The 24th

The film is about what the all black Twenty-Fourth United States Infantry Regiment went through in Houston in 1917. For as long as they were stationed in the city the soldiers met police violence and humiliation; after one soldier was beaten and taken in, and a corporal who went to ask after him was beaten too, a hundred and fifty six soldiers armed themselves and marched into the city. In two hours of fighting nine civilians, four policemen and two soldiers were killed. The courts martial that followed were the largest mass trial in the history of the American army: a hundred and eighteen soldiers were tried, a hundred and ten were found guilty, nineteen were hanged and sixty three were given life sentences. Kevin Willmott’s hundred and one minute American film was written by the director together with Trai Byers, who takes the lead; the William Boston he plays is based on the real corporal Charles Baltimore. It was completed in 2020, and in 2023 the army set aside those hundred and ten convictions.