Mark Reviews Movies: THE 24TH

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 20, 2020

In The 24th, screenwriters Kevin Willmott (who also directed) and Trai Byers (who also stars) try to reckon with the violence of August 23, 1917 in Houston, Texas. At the height of the Great War in Europe, 156 soldiers mutinied on American soil, took to the streets of the city, and killed multiple police officers and civilians, as well as four soldiers.

The reason, according to both the movie and history, was overt prejudice and violence against and witnessed by the soldiers, who were part of an all-Black regiment. Just before the uprising, the soldiers believed their lives were in immediate danger from an angry white mob about to assault the camp.

At the time, they were also suffering the humiliation of internal racism within the military. These soldiers were ready and willing to fight and even die for their country in France, but the Army's official policy was that African-American soldiers were inherently inferior. Seemingly adding insult to that injury, the Army ordered them to build a new camp in the heart of the Jim Crow South, where there was no plan or concern for how these men would be treated outside of the base.

Everyone kept telling and showing these men that they don't matter. It's a constant attack on their existence: They don't matter as soldiers, because they're not allowed to fight, or as citizens, because their rights don't exist within the legal structure of this place, or even as people, because all of these injustices have been enacted with the perspective that their goals, their ambitions, their rights, and even their lives are of no concern to the powers that be on almost every level of government.

For a long time in the ongoing battle for civil rights in this country, there has been the constant refrain that violence is never the answer. It is, of course, always aimed at those whose rights have been trampled upon or outright denied. Whether or not violence is the morally correct response exists as a moot point in this story. It happened. There was violence and death, and there were legal repercussions to those acts. Here, the soldiers participating in the mutiny understand those consequences, which makes the need to respond in such a way even more troubling.

It is history, and we can assume the perceived higher ground that it shouldn't have happened. Some might even decry the film for portraying this incident at a time of civil unrest (as if the filmmakers would have known the future while making this). None of those people, one imagines, would dare to put that constant refrain about violence toward the people whose racism and abuse of power inspired the mutiny. In some minds, violence is never the answer when it comes to riots, as the 1917 event in Houston is also called. Those same minds likely would never consider telling the police or civilians that violence shouldn't have been the answer when they attacked or killed a Black person.

The film itself is inspired by the Camp Logan Mutiny, in that events happened more or less as they happened according to history, although the names have been changed, while certain story threads and characters have been speculated or invented. Our main character is William Boston (Byers), new to the regiment after studying in Paris, where, he tells his fellow soldiers, nobody seems to care about the color of your skin. At this time in this country, though, there are riots and a massacre in East St. Louis, Illinois, where white mobs murdered an uncertain number of African-Americans (One of Boston's fellow soldiers has family there, and he recalls going home to search for his missing sister).

Boston needed to return to the United States, though, because his parents gave up everything for his opportunities in life. He wants to continue the fight to ensure that other Black men and women will have the same chance. Boston's commanding officer Col. Norton (Thomas Haden Church), whose career has come to a standstill because he volunteered to lead an all-Black regiment, believes the young soldier has a future as an officer, but Boston wants to prove his worth, as a soldier and a Black man, among the infantry.

Willmott and Byers portray the discrimination in the city, which begins with the cops enforcing segregation laws and quickly builds up to racially-based attacks and murders performed in broad daylight. There's some progress, as Norton forms a military police unit to protect the soldiers from the local police (leading Boston to become the first Black man to arrest a white cop for murdering a Black man), but as many—and then more—steps backwards. Meanwhile, Boston begins a romance with Marie (Aja Naomi King), a pianist who was unjustly run out of her hometown for a crime committed against her.

In general, it works, although the love story feels like an unnecessary attempt to add a level of sympathy for Boston, who is already quite sympathetic—on account of the character and Byers' charismatic performance as the increasingly tormented soldier. As events escalate, Willmott efficiently and affectingly taps into the atmosphere of fear elevating to panic, of frustration transforming into rage, and, for most of the soldiers, of helplessness instantly becoming the realization that, if nobody else is going to help these men during a possible attack, they'll have to do it themselves.

It's not a simple case of self-defense, though, as the film and history reveal. Some of these soldiers simply had had enough of the violence and responded in kind. The 24th doesn't try to justify that. Indeed, the film has no solutions, but it doesn't need any. After all, in the century since the mutiny, we haven't solved much of anything.

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