JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

Even though I lived part of my life in the era before African-Americans were afforded equal rights under federal law (the 1964 Civil rights Act), I am continually amazed and appalled when I read stories and books about the outrageous inequities that took place before and after that.

How could that have happened in America in my lifetime? I ask myself.

I’m sure most of you have asked yourselves the same question from time to time, as you’ve read or heard about atrocities committed against African-Americans.

Serrano

Rick Serrano, who worked at The Star from 1972 to 1987 and then went on to have an outstanding career at the Los Angeles Times, has written a shocking and dramatic book about events that took place in our area in the 1950s and 1960s.

The book is Summoned at Midnight: A Story of Race and the Last Military Executions at Fort Leavenworth. Published by Beacon Press, Boston, it will be available starting tomorrow and can be pre-ordered now. (Rainy Day Books in Fairway ordered four copies initially.)

The precise “scene of the crimes” was Fort Leavenworth’s United State Disciplinary Barracks (U.S.D.B.), where male members of the U.S. Armed Forces convicted of serious crimes have been incarcerated for more than a century.

Between 1955 and 1961, the Army hanged eight black soldiers at the disciplinary barracks. During the same period, each of the eight white soldiers condemned to death were spared by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Army or the federal courts. And eventually all were paroled and set free.

As Serrano described the inherent unfairness in his book…

“Black soldiers around the nation were treated to a different system of army justice. That simply was how army life had always been, how all the black recruits imagined it would be. The long arm of the law swung heavily against them; the scales of justice tipped the other way. And sometimes that reality could have devastating consequences.”

The macrocosmic story unfolds in the course of the microcosmic story of a young black soldier from Virginia named John Arthur Bennett. While stationed in Austria after World War II, Bennett, then 18, raped an 11-year-old Austrian girl, threw her in a creek and left her for dead. He was summarily convicted of rape and attempted murder at a court martial and sent to Fort Leavenworth to be executed…No matter that the girl survived, that Austria had no death penalty (its maximum sentence for rape was 20 years) or that the girl and her parents were contacted and did not object to Bennett’s sentence being commuted.

Bennett

Serrano intersperses Bennett’s story with condensed versions of other condemned soldiers’ experiences, but Bennett’s dilemma is never far from mind. As the book progresses, a gut-wrenching tension develops: Will his sentence be commuted, or will he hang? The case dragged through Eisenhower’s second term and into the start of John F. Kennedy’s.

It was Kennedy who had the final say.

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Serrano, a Kansas City native, spent about two years researching and writing the book. In writing the book, he relied mostly on interviews, transcripts and archived material. Among the archived material were “voluminous” U.S.D.B. documents chronicling Bennett’s years on death row. The seeds for the book were planted decades before Serrano began writing, however. In an interview, he recalled how he listened with fascination to a longtime Star editor and reporter telling him in the 1970s about having witnessed an execution at Fort Leavenworth.

“The Castle,” as the old U.S.D.B. was known

Of particular interest to residents in our area, the book contains rich history about the founding of Fort Leavenworth and the development of the disciplinary barracks, known as “The Castle” before it was replaced by a new prison in 2004.

Serrano opens the chapter about the fort’s establishment with this captivating line, “The man who gave his name to the old fort died chasing a small buffalo.”

That man was Lt. Col. Henry Leavenworth, whom the Army dispatched in 1827 to find a location for a new army encampment in the fast-opening West. He settled on a spot high above the west bank of the Missouri River just before, as Serrano describes it, the river “makes its mighty swerve east.”

Leavenworth

After being promoted to brigadier general, Leavenworth set out with 400 soldiers in 1834 to subdue native warriors in the Southwest. It was his final assignment. Many of his men took fever, and when he showed up in a hospital wagon it appeared he himself had contracted malaria. But as he was dying (at age 50), he said his horse had tripped in a gopher hole as he was attempting to lasso a calf. “I have killed myself in running down that devilish calf,” he said.

In addition to absorbing the reader with the stories about the disciplinary barracks and the black/white disparity, Serrano’s descriptive, punchy writing often delights the ear and disturbs the mind. Consider this paragraph about the conditions on death row, deep in the bowels of the disciplinary barracks…

“On death row, they wrestled with daily fears. Floor rats scurried under their beds. Night thunder and bolts of lightning banged against the windows. Food was cold and the Kansas summers scorching. News from home was fleeting. The next execution hovered constantly at the edge of their thoughts. Whenever a hanging date arrived, army boots came stomping down the death row hallway.”

And this…

“Bennett took months to adjust to the routine of life on death row. Six years later, he would be the last prisoner still there, white or black. And in all that time, prisoners and guards alike long remembered Bennett’s first night in his cell near the green door that offered death or salvation. The other prisoners stayed up late, listening quietly. They could hear him sobbing for hours. By morning, when the sun peeked in the windows and the peacocks shrieked, Bennett had chewed his pillow in half.”

Those sentences are straight out of the Hemingway school of writing.

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Serrano is one of many KC Star reporters who have gone on to have great success at larger papers. Before retiring from the LA Times in 2015, Serrano covered the FBI and the Department of Justice. Big stories he covered included the Rodney King beating and riots, the Oklahoma City and Sept. 11 terror attacks and school shootings in Colorado, Virginia and Connecticut. He shared in three Pulitzer prizes, including one the Times won for coverage of the Rodney King-related stories.

Summoned at Midnight is Serrano’s fifth book. The others are…

— One of Ours: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing

— Last of the Blue and Gray: Old Men, Stolen Glory, and the Mystery that Outlived the Civil War

— American Endurance: Buffalo Bill, the Great Cowboy Race of 1893, and the Vanishing Wild West

— My Grandfather’s Prison: A Story of Death and Deceit in 1940s Kansas City

Serrano lives in Fairfax, VA, with his wife Elise. They have three grown children, who all live in the D.C. area.

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Congratulations to my former colleague on his latest book. It deserves to sell well, and I hope it does. It’s a great read and a strong reminder that we have to be diligent, now and always, about equity in race relations. The injustices that have been perpetrated on so many fronts — the lynchings, the exorbitant prison sentences, the church bombings, the hurtful and hateful language — have been horrendous. We can never forget. We must do better.