BANG! A single shot echoes through the street. Hell breaks loose as white military police unleash on Black soldiers fighting back with makeshift weapons against military guns. How did a quiet night out go so wrong?
Pearl Harbor was a month earlier, so every soldier was on edge. Black soldiers from Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, strolled to Alexandria for rest and recovery. These soldiers, many from the north, didn’t understand the hotbed of racism they were stepping into.
Alexandria was consumed by Jim Crow violence, and military police patrolling the town on the weekends lived up to the town’s reputation. On Saturday, January 10, 1942, a white police tried to arrest a Black soldier when the shot was fired. It’s estimated that around 20 Black soldiers were killed, but no one knows for sure. Why?
The internal report of the massacre said something shocking: ZERO fatalities. The military may have attempted to erase this massacre from history, but because of eyewitness accounts, we know the truth of this horror today.
Uniforms didn’t save these Black GIs because, to military police, Black people were still the primary enemy. We can’t trust a power structure designed to exploit us. Our safety and our liberation should always come first.