By Queen Anne author Jack Hamann's reckoning in "On American Soil," 28 African-American service men stationed at Fort Lawton were railroaded at a court-martial in the summer of 1944.
Published in 2005, the book caught the eye of fellow neighborhood resident and U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott, who vowed last year to correct what is widely believed to be an injustice.
The court-martial was prompted by a riot between around 200 black soldiers and 200 Italian prisoners of war, a melee that led to the lynching death of one Italian. The riot itself was sparked by a fistfight earlier the same day between a black soldier and one of the Italian POWs, a group perceived to be getting better treatment than the segregated African Americans at the base, according to Hamann's book.
The result was that all 28 were convicted of rioting and two for manslaughter - in part, because a huge amount of exculpatory evidence military prosecutors withheld or excluded from the trial, Hamann found.
Furthermore, there was no physical evidence and no witnesses tying the prosecuted service men to the lynching, McDermott said in a Sept. 28 address to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.
Still, the soldiers were sentenced to six months to 25 years in military prison, and all but one of them received an honorable discharge, McDermott noted.
McDermott wanted to get the convictions overturned if warranted, but he faced a daunting task because normal channels would have involved multiple layers of bureaucracy at the Veterans Administration.
But the liberal McDermott was able to enlist the aid of Rep. Duncan Hunter, a conservative Republican who was the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee at the time.
The unlikely alliance cleared the way for the convicted soldiers or their descendents to use a single point of contact at Army Board of Correction of Military Records.
McDermott was thrilled, declaring, "Justice delayed is no longer denied."
So far, five cases have been filed by two surviving soldiers or their families, and decisions are expected later this year, according to a press release from McDermott's office.
Overturning the convictions and dishonorable discharges would restore benefits such as those contained in G.I Bill to the surviving men and the families of the others, McDermott said.
One of the surviving soldiers, Samuel Snow Sr., traveled from his home in Florida to attend the Black Caucus conference, where he met both McDermott and Hamann.
McDermott noted in his speech that Snow harbors no ill feelings about what happened to him more than six decades ago.
But the effort to restore the black soldiers' honor also touches on a broader theme, according to the Queen Anne Congressman. "Today we have the opportunity to shine the light of truth into the darkness of racial discrimination," he said in his speech.
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