MARCH, 2008

By Blair S. Walker
AARP Bulletin

For most of his 83 years, Samuel Snow silently endured the pain of having been betrayed by military justice. When vindication finally came 63 years after the fact, it was accompanied by a $725 check that merely added insult to injury.

That’s what the Army mailed to Snow’s Leesburg, Fla., home as back pay after ruling he’d been wrongly incarcerated for 15 months in 1944 and 1945. Snow was one of 28 black enlisted men sent to prison after a prisoner of war was found hanged at a Seattle military installation following a melee involving black soldiers.

Snow’s court-martial had prompted the government to deny him military benefits and a chance to compete for civil service employment. An Army board overturned it last October.

“They should have paid me all my back pay with interest,” says Snow, who started a janitorial business that allowed him to send two children to college.

Snow refuses to cash the check and has always maintained he was blameless in the Aug. 14, 1944, death of Guglielmo Olivotto. Evidence substantiating Snow’s claim surfaced more than six decades later, thanks to Seattle journalist Jack Hamann.

Hamann wrote On American Soil: How Justice Became a Casualty of World War II, a book that details how Snow and the other accused soldiers were railroaded in a trial prosecuted by an Army lawyer named Leon Jaworski, later famous as a Watergate prosecutor.

Snow’s case caught the attention of U.S. Reps. Jim McDermott, D, Wash., and Duncan Hunter, R, Calif., who pushed the Army to review it, resulting in the court-martial reversal.

Army spokesman Maj. Nathan Banks says the money Snow received is in line with U.S. law. “We don’t compensate for inflation, interest and all of that,” he says.

Snow’s back pay could amount to $80,000, if calculated at 8 percent for 61½ years and compounded annually. If adjusted for inflation, $725 in 1946 would total more than $7,700, according to a calculator on the Labor Department website.

When his incarceration ended in 1946, Snow returned to Leesburg, married and got on with his life. “Wasn’t no need in me letting that set on my mind,” he says of his military experience. “I wasn’t made at nobody … I prayed and [God] took care of me. I wouldn’t do nothing else differently.