The prosecution was led by Leon Jaworski, who later became Watergate special prosecutor. His courtroom adversary was local maritime attorney William Beeks.
Beeks was given little time to prepare for trial and spoke only briefly to some of the men he was defending. His son, William Beeks Jr., also a Seattle attorney, remembers his father worked nights and weekends on the case, fearful that the three men charged with murder could be put to death if convicted.
In his closing argument, Jaworski told the court: "What went on that night was shockingly shameful. It placed a blight on one of the pages of the annals of our Army during this present war. Tragic and unfortunate."
When it was his turn, Beeks talked of each defendant. "Sammy Snow," he said, "never got the opportunity to put into effect what he had in mind. No matter how much the court finds that Sammy Snow intended to do something that night, he never got the opportunity to carry out that intention."
While Jaworski avoided questions of race, Beeks made them central.
"Negroes are by their nature an easy-going and peace-loving people. At the same time, they are easily swayed by passion and by prejudice," he told the court. "You can't teach men to kill others and expect them to be friends overnight.
"The eyes of the nation are upon this court. I know this court is going to show that the Negro will be given a square deal."
Unjustifiable segregation
In the end, 28 defendants were convicted of rioting. Two of the three men charged with murder were convicted of manslaughter. The third was convicted only of rioting. Sentences ranged from one to 15 years, which the defense considered a success.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) determined that the trial was fair but did not comment on the conditions which may have led to the violence.
Roosevelt, needing the support of Southern lawmakers, did little to improve conditions for black soldiers, but most could see that the Army could no longer justify its policy of racial separation by the end of the war in 1945. Three years later, President Truman ordered integration of the armed services; it took less than a decade to finish the job.
Ending segregation in the rest of society turned out to be much harder.
"We sometimes assume that African-American political activity is an even flow, but it ebbs with the politics of the era," said Quintard Taylor, a University of Washington ethnic-studies professor who has examined the Fort Lawton riot.
Since its beginning in the early 1960s, the civil-rights movement in Seattle has been fraught with compromise and contradiction, said Taylor. In the mid-1960s, the black community began to splinter and speak with different voices concerning busing and economic independence.
Today, he said, there is no consensus about what challenges remain for the African-American community — or how to address them.
Questions at home
After serving a year in the stockade picking up garbage and cigarette butts around Fort Lawton, Snow was finally sent home.
Back in Leesburg, it was tough answering questions from friends and family about what happened, he says, and he mostly wanted to forget it.
Snow still remembers his father's tears when he couldn't take a mechanic's job his father had arranged because he was ineligible for the GI Bill and couldn't pay for the training. A little while later, Snow torched his Army files. "I was embarrassed," he says. "I thought, 'When I get married, I don't want my children to see this.' "
Snow landed a job as a janitor at a Methodist church, for which he was grateful, and worked there for more than two decades. He cleaned the pews early Sunday morning while a church official quietly watched to make sure he left before services began. For years, he says, blacks were not allowed as parishioners.
With help from his congressman, Snow got his discharge upgraded so he could receive health and other benefits. He eventually served in the local American Legion post. He proudly notes that he has been married 52 years and put two children through college.
Driving around Leesburg, Snow points out the orange groves and clapboard rental homes he owns. It's property he hopes to pass on to his children. Maybe in the future they'll be worth something, he says, but today no one wants to own real estate in black neighborhoods.
The civil-rights movement seems far removed from Snow's perspective. In his experience, blacks and whites who do the same job are still judged differently. "It'll be 100 years before a black man can walk free in America," he says. It's a passing thought that hangs in the humid air of Leesburg, and disappears.
Snow has never been back to Seattle but says he'd like to visit and stroll the grounds of Discovery Park. If he goes, Snow might come across Olivotto's grave, which is tucked away from other markers at the military graveyard there.
The memorial is a broken Roman column, signifying life cut short.
Alex Fryer can be reached at 206-464-8124 or afryer@seattletimes.com.