Uncovers the hidden globe of the military legal system and the romantic history of racism that pervaded the armed forces long after integration.

Richard A. Serrano reveals how racial discrimination in america military legal justice system decided whose lives mattered and deserved another opportunity and whose didn’t. Between 1955 and 1961, a group of white and black condemned soldiers lived jointly on death row at Fort Leavenworth military jail. Although convicted of similarly heinous about Summoned at nighttime: A Story of Race as well as the Last Armed service Executions at Fort Leavenworth offences, all of the white troops were ultimately paroled and returned to their families, spared by high-ranking military officers, the armed service courts, sympathetic doctors, experienced attorneys, the White colored House staff, or Leader Eisenhower himself.

During the same 6-year period, only black colored soldiers had been hanged. Some had been cognitively challenged, others addicted to substances or psychologically unbalanced-the same mitigating circumstances that had won white military their loss of life row reprieves. These males lacked the advantages of politics connections, expert lawyers, or open public support; just their mothers begged fruitlessly because of their lives to be spared. By 1960, John Bennett was the youngest dark inmate at Fort Leavenworth. His lost battle for clemency was fought between 2 vastly different presidential administrations-Eisenhower’s and Kennedy’s-as the civil privileges movement was gaining steam.

Drawing on interviews, trial transcripts, and rarely released archival material, Serrano provides alive the characters with this lost history: from eager mothers and disheartened appeals attorneys, to the jail doctors, psychiatrists, and chaplains. He shines a light for the scandalous legal maneuvering that reached the doorways of the White House as well as the disparity in capital consequence that was cut therefore totally along racial lines.