Henry Chenault’s Unknown Role in 1917 Houston Race Revolt
Rain was falling the night of August 23, 1917, when 150 Black soldiers marched on the city of Houston. They were protesting the inhumane treatment they had received from residents and police, including the brutal beating that day of two soldiers by white policemen. By the end of the evening, 20 people would be dead, 16 of them white, resulting in one of the largest court-martials in American history and, ultimately, the death of 19 Black soldiers by hanging.1
Henry Chenault was among an additional ten soldiers scheduled to be hung. At the last minute, President Woodrow Wilson commuted their sentences to life imprisonment, later reduced to 20 years. Chenault ended up serving 13 years of hard labor at Leavenworth Federal Prison. After his release, he made his way to Petaluma, where he opened a shoeshine stand in the early 1930s.2
Thanks to Chenault’s engaging charm, his sidewalk stand—first on Main Street and then Western Avenue across from Andresen’s Tavern—quickly became a popular local crossroads.
For sports enthusiasts, the stand was a mecca to stop at and check the radio—always tuned to a ball game—for the latest score and Chenault’s play-by-play commentary. Among downtown merchants, it served the city’s “second chamber of commerce.” To newcomers it was an unofficial welcome center, stocked with brochures and Chenault’s recommendations of places to go and things to see. For local politicians, many of whom relied upon Chenault as a trusted advisor, it was a spot to keep their fingers on the pulse of the community.3
With his uncanny ability to recall names, dates, and scraps of street conversation, Chenault was said to be on a first-name basis with nine out of ten people who passed by. During Petaluma’s suburban housing boom in the 1950s and 60s, as the city’s population more than tripled to 25,000, that became increasingly important. A personalized greeting from Chenault was reassurance that Petaluma remained a place where people knew your name.4
Longtime Argus-Courier columnist Bill Soberanes attributed his popularity to a personal creed that if one looked for the good in others, the bad points would vanish.5
While that may have been self-fulfilling—Chenault never spoke of his incarceration, telling people he worked on the railroads after being discharged from the army—it didn’t erase Petaluma’s bad points when it came to race, no matter how much good Chenault brought out in the town.6 For most of his years in Petaluma, he was the city’s only Black businessman, as well as its sole Black homeowner.7
That wasn’t by accident. Unlike the blatant and violent Jim Crow racism he faced as a young soldier in Houston, the discrimination he found in Petaluma was largely covert, camouflaged behind a smiling face.
That didn’t stop Henry Chenault from trying.
Born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1895, Chenault quit school at 16 to apprentice as a teamster and stableman. Upon turning 18 in 1913, he enlisted for a three-year stint in the U.S. Army. Following his discharge, he settled in Oakland, where he met and married Willie Bernice Butler, originally of Red Bluff, adopting her five-year old son Samuel.
On May 24, 1917, almost two months after the United States entered World War I, Chenault was recalled to active duty, and assigned to the all-Black Third Battalion of the 24th Regiment. A unit of the famed Buffalo Soldiers, the 24th had charged up San Juan Ridge with Teddy Roosevelt and fought in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War.8
In late July, the Third Battalion was dispatched to Fort Logan, three miles outside of Houston, Texas, to guard the construction off a new aviation training facility.
Racial tensions were high across the country that summer. In July, white mobs in East St. Louis, Illinois, staged a labor riot, killing dozens of Blacks who had moved there from the South to work in war factories.
Houston officials and business leaders, looking to capitalize financially on the new army base, assured the military that Black soldiers would not pose any problem in their city.9
It proved to be an empty promise. A segregated state, Texas had a reputation for lynchings and racial violence. In Houston, the mere presence of Black men in uniform threatened the social hierarchy. A year before, a member of the 24th stationed in Del Rio, Texas, had been killed for no other reason than he was Black. It angered many white Texans to see Black men in uniform. They feared that if they weren’t kept in check, local Black civilians would begin demanding equal treatment for themselves.10
As a result, soldiers in the 24th endured an onslaught of racial slurs and discrimination from city residents, along with pistol whippings and arrest from police officers for violating such Jim Crow laws as sitting in “white only” sections on the streetcars and drinking from “white only” fountains.
Tensions came to a boil the night of August 23rd, after two white police officers assaulted a Black private for interfering in the arrest of a Black woman. When a Black M.P. patrolling the city asked the officers about the soldier’s whereabouts, he was hit with a pistol, shot at three times, and brutally beaten before being thrown in jail.
News filtered back to the 24th that police had killed the two soldiers and an armed white mob was headed for the camp. Shots rang out, sending the frightened soldiers scrambling for their rifles and shooting into surrounding buildings at suspected snipers. An examination of soldiers inflicted with bullet wounds that evening at the camp, found the bullets came from non-military rifles.
After forming a skirmish line to secure the camp, 150 soldiers began marching toward the Houston police station to hold the police accountable for their attacks on the two soldiers.
All in all, 20 people died in the soldiers’ uprising that evening, including 11 white residents, five policemen, and four Black soldiers killed by friendly fire. Afterward, 118 soldiers were court martialled for murder and mutiny. All pleaded not guilty. They included Chenault, who claimed to be sick that night, and so remained behind in camp.11
As the night was dark and rainy, identification of individual participants proved impossible. Instead, military investigators persuaded seven frightened soldiers to testify against their battalion mates in exchange for immunity. The resulting testimonies were conflicting.12 In Chenault’s case, an informant posing as a participant in the uprising, was planted in his cell to trick him into allegedly revealing his participation.13
The men were tried in three groups. Despite inconclusive evidence, 19 black soldiers in the first group sentenced to hang, their executions expedited under the Articles of War, as the U.S was at war with Germany. Another 10 soldiers in the second group, including Chenault, were sentenced to death. After an outcry from the NAACP and high-ranking military officials, President Wilson, an avowed racist, reluctantly commuted their sentences to life in federal prison.
All told, 110 men of the 24th were convicted, 63 men of them received life sentences. Some soldiers served as many as 20 years before their release.14 Chenault was released after serving 13.15
Upon his release, Chenault reunited with his wife Willie, then working as a hotel manager in San Francisco. By 1933, they were renting a house in Petaluma, where he opened a shoeshine stand outside Damon and Oster’s, the town’s largest barbershop and beauty salon, on Main Street across from the town clock.
Chenault soon became a Petaluma fixture with a signature technique of taking a deck of cards and placing individual cards in a customer’s shoe to keep the polish from rubbing off on the man’s socks.17 Behind his happy demeanor however, he struggled.
In 1937, he and his wife divorced, after which he became engaged to Cecily Clapp, a 30-year old Black woman working as a domestic for the Herold family of Herold Drug Store in town. In May 1938, Chenault purchased a house at 32 West Street. Three months later, Clapp died from an illness apparently brought on by sunstroke. Chenault accompanied her body by train to her hometown in Virginia.18
When World War II broke out, disrupting his shoeshine business, he took a job on Mare Island, where thousands of Blacks had immigrated from the South to work in the shipyards. In 1944, he married Bessie Thompson, a Kansas native who had moved to Petaluma from Eureka in 1939 with her young daughter Nancy Lou.19
After the war, Chenault opened a new shoeshine stand outside the Arcade Barbershop at 18 Western Avenue, where he would remain for the next twenty-one years.20
He and his wife became actively engaged in politics, serving as officers of the Petaluma Democratic Club, and founding members of the Sonoma County NAACP. Established in Santa Rosa in 1955, the chapter elected Bessie Chenault as its first treasurer.21
While the county chapter supported the national civil rights movement—for example, picketing and boycotting the F.W. Woolworth’s Department Stores in Petaluma and Santa Rosa over the chain store’s refusal to serve Blacks at lunch counters in the South—their primary focus was securing equal treatment in jobs and housing for Sonoma County’s estimated 1,000 Black residents, most of whom lived either in rural areas or Santa Rosa’s South Park neighborhood.22
That included lobbying for the controversial California Fair Employment Practice Act, which barred businesses and labor unions from discriminating against job applicants because of race, color, or creed. After many legislative defeats, it was signed into law in 1959.23
They also pressed for the California Fair Housing Act of 1963, which made it unlawful to discriminate against home buyers and renters.
In 1960, a federal commission on civil rights found Petaluma had only one home owned by a Black family—that of Henry and Bessie Chenault at 32 West Street.24
The Chenaults’ daughter, Mary Lou, was Petaluma High School’s only Black student when she graduated in 1950. Santa Rosa Junior College, which she went on to attend, was only marginally better in terms of student diversity.25
The commission determined Petaluma’s lack of Black residents was due to exclusionary housing practices. They pointed to a cabal of Sonoma County bankers, real estate agents, developers and neighborhood groups who blackballed and financially threatened anyone attempting to sell or rent property to Blacks.26
Such exclusionary practices were reinforced by formal housing policies. In 1927, the National Association of Real Estate Boards championed racial covenants, creating a model clause that was inserted into countless deeds: “No part of said premises shall be sold, given, conveyed or leased to any negro or negroes.” The Federal Housing Administration, created in the 1930s to insure home mortgages, also required racial covenants to guarantee loans—better known as “redlining.”27
In Petaluma, the suburban tract housing boom on the city’s east side following World War II was accompanied by restrictive covenants that preventing the sale or resale of homes to Blacks.
Although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that such covenants were not legally enforceable, they did not rule that they couldn’t be used.28 Stifling Black homeownership in suburbs like Petaluma pushed Black Americans, many who had migrated to California during the war to work in shipyards and factories, into zones of concentrated urban poverty in the East Bay and San Francisco.29
According to the 1960 civil rights commission report, Black families showing an interest in buying in Sonoma County were often told the property had “just been sold,” even though the house remained on the market. Blacks who did manage to purchase property in Sonoma County had to contend with the possibility of racially motivated violence and vandalism.
In the 1950s, the Santa Rosa weekend home of Jack Beavers, a leader of the San Francisco NAACP chapter, was burned. Black and white neighbors alike agreed that the fire was likely a deliberate act of discrimination.30
The California Fair Housing Act, championed by the Chenaults and other members of the Sonoma County NAACP, was met with opposition after being adopted in 1963. The next year, the California Real Estate Association put forth a ballot measure to nullify the act, and explicitly allow discrimination in the housing market. It passed with 65% of the vote, but was overruled in 1967 by the U.S Supreme Court.31
Chenault was still shining shoes on Western Avenue and fighting the good fight in 1969 when he died unexpectedly at age 74.
In 2023, the Army formally overturned the convictions of Chennault and the other 109 soldiers charged with crimes association with the 1917 riot, acknowledging that the military trials had been unjust, tainted by racial discrimination.32
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A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, and in the 2022 Buffalo Soldiers Exhibit at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles.
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Sidebar: In 2020, a motion picture based upon the 1917 Houston Race Revolt was released. It is currently streaming on Apple TV and Starz.
Footnotes:
[1] C. Calvin Smith, “The Houston Riot of 1917, Revisited,” The Houston Review, Spring 1991, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 85-102.
[2] “Houston Mutiny and Riot Records: Henry Chenault,” South Texas College of Law Digital Collection, https://cdm16035.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15568coll1/id/1707
[3] Petaluma Argus-Courier: Bill Soberanes, “So They Tell Me” column, June 19, 1952; Bob Wells, “Everybody Here Knows Henry L. Chenault,” June 24, 1954; “A Paragraph for Mr. Chenault,” October 29, 1954; Bill Soberanes, “Henry Chenault Was a Petaluma Institution,” January 20, 1993.
[4]“Shoe Shine Operator is C. of C.,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 8, 1949.
[5] Bill Soberanes, “Henry Was a Friend to All,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 15, 1969.
[6] “Henry Chenault is Dead,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 14, 1969.
[7] Soberanes, January 20, 1993; “United States Commission on Civil Rights, Hearings before the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Hearings held in Los Angeles, California, January 25, 1960; San Francisco California, January 27, 1960, January 28, 1960,” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1960), p. 588.
[8] “Houston Mutiny and Riot Records: Henry Chenault”; “Who Are the Buffalo Soldiers,” https://www.buffalosoldiermuseum.com/
[9] Allison Keyes, “The East St. Louis Race Riot Left Dozens Dead, Devastating a Community on the Rise,” Smithsonian Magazine, June 30, 2017. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/east-st-louis-race-riot-left-dozens-dead-devastating-community-on-the-rise-180963885/; Smith, pp. 86-89.
[10] Smith, pp. 86-89.
[11] “Houston Mutiny and Riot Records: Henry Chenault”; Christian, Garna L. (2009). “The Houston Mutiny of 1917,” Trotter Review: Volume 18, Issue 1, Article 14. https://scholarworks.umb.edu/trotter_review/vol18/iss1/14
[12] Outline of events from Smith, pp. 85-102.
[13] Robert V. Haynes, A Night of Violence: The Houston Riot of 1917 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), digital edition, p. 286; “Houston Mutiny and Riot Records: Henry Chenault.”
[14] Smith, p. 97; Haynes, p. 301; “Houston Mutiny and Riot Records: Henry Chenault”; “5 Surprising Facts About Woodrow Wilson and Racism,” Christian Science Monitor, December 14, 2015,.
[15] “Houston Mutiny and Riot Records: Henry Chenault”; The 1917 Houston Riots/Camp Logan Mutiny. Prairie View A&M University.
[16] Burroughs Miller is Bride of Julio Coehlo,” Petaluma Argus Courier, August 7, 1933;
[17] Bill Soberanes, So They Tell Me Column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 3, 1966.
[18] “Final Divorce Decrees Granted,” San Francisco Examiner, November 10, 1937; “H. Chenault’s Fiancee is Called,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 17, 1938; “Henry Chenault Home from East,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 9, 1938; Sonoma County Deeds, Sonoma County Clerk: May 19, 1938: Grantee- Henry Chenault; Grantor – Central Bank, etc., Deed, Book 455, page 138; 1940 U.S. Census, Petaluma, lists Henry Chenault, single, white, living at 32 West Street.
[19] “Henry Chenault is Dead,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 14, 1969.
[20] Bob Wells, June 24, 1954.
[21] Bill Soberanes, So They Tell Me Column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 24, 1960; June 27, 1966; December 19, 1966; “Santa Rosa Unit of NAACP to Receive Charter,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, June 2, 1955.
[22] “Picketing by NAACP Continues in County,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, March 20, 1960; “Negro ‘Test’ Stores Open—Part of the Way,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 9, 1960.
[23] Bill Soberanes, So They Tell Me Column, Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 20, 1955; Michael C. Tobriner, “California FEPC,” Hastings Law Journal, 1965, Vol. 16, issue 3.
[24] Hearings before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, p. 588. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hearings_Before_the_United_States_Commis/fUXVAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1
[25] “Petaluma High School Will Hold Graduation Exercises on Durst Field Friday Night,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 8, 1950; “Ex-Petaluman Honors King: As a Girl, She Was the Only Black Student,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, January 19, 1993.
[26] Hearings before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, p. 590. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hearings_Before_the_United_States_Commis/fUXVAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1
[27] “Is There Racism in the Deed to Your Home?” New York Times, August 17, 2021.
[28] Moore, Montojo, Mauri, “Roots, Race, and Place,” Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, University of California, Berkeley, October 2019, pgs. 7, 13; Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation,2017), 6.
[29] Rothstein, p. 6.
[30] Hearings before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, p. 590.
[31] Moore, Motojo, Mauri, p. 54.
[32] Jaime Salazar, Mutiny of Rage: The 1917 Camp Logan Riots and Buffalo Soldiers in Houston (Prometheus eBooks, 2021), p. 51; “Army Overturns Convictions of 110 Black Soldiers Charged in 1917 Riot,” New York Times, November 14, 2023.