Copyright 2021 by
Hershel Parker
A DRAFT--But posting
it because it is so timely
How One Bad Cop Caused the “Largest Murder
Trial in the History of the United States.”
Lee Sparks--The Mounted Policeman Who Destroyed the
Buffalo Soldiers
Hershel Parker
“Largest Murder Trial in the History of the United States. Scene during
Court Martial of 64 members of the 24th Infantry United States of America on
trial for mutiny and murder of 17 people at Houston, Tex. Aug 23, 1917. Trial
held in Gift Chapel Fort Sam Houston. Trial started --- Nov 1, 1917, Brig Genl .
George K. Hunter presiding. Colonel J.A. Hull, Judge Advocate, Maj. D. V.
Sulphin Asst. Council for Defense, Major
Harry H. Grier. Prisoners guarded by 19th
Infantry Company C, Capt. Carl J. Adler.” [I have slightly reordered and
corrected the caption. The photograph, then under copyright, is in the public
domain, and justly famous.]
Like the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, the Houston Riot of
1917 at Camp Logan has been minimized or even ignored. Here I offer only dry
facts, as given in the first years after the riot. On 23 August, 17 people were
killed. On 29 August, one hundred fifty of the Black soldiers
were brought to El Paso and put in the military prison at Fort Bliss.
Thirty-four were already charged with murder. Thirteen negroes, convicted by court-martial, were hanged. In December 1917 thirty-nine soldiers were
sent to prison at Leavenworth. On 19
June 1920 the San Antonio Light
recorded the attempts to free the imprisoned soldiers: “petition for release of negro prisoners made by attorneys. Thirty-nine Are Serving Sentences Imposed by
Court-martial.” Part of a statement by John A. Hull was included as part of the
petition: “In this statement it was asserted that negro soldiers of the Third
Battalion of the 24th Infantry, from the time of their arrival in
Houston, July 28, 1917, to the day of the riot, August 23, 1917, had repeatedly
been molested and assaulted by white civilian policemen of the city of Houston,
and that the day of the outbreak Lee Sparks, a white patrolman, had engaged in
an altercation with Corporal Lee [Charles?] Baltimore, a negro soldier of the
24th Infantry, who was a member of the military police and that the
while civilian policemen had beaten the negro military policemen over the head
repeatedly with the butt of a revolver, and finally lodged the negro in jail.
Exaggerated reports of this incident, according to the statement, which was art
of the record at the original court-martial trial, were the immediate cause of
the outbreak of August 23.” In February 1918 the NAACP petitioned President
Wilson with 12,000 signatures protesting executions of the imprisoned soldiers
without personal review of the President. On 31 August 1918 President Wilson
retained the death penalty already imposed on 6 of 16 solders and commuted the
rest to life imprisonment, the fate of all the 63 still living soldiers who had
been convicted. The Pittsburgh Courier on 30 April 1938 looked back at
the NAACP’s” long continued and steady campaign for the pardon or parole of the
men whom all colored people regard as martyrs, but whom the law branded as
rioters. The Association never ceased activity with each new President and
Secretary of War.” As I first learned from Angela
Holder, some of these soldiers died or were pardoned in the 1920s and 30s until
the last prisoner was released in 1938. In
this chapter I give no history of the men hanged and
imprisoned or their early tormentors, for in word and deed Houstonians had been
displaying arrogant racism toward the newly arrived Buffalo Soldiers. Instead, I focus on the Texas policeman whose
behavior destroyed so many lives and tarnished the reputation of the Buffalo
Soldiers. All the suffering of 23 August 1917 and for decades afterwards occurred as a direct consequence of the
brutal racism of one man, Lee Sparks, a
Houston Mounted Policeman.
Lee Sparks was born on the last day
of 1877 in Wilson County, Texas. He died
on 9 January 1934 in Houston. He is a
cousin of mine, descended like me from the brave old Tory Solomon Sparks who
was tricked by the deceit of young
George Parks and, bound on the bottom of a canoe, going down the Yadkin to a
Patriot jail in Salisbury, kept shouting “Hurrah for King George!” Find A Grave says that Lee Sparks, “never
married and made his living as a Texas Ranger and farmer.” Farmer is doubtful,
and I have yet to confirm that he had been a Texas Ranger. His father, John C.
Sparks, was not the John C. Sparks who had some notoriety as a member of the
Frontier Battalion. Lee’s father was a Georgia-born farmer, 28 in the 1880
census, with a 24 year old wife born in Texas. His own father, George
Washington Sparks, also a Georgian, was 64, and living with him, but not head
of the family. Lee was officially Louis
E. (E. likely from his mother Catherine’s last name, Edmiston). The only known
description of Lee Sparks is from his draft registration card on 12 September
1918. At almost 40, he was slender, tall, with brown eyes and dark brown hair. One
more detail confirms that his build was slight: the Houston Post on 27 April 1921 reported Sparks’s
saying that “he wore a size 15 shirt.” And one reason he pistol-whipped a sturdy
Black Sergeant in the Buffalo Soldiers and then shot at him was that he did not
want personal contact-- “he wasn’t going to wrestle with the big negro.”
Lee Sparks emerges in newspapers on 29
November 1916 when the headline in the Houston Post was “NEGRO WITH KNIFE
SHOT BY POLICEMAN MAKING ARREST. Tom Farrington in Hospital Following an
Encounter With Mounted Officer Sparks.” Sparks, then on duty, had supposedly received
a call saying that “a negro was trying to kill some one.” What follows is from
Sparks’s account: “Hastening to the scene Officer Sparks started to arrest the
negro who was causing the trouble. Farrington,
according to the officer, resisted and in the melee drew a knife, cutting a
button off the officer’s blouse, at the same time trying to choke him. The
officer, finding his life in danger, drew his pistol and fired, several shots
taking effect in the negro’s body.” Then Westheimer’s ambulance carried the
negro to the infirmary--probably St. Joseph’s, which accommodated black, white,
and Mexican patients.
“Several shots” into Tom
Farrington’s body suggests at least that Sparks liked to be thorough in his job. Then the Houston Post on 28 June 1917 printed an ominous little notice: “two officers suspended.” These were Lee
Sparks and J. H. Walsh, who may have misbehaved together or separately but were
punished differently: “The members
of the police department must have the respect of the general public, and in
turn the officers must not do anything that would subject them to criticism,”
remarked Superintendent of Police Brock Wednesday afternoon” (the 27th),
“as he announced the suspension for 10 days of Officers Lee Sparks and J. H.
Walsh, the latter for 15 days.” No one may have reproached Sparks for putting
multiple shots into Farrington, but seven months later In his dealings with the
“general public” he had had done something that deserved sharp criticism and a
severe punishment (suspension without pay?).
Lee Sparks continued to show
contempt for the “general public,” particularly any negro. What he did on the
late morning of 23 August 1917 could
have been insignificant, just a routine episode of police brutality, verbal and
physical. Maybe a report of a negro
craps game had come into police or maybe Sparks and his partner R. H. Daniels
came upon the game in progress at San Felipe and Wilson. The gamblers were
negro boys, not grown men. One ran into a nearby house where a negro woman
lived. After he barged in and questioned
her, Sparks “slapped her in the face,”
according to Kneeland Snow’s testimony as recorded in the Post of 2 November 1917. What that means, is that Sparks struck her
across the face with his pistol--pistol-whipped her, and arrested her. (Habitually he stuck with the butt of his
pistol, you would think the barrel would be a risky way to grip a gun.) Private
Alonzo Edwards, company L., 24th infantry (newly moved to Camp
Logan), who had reportedly already started day-drinking, tried to protect her
(“to interfere”) “and as a result was promptly beaten up and placed under
arrest by Sparks.” Beaten up means being pistol-whipped. When Corporal Charles
Baltimore challenged Sparks for the condition Edwards was in, Sparks
pistol-whipped him. Baltimore fled
into a house while Sparks was shooting at him (just a shot to the ground to
stop him, Sparks said but others counted more). Baltimore hid under a bed but
Sparks forced him to come out, pistol-whipped him again “twice over the head,”
and arrested him and hauled him to the city jail.
The New York Times on 25 August printed what Private Leroy Pinkett, Company J of
the 24th Regiment, called “a complete story of the trouble”:
“Yesterday [the 23rd] about 3 P.
M.,” he said, “we heard that Corporal Baltimore of our company had been shot by
special officers, (white officers who ride horses.) All the boys said, ‘Let’s
go get the man that shot Baltimore.’ It was getting late then, and we stood
retreat at 6 o’clock, and then I heard Sergeant Henry of our company say:
‘Well, don’t stand around like that. If you are going to do anything, go ahead
and do it.’
After
that I saw some of the boys slip over to Company K, and I heard them say they
had stolen the ammunition. Then Captain Snow called the men out in line. He
asked what we were doing, and ordered a search made for the ammunition, and
also ordered that our rifles be taken up. Another Sergeant, I forget his name,
took up our rifles from our tents. In this same talk Captain Snow told us that
Baltimore was not in the wrong; that the policeman was in the wrong. I heard
him say that. A big fellow in our company named Frank Johnson, then came running
down the company street, hollering ‘Get your rifles, boys.’
“We
all made a rush then for the supply camp, and got our rifles, and we went to a
large ammunition box and got our ammunition.
Captain Snow was right--the mounted policeman Lee Sparks “was in the
wrong.” But what followed was murderous and suicidal.
Newspaper men all
around the country knew that the behavior of Lee Sparks had caused the riots
although there was a noticeable effort to palliate the blame of a policeman..
On 8 September 1917
the Chicago Tribune headlined:
“POLICE OFFICER IS INDICTED FOR HOUSTON RIOTS.”
In Texas the Fort
Worth Record-Telegram on the 8th
hedged in the headlines (“HOUSTON POLICEMAN WHO PARTLY STARTED TROUBLE IS
INDICTED”) and hedged again in the text (Sparks’s assault on “Sergeant
Baltimore” “is supposed to have been the incentive which caused the troops to
mutiny”).
The Portage, Wisconsin
Register in the subhead said: “Police
Officer, Whose Alleged Assault on Negro Sergeant Caused Trouble, Faces Two
Charges.”
The Los Angeles Times on the 10th started
with “Accusation. BLAME POLICEMAN FOR NEGRO RIOTS,” but reduced the
pistol-whipping of Baltimore to “Alleged Brutal Assault Upon Colored Corporal
said to Have Precipitated Clash.”
The Nashville Globe on the 14th made a
typographical error in headline: “MUONTED OFFICER SPARKS STARTED NEGRO RAID.”
C. L. Brock, the Chief of Police, before
the riot called Sparks into his office (the Post
on 1 September). Sparks and his partner Daniels (a short time before he was
killed) made a “verbal statement” about Sparks’s beating of Baltimore, and
Brock told Sparks “he would be suspended in the morning.” Defiantly, “Sparks
said he could not afford to be suspended, that he had been suspended before and
Brock told him he would wait until he investigated the matter. Sparks spoke
strongly about Brock. As for suspension, he “would rather work than lay around.”
He declared, “I don’t respect him as chief. I got a little mad and told him a
little of my mind. I told him I didn’t think he would back me up, that he
didn’t show it that far. I told the chief I wasn’t getting a square deal and I
didn’t think he ought to suspend me when I was doing my duty.” He had
absolutely done nothing wrong: “I arrested the negro woman for abusive
language. While I was waiting for the wagon Edwards came up with about 30
negroes following him and said he wanted the woman. I said he couldn’t have
her. He said he was going to have her anyway and reached over. I hit him over
the head three or four times till he got his heart right and sat down.” Detective E. F. Daugherty had taken down
Baltimore’s statement on the typewriter in Brock’s office. Baltimore had
claimed that when he asked why Sparks had beaten his companion, “Sparks told
him he was not in the habit of reporting to a negro.” The typed report said that
Spark had hit him with his pistol then ran as Sparks fired three shots at him.
Claiming to have pistol-whipped Baltimore only once, brought the question, why
only once? Sparks said “he wasn’t going
to wrestle with the big negro.” Daugherty said that later Brock and Sparks were
in the office alone, “and that when Sparks came out he said something to the
effect that he wasn’t getting a square deal. He also said that “any man who
would stick up for a negro was no better than a negro himself.” Sparks muttered
something which Daughertry may have understood: “as he went out the door he
continued that if that wasn’t enough he would give him (Brock) the rest of it.”
To
the citizens’ and the military investigating committee on the DATE Friday. Sparks declared that he
“did not apologize to Superintendent of Police Brock” later in the day of the
riot; in fact, “Officer Sparks was very emphatic in his denial and requested
that it be published.” According to the Post on the 2nd of September,
on the day before. Sparks had received a written notice from Superintendent
Brock suspending him from duty starting the next day, Sunday: “Officer Lee
Sparks: You are hereby notified that you are temporarily suspended, pending the
investigation now being carried on by the citizens committee and the grand jury.”
Sparks later said he had continued work as if not suspended.GET Get POST, but on 7 September the
Harris county grand jury indicted him on two charges: “One indictment charges
him with aggravated assault on Sergt. Baltimore. The second charges with murder
in connection with the death of Wallace Williams, a Negro civilian who was shot
to death on the Sunday following the riot.”
On 8 September the Post reported that while suspended Lee
Sparks had been “Charged With Murder and Aggravated Assault.” He was charged
with shooting Wallace Williams, a negro, to death on 26 August. Sparks and two
other policemen had gone to a Dallas Avenue house “on a report that gambling
was in progress among negroes.” The negroes were told to stay in the house but
“Williams attempted to make a break for liberty” and a policeman put “a bullet
in the back” which killed him. The Assault was against Baltimore, now dead in
the riot: “The beating of Baltimore and several shots which are said to have
been fired at him, has been the subject of much inquiry by the civilian
investigating committee and also by the military committee. It has resulted in
Sparks’ suspension from the force, pending further inquiry.”
Despite all the new
evidence of his unfitness, Sparks was promptly hired (ironically) “as a guard
at Camp Logan, being employed by the American Construction company. He has a
commission as a deputy sheriff.” On 12 September Sparks was freed on a $5000
bond--but, the court emphasized, only temporarily. By 3 October he was back in
the county jail, only to be released on a $7500 bond on 10 October, according
to the Post of the next day.
The jurors on the
charge of the murder of Wallace (“Snow”) Williams retired to debate at 9:15 at
night on Monday 15 October but milled a moment rather than sitting down. The
headline in the Post the next day was
“Sparks Acquitted in Less Than a Minute”: The jurors had hardly all “entered
the jury room before it was announced that they were ready to return with their
findings.” They bought the defense story “that the fatal shot was fired by some
one else and that Sparks was a block away at the time.”
Some workers at the Post apparently forgot Sparks’s name
fast enough because his history is not mentioned in the 9 March 1918 article
“Negro Wounded in Duel With Officer”: “As a result of pistol duel between
Special Officer Lee Sparks and two negroes in the International and Great
Northern yards early Friday morning P. H. Hill, negro, is in a serious
condition at St. Joseph’s infirmary. Sparks was unhurt. The other negro
escaped.” All the information came from Sparks. “According to Officer Sparks,
the negroes were engaged in taking the brass car journals off of oil cars
belonging to the Texas company at the unloading rack near the plant of the
Magnolia Cotton Oil company, when he surprised them while making his rounds as
watchman for the company.” This suggests that Sparks at this time was hired by
the Magnolia company, no longer with the
Houston police. Sparks said that the two negroes fled and opened fire on him.
“He succeeded in bringing down Hill,” having found his pistol, “but the other
negro made good his escape.” Sparks had been “detailed to catch” whoever had
been stealing the brass. “Tom Harris of the district attorney’s office took
what was supposed to be a dying statement from the negro, in which the negro
admitted they were engaged in stealing brass, and that they fired at Sparks.”
Forty on the last day
of 1917, the tall, slender Sparks was in
the news again. The headline in the Post on 14 November 1918 was “INJURED IN RUNAWAY.” This time the
subject was only “Former Policeman Lee Sparks.” Was he unemployed? Here is what
happened. He “received a broken arm, a scratched face, and other injuries when
he was thrown from a wagon by a runaway team in the 1700 block on Franklin
avenue, shortly before 2 o’clock Wednesday afternoon” (the 13th).
“The team started from a point in the Second ward and ran more than a dozen
blocks when they ran into a fence, throwing Mr. Sparks to the ground. He was
taken to his home and a physician summoned. His injuries are not regarded as
serious.” Now, strong men approaching 40 may sometimes lose control of a team
they are driving, but judging from what comes later, had Cousin Lee been
day-drinking?
Sparks may have known
he was in new trouble the first week of January 1921, as I explain later. On 17
February 1921 the Post reported that in Harris and Fort Bend counties many
suspects had been arrested and freed in the aftermath of the 14 February
robbery at the Blue Ridge State Bank in which the robbers killed the cashier,
R. L. Kirby. Four men were asleep in the woods when arrested on the 15th
near Stafford and Blue Ridge, and were brought to Houston Wednesday afternoon
by Deputy Sheriff Lee Sparks and three others.
The Chief decided they were merely boon companions, over-excited after
participating in the “systematic” search in Blue Ridge, after which they had
the idea of going hunting in the woods and catching some robbers.
The news on 17
February left it unclear where Lee
Sparks was employed as a deputy sheriff, but on the 19th the Post
identified him as “Deputy Sheriff Lee Sparks of Blue Ridge.” He had lost his
job before 14 November 1918, and had been hired in Blue Ridge despite his
appalling record in Houston. The ability
of bad cops to move on to jobs in other cities is a constant. Deputy Sheriff
“Doc” Sammon (or Samon) of Blue Ridge had first picked up the trail of Kirby’s
murderer “and tenacious followed it until the man was run down” at a hotel near
“the busiest corner of Houston.” In the assault on the hotel room Deputy Samon
was “accompanied by Deputy Sheriff Lee Sparks of Blue Ridge, Sheriff Henry
Collins of Fort Bend county, and City Detectives Rainey and Heard of Houston.”
Collins (and perhaps the deputies from Blue Ridge) drove the prisoner and his female accomplice
to Richmond but covertly turned back to Houston to prevent a lynching, “making
a wide detour around Blue Ridge.”
That was February
1921. On 6 March 1921 the Post
announced “2 Indicted on Charge Of Operating Still”: “Lee Sparks, former member
of the Houston police force, and J. H. Brown, formerly a peace officer at Blue
Ridge, were jointly indicted Saturday by the federal grand jury on a charge of
unlawfully manufacturing whisky, possessing whisky and having a still. The
still is said to have been found some time ago under operation in the house
where Sparks and Brown lived.” Also on the 6th the Austin American-Statesman added this
information: “Their farm near Alameda was raided Jan. 5. Both are out on bond
and it is expected they will be tried at this term.” The Galveston Daily News on 11 March had more: “Sparks
and Brown both took the stand and denied knowledge of the still that
prohibition officers are said to have found. A raid was made Jan. 4, after
which C. C. White, S. M. Jester,
prohibition agents, and Hugh Graham, city detective, testified they found a
still. Sparks denied knowledge of the still being there. Sparks testified that
the room had been locked since November. He blamed an old man and stated he had
discharged him and hired Brown the day preceding the raid.” Strangely, no one
believed him. The next day the Galveston paper had the verdict: “A fine of
$1,000 was given Lee Sparks, deputy sheriff of Fort Bend County, this morning
soon after the jury returned a verdict of guilty against Sparks on charge of
possessing a still and moonshine whisky. J. H. Brown, who was employed on
Sparks’ farm at the time the place was raided, was declared not guilty by the
jury and released. Sparks was acquitted of the charge of manufacturing liquor
and of the charge of conspiracy.” He was
given two days to pay the fine.
Stewart W. Phillips, sentenced to life, escaped from
Leavenworth and for five years “was a free but hunted man for five years,” the
Pittsburgh Courier said on 30 April
1938: “He finally gave himself up and returned to prison so he could win a
parole and enjoy his freedom in peace. His escape counted against his record
and therefore he was the last to be released.” The Los Angeles California Eagle on 5 May noted this:
“Mr. Phillips received executive clemency from President Roosevelt, and an
unconditional release, and expresses himself as deeply indebted to the NAACP
for their efforts in his behalf.” He offered a restrained picture of what life
in Leavenworth had been like: “According to Phillips, segregation is rampant in
Leavenworth prison. Negroes are given the most gruelling and unpleasant work in
the shoe factory. In the furniture shop Negroes can only be porters, and the
same is true to the other trade shops. Everything which carries much in the way
of salary is kept from the Negro, and if he is accepted in say the shoe
factory, he is kept at one job and not given the chance to learn the entire
process of the trade. None of this is conducive to a happy adjustment of a man,
and really presents a grave situation.” The “martyrs” were not tortured, not
pistol-whipped daily, but they experienced daily humiliation in stultifying
work. These men had been proud Buffalo Soldiers!
Lee Sparks gave many
members of the NAACP and families of the imprisoned soldiers work to do, year
after year through the twenties and far into the 1930s. Meanwhile, Sparks was
not doing much to stay in good health, and a fair assumption is that a
moonshiner might do more than sample his product, when he could. However, Sparks
lived on without any more recorded mishaps. Early on 9 January 1934, just
turned 56, he died in a Houston hospital of emphysema, probably due to “cancer
of lung tissue.” There was no autopsy. For at least two decades he had shamed his family name. To adapt his own formula about negroes, any
man who would stick up for a man like him was no better than Lee Sparks
himself.
