Camp Logan & the Houston Riot of 1917

In the summer of 1917, with the United States newly at war, the Army raised a sprawling training cantonment on the western edge of Houston and named it Camp Logan. To guard the construction site the Army sent the 3rd Battalion of the all-Black 24th Infantry — Regular Army soldiers, part of the storied Buffalo Soldier regiments. What happened over the weeks that followed, in a city bound by Jim Crow law and daily indignity, became one of the most consequential episodes in the history of the U.S. Army: a night of violence on August 23, 1917, followed by the largest courts-martial in American history. This tour treats that history soberly and factually. It begins in Memorial Park, which now covers most of the old camp, and moves through the ground where these events unfolded — a landscape that has since become one of Houston's most beloved green spaces, layered with a past worth understanding.