Lynching Bee

One night last August a mob of Negro stevedore soldiers at Fort Lawton, Wash., stormed into a barracks occupied by paroled Italian prisoners of war. The Negroes, brooding over special privileges shown the POWs, were armed with "knives, clubs, trench shovels, axes, stones." After MPs had quelled the brawl, Italian Guglielmo Olivotto was found in a gully near by, hanged by the neck and dead.

Last week, after more than two months' investigation, Army authorities started a proceeding which had few if any precedents in U.S. judicial history. They accused 43 Negroes of taking part in a lynching bee, charged 40 of them with rioting, three with rioting and murder, got ready to march them before a court-martial. The three charged with murder: Sergeant Arthur J. Hurks, 23, of Houston, Tex., Corporal Luther Larkin, 23, of Helena, Ark., Private William G. Jones, 21, of Decatur, Ill.

Ordered back to camp in England be cause of improper uniform, ten Negro G.I.s who had been having a few beers at a hotel in Kingsclere, Hampshire, sullenly obeyed, shortly returned with carbines "to deal with the MPs." In the rattle of gunfire that followed, the hotel proprietor's wife, an MP and another soldier were killed. Last week an Army court-martial found nine of the Negroes guilty of murder, sentenced them to hard labor for life. The tenth got ten years at hard labor for being A.W.O.L. Said one of the accused: "We have had no dealings with the law and we are ignorant."

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