MEDIA COVERAGE OF ON AMERICAN SOIL

Jack Hamann's career spans 25 years. He's been a news reporter, network correspondent and documentary producer. He was the Seattle bureau chief for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS and is also a veteran of CNN and NBC. Hamann has earned ten Emmys and numerous national and international journalism awards for his work. A UCLA and University of Oregon Law School grad, he recently added author to his resume with On American Soil - an investigative account of World War II's largest Army court-martial.

Tavis: Jack Hamann is an Emmy Award-winning journalist with stints at CNN and 'The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.' His new book is the untold story of racial injustice during World War II that turned into the longest Army court-martial of the war. The book is called 'On American Soil: How Justice Became a Casualty of World War II.' Jack, nice to have you on the program.

Jack Hamann: Very nice to be here. Thank you.

Tavis: The longest court-martial of the war, and yet a story that most of us don't know.

Hamann: You know, not only the longest, but the largest.

Tavis: Yeah.

Hamann: There were 43 defendants, all American soldiers, all of them African American. And it took place in Seattle, involving men from all around the country, very few from Seattle. And I'd lived there for years and years and had never heard of it until one day I stumbled across it. And I was just absolutely stunned that no one had ever reported on this story.

Tavis: Tell me what the story is, essentially.

Hamann: Well, one night in 1944, an Italian prisoner of war based in Seattle, they put him there, was found lynched. And the Army underwent what turned out to be an unbelievably flawed, brief investigation and had decided that there was a riot the night before that had occurred between segregated units of black soldiers, American soldiers, with Italian prisoners of war who were there at the same fort in Seattle, and pretty quickly made a lot of rash decisions that assigned the blame on these 43 black American soldiers.

It turns out that the Army itself, at the time, was very, very suspicious of this, and so they sent this very colorful US Army brigadier general to Seattle to do his own investigation. But that report was never made public, and it was never introduced at trial, and most of these men were convicted. And the book exists because, after quite a bit of searching, we found in the National Archives in Washington, DC, that general's report, and it tells this amazing tale of what really happened.

Tavis: Before we get to the report, this was classic example of rush to judgment. When you say that they did something pretty quickly, we're talking, what, days? 10 days here?

Hamann: Yeah. Well, what happened was, is that the jurisdiction for who was going to investigate this thing just kept switching between one little branch of the Army to another, and each time somebody else took over the investigation, anything that had to do with evidence that, back in 1944 or even now, was utterly mishandled. They, the Army lost the murder weapon, the noose around this man's neck. Lost, or someone made sure it disappeared for convenient reasons. No fingerprints were taken. There were footprints under where this man had been lynched and no one bothered to take pictures of those or do plaster casts. It was an utterly Keystone Kops type of operation and yet that became the basis for a capital murder case against these men.

Tavis: So, how long did it take, though, for them to indict these 43 African American...

Hamann: Well...

Tavis: ...military personnel?

Hamann: To answer that, the answer is that the prosecutor was a young man at the time, by the name of Leon Jaworski, the guy who goes on later to be the Watergate special prosecutor. Jaworski took two month's worth of all sorts of prosecution investigation and such to decide which of, out of a pool of 200 blacks, he was gonna charge. He charged 43 out of the 200 men that he initially suspected. By contrast, once those men had been charged, all 43 had to share just two lawyers between them, two total, on trial for their lives, a couple of them, and those men were only given 10 days to prepare, the defense lawyers for this trial. And the trial ended up being a five-week long trial.

Tavis: All right. So, you, thankfully, dig into this, start doing the research, and you find this report that was never released.

Hamann: Right.

Tavis: What'd you find in the report?

Hamann: Well, it turns out that the story had always been that Americans in general, but particularly these black soldiers, resented the fact that at this point in the war, in 1944, Italian prisoners of war were being given more and more freedom. That's because the war with Italy was over, they had surrendered, and we couldn't completely send them back. They were still technically prisoners of war. But back in World War II, the US made a concerted effort to be humane, very humane to its prisoners of war. And what everyone was assuming and believing was that these black soldiers who were stationed there, who were treated, frankly, very much as second-class citizens within their own army, it was a segregated army, they were mostly not allowed to have the kinds of positions, both fighting and otherwise within the army, that white soldiers could, and the story was that they resented it so much that they decided somehow spontaneously to one night go and attack a bunch of Italians, who were stationed literally, physically, right next to them, in a segregated part, and then, at one point, decided to lynch one of these Italians.

None of that makes sense if you really stop and think about it, and for 60 years, everybody would take that as, for granted. As it turns out, it wasn't that group of black soldiers who resented the Italians. It was, we've now discovered a group, a small group of white soldiers at the fort who were part of a much larger part of America, who at the time did resent the Italians being given any kind of slack at all, since they had been one of our enemies in World War II, and whether we were at war with Italy or not, their idea was, let's lock them up, and that became the flashpoint. Turns out, at this particular fort, they were able, this small group of whites, to be able to do considerable mischief, and who better to blame than these black soldiers?

Tavis: What happened to these 43 black soldiers?

Hamann: Well, as we sit here today, three of them are still alive. At the time, 28 of them were convicted of rioting, two of them of manslaughter. The sentences were as, one case, only six months, but they went all the way up to 25 years of hard labor, and the average sentence was seven and a half years.

Tavis: So, for the three who still live, for the families of those who have now passed on, what's the best we can expect to come out of a story like this?

Hamann: Well, an entirely unexpected thing has happened for me in writing this book. My wife and I were in our garden in Seattle a couple weeks ago and we got a telephone call from a member of Congress, Jim McDermott, a Democrat out of Seattle, and he said, I've just read your book and I just, I'm amazed, and I want to know, what can Congress do? Well, I was taken aback by that question, but he put his staff on it, and staffs elsewhere, and there's a bill now that will be introduced, it has been introduced, excuse me, but it will be in congressional committee now, this next week, it's HR-3147 that will demand, that does demand, that the secretary of the Army re-open this case, 60 years later, with an eye toward perhaps giving a honorable discharge to the men who they recognize were wronged.

There's precedent for that. Twice before in American history. Once when President Nixon was president and once during the Clinton administration, there were examples where large groups of black military, one were Army, one was Navy, had been convicted, and the US, decades later, said, boy, this was a rush to judgment and this was wrong. And I think that's what Congressman McDermott would like to do and have other congressmen do.

Tavis: I suspect, depending on one's prism, the prism through which one is looking, one can look at this and say, here's another writer, in this case, Jack Hamann, rewriting history, or one can look at it through the prism of justice delayed, not necessarily being justice denied. How should one view this piece of work, 'On American Soil?'

Hamann: You know, I didn't go into this to try to have anything happen from it. I saw what to me was a fascinating story, and it was like, how could it be that these things could not be reported? They, they happened. They were facts. But the thing that really, I think, strikes me is it was a member of the Army, it was a brigadier general of the United States, who himself, all these decades ago, in the 1940s, he's the one who uncovered this. And it was the fact that the Army had this report, and that Leon Jaworski, the prosecutor, knew that all of these, that these men, frankly, he had enough evidence to see that what the Army had done was wrong and they did nothing. You know, in a sense, I don't think anybody's rewriting history. I think what we've tried to do here is uncover another layer of history, because, Tavis, history is written, the first chapter of history is written by those who are in power.

And that means one version of history is usually what we first learn. And over time, what journalists, historians, and regular folks do is they see that there's an entirely other side, or other facets to things that happen, and so you uncover their story. And now what we have is, I think, a clearer picture of the history, not rewriting it.

Tavis: What's the value, then, in your mind, of revisiting this racial, racist underbelly in America?

Hamann: Well...

Tavis: 'Cause you gotta know that there are tons of stories like these, not just where the military is concerned, but tons of stories where black folk have been wrongfully accused, convicted, and put to death, for that matter.

Hamann: Here's the strongest reason, to me. If it were my grandfather, and I had known that man before he passed, as many of these men have, and I knew, as a lot of us do, that our grandfathers had fought in the war but didn't really want to talk about it, but further knew that he had been accused of, perhaps convicted of, and served time for, what's really a terrifically bad crime, how awful is it if I then find out decades later that the Army knew that he didn't do it? And for my sake, for my own children's sake, for the future, those people, those families deserve to be able to know that that legacy is there in their own family. That's on the short term.

On the bigger picture for all of us, you know what? If we don't look back at the Emmett Till case, if we don't look back at the Mississippi burning kinds of instances, then the truth is, as we try to represent to each generation what the history of this country really is, and was really all about, I think that we fall into the trap that when maybe you and I were kids, we used to think that Washington really did chop down the cherry tree and say, "I didn't tell a lie," even though he didn't. Or that Thomas Jefferson, you know, didn't father slaves.

Tavis: Or that Columbus discovered America.

Hamann: Exactly.

Tavis: Yeah.

Hamann: And so, this is another thing that I think helps us have a healthier, bigger picture of what America was, and really helps us decide what America will be.

Tavis: Quickly here, you're hopeful that what Congressman McDermott is doing will be met with the kind of response that it should be met with in Congress.

Hamann: Well, the congressman says this is not a partisan issue as far as he's concerned, and really, it's up to other members of Congress. Are they gonna join in on this? Are they gonna say to Congressman McDermott and the other 32 so far who've signed on this, we agree, let's ask the Army to look at it. They can study it and see themselves.

Tavis: I hope that, well, anyway, you recall this, the lynching stuff that Senator Mary Landrieu raised...

Hamann: That's right.

Tavis: ...weeks ago, that all the senators still didn't get behind that. But we'll wait and see. 'On American Soil: How Justice Became a Casualty of World War II,' the new book by Jack Hamann. Jack, nice to have you here.

Hamann: Thank you so much.

Tavis: Thanks for the book, too.

Hamann: You bet.

Tavis: Up next on this program, actor Larenz Tate. What a great year. 'Crash' and 'Ray.' Larenz Tate. Stay with us.