SEPTEMBER 20, 2007

by Taylor Vernarsky
Staff Writer, Daily Commercial
Leesburg, Florida

LEESBURG - Samuel Snow holds a perhaps unwelcome place in military history. In 1944, he was among a group of black American soldiers involved in the largest and longest U.S. Army court martial of World War II.

Snow, then a 19-year-old Army private, and 42 other black troops were tried at Fort Lawton in Seattle for the death of Italian Army private Guglielmo Olivotto, a prisoner of war.

All 43 were accused of rioting, while three of the GIs were charged with first degree murder. The case was prosecuted by then-Lt. Col. Leon Jaworski, who later gained fame as a special prosecutor during the Watergate scandal.

Snow, 82, is one of two men still alive to tell the story.

"It was unbelievable because there was me and other soldiers like me being tried for something that we had no part of," he said of the court martial.

The lifelong Leesburg resident enlisted in the U.S. Army May 2, 1944, in New Orleans. His enlistment helped fill a need for black soldiers to fill segregated units to be shipped to Japan.

As Snow packed to get ready to be shipped out, a fight broke out between a large number of black soldiers and Italian POWs. Snow said he went to defend some of the soldiers.

"I had no idea what was going on when it all happened," Snow said. "All I remember is being hit on the side of the face and in the lip. I was taken to the hospital for some time and then taken to the Federal Bureau of Investigation who informed me I was being jailed. I was sent back to the stockade."

Snow spent a year in confinement.

Jack Hamann, Seattle-based author and journalist, wrote a book, "On American Soil," on the court-martial. Hamann met Snow while researching the book.

Hamann used records, newspaper clippings and other data to track down some of the soldiers involved in the trial. For him, finding Snow was simple.

"(The search) was easy because Snow came from and lived in a small town like Leesburg," Hamann said. "Which is much different than trying to find someone in Chicago, St. Louis or New York."

Hamann said he saw Snow's sworn statement and compared it to what Snow recollected over 60 years after the court martial, which was not easy because he "tended to remember certain things and forget certain things."

Not only was it the largest court martial during the war, it was the only time where blacks were tried for alleged lynching, Hamann said after consulting with army officials, legal scholars and civil rights leaders.

He said his research showed that the prosecution based their case on alleged resentment from black soldiers because of they believed the Italian POWs were being treated better than they were.

"That was completely bogus, and the U.S. Army knew it," Hamann said.

"It was all a complete misunderstanding," Snow said. "It just seemed like a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Delving deeper into the history of the incident, Hamann said files of the Office of the Inspector General revealed that a group of white soldiers started the scuffle, claiming that Army was being too lenient toward the POWs. The white soldiers allowed the fight to occur and committed the murder to frame the black troops, he said.

"They succeeded," Hamann said.

When the trial ended, 28 soldiers were convicted, 13 acquitted and charges against two others were dropped. Snow was not so fortunate.

He was issued an ultimatum: Go to prison or receive a dishonorable discharge.

"I decided to leave," Snow said. Then, he said, he came back home to Leesburg "to find a job." But because of the dishonorable discharge, he couldn't get a government or civil services job.

Family and friends always believed he was wrongly convicted, Snow said. It took many years, but the U.S. Army finally agreed to listen to his plea.

Between the 1960s and '70s, Snow's status went from dishonorable to honorable. "It definitely took a while, that's for sure," he said.

Snow has been invited to attend the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation annual legislative conference Sept. 26 in Washington, D.C. He will be keynote speaker for the ALC '07 Issue and Braintrust Forum.

"I'm very proud of the fact that out of all of the issues in which he was set up for failure, he was able to overcome them to become a successful man," said his son, Ray L. Snow.

Even though the charges were never dropped, Snow hold no qualms about the past.

"I ain't mad at nobody," he said. "I have no grudges or arguments with no one. I'm just thankful everything worked out in the end.