Florida Fallen Stories

Ben Bowie was born on December 27, 1887, in Monticello, Jefferson County, Florida. He was the son of Annie Sanders (1871-1932), a laundress, and Benjamin J. Bowie, Sr. (born 1861), a farm laborer from Florida. Ben had a younger sister, Nola Willie (1888-1955), a dressmaker. Benjamin Bowie married Ann Sanders on February 20, 1890, in Jefferson County.

Ben attended school in Tampa before dropping out by the time he was 13. In the 1906 Tampa directory, when was 19, he is listed as working in a cigar factory and living with his mother and sister at 1418 Scott Street. In the 1910 Tampa directory, Ben, still a cigarmaker, lived with his mother at 1212 East 3rd Avenue. By April of that same year, he had relocated to Los Angeles, California.

 

In Los Angeles, Ben Bowie held several different jobs, first as a cigar maker (1910), then janitor (1912) and laborer until 1913, when he began working as an observation car porter with the Southern Pacific Railroad. Being a Pullman porter was one of the premier jobs young African American men could have at the time. Despite the hard work and low pay, the job was less physically taxing than farm or factory work and offered the opportunity to see other parts of the country.

 

 

Despite claiming an exemption, Bowie was drafted and entrained on October 28 to the National Army cantonment at American Lake, named Camp Lewis, some 17 miles south of Tacoma, Washington. Joining him were 32 other African American recruits from City District No. 17, a group described as among “the finest” sent to camp. “They are courteous, gentlemanly and obedient,” a draft official declared. And “they have a very clear conception of their duties.” Ironically, the draftees traveled to Camp Lewis onboard a Southern Pacific train and had a Pullman car to themselves.

 

Bowie had joined a racist army, as the U.S. military always had separated its troops by race. He was assigned to 49th Company, 13th Training Battalion, 166th Depot Brigade, an all-black unit with white officers and sergeants. He and his fellow recruits were quartered in separate barracks, ate separately, marched in separate formations, and trained in separate areas on post.

 

But their daily routines were essentially the same as white conscripts. Reveille at 5:45 a.m., followed by assembly at 6:00, breakfast at 6:45. The rest of the morning was filled with close order drills, assigned tasks, manual of arms, instruction in personal hygiene and care, parading in companies, before breaking for lunch hour at noon. Then more drills, range finding, firing practice, bayonet practice, guard duty work, policing, first-aid instruction, inspections, followed by assembly and final review of the evening. Chow at 5:00. Tattoo at 9:00. Lights out and all to bed at 9:30. This was the schedule for the week, except on Saturdays, when there were more physical drills, marching on the parade and drill grounds, and instruction in military courtesy and protocol. On Tuesday and Friday mornings the men often made four-mile marches to American Lake where they were instructed in swimming and lifesaving, or a longer hike around Mount Ranier. There was plenty of time for organized play after supper —football, baseball, basketball, boxing, wrestling, or track events. Then there was “Camp Lewis University,” where French was taught, and almost any other subject. And there was a giant amusement center, filled with motion picture theaters, shooting galleries, and ice cream parlors, even a Ferris wheel. There were libraries, games, writing tables, pianos, and phonographs in all the Y.M.C.A. buildings, including the “Negro” division, and each barracks had a phonograph and twenty records, donated by an anonymous Tacoma woman. Such was the training regimen and camp life for the first contingent of several hundred recruits who arrived at Camp Lewis on September 5, 1917. By the end of the year, there were some 37,000 officers, cadre, garrison, and trainees from eight different western states and Alaska, with fewer than 400 African Americans on post.

 

 

On February 18, 1918, after more than three months of initial training, Bowie’s unit was transferred from Camp Lewis.  They traveled by rail on a special train of twelve cars in below freezing weather, arriving at Camp Grant, February 22, some six miles from Rockford, Illinois, a city of about 60,000 people, all but one thousand white. Here Bowie was assigned to 3rd Platoon, Company I, 365th Infantry Regiment, 183rd Brigade, 92nd (Buffalo) Division. Created along with the 93rd Division in November 1917, the 92nd Division was a segregated combat unit of the United States Army, comprised mostly of African American servicemen from almost every state in the country. The 365th Infantry, the 366th Infantry, and the 350th Machine Gun Battalion formed the 183rd Infantry Brigade at Camp Grant.

Although Bowie’s division commander, Maj. Gen. Charles C. Ballou (West Point grad, 1886), his brigade commander, Malvern Hill Barnum, and the 365th Regiment commander, Col. Vernon Avondale Caldwell, were all white, every other officer downward in Bowie’s direct chain of command were black. Company I, with 252 men, was led by Capt. A. T. Walden (1885-1965), of Fort Valley, Georgia, a graduate of Atlanta University (1907) and the University of Michigan law school (1911), who became a civil rights leader in Atlanta after war. First Lieutenant Floyd Gilmer (1877-1953) of Denver, Colorado, was like Bowie, a former Pullman porter, born in Montgomery, Alabama and enlisted in the Army in 1899. Second Lieutenant Lightfoot Henry Reese (1893-1967), a former house painter from Newnan, Georgia, and postwar barber, was 1 of 639 men commissioned an officer at Camp Fort Des Moines, Iowa in mid-October 1917. And Second Lieutenant Felix Buggs (1877-1961), another Georgian and Des Moines man, served in the Regular Army for more than twenty years until his retirement in 1922.

 

 

As at Camp Lewis, Rockford’s Camp Grant had segregated housing, Y.M.C.A. recreation buildings, and other facilities for African American soldiers. One day someone put up signs in the latrines that stated that certain sections were to be reserved for “coloreds” and “whites.” They were torn down quickly. Afterwards, a white captain came into the mess hall and said that anyone caught tearing down the signs would be given six months in the guard house. Some white troops took it upon themselves to drive black soldiers out of the latrines. They refused to go. So, they got rifles with bayonets to force them out, and the black soldiers got some old pistols. Cooler heads prevented bloodshed. But the signs went up the next day.

At nearby Rockford, white businesses and restaurants refused to serve black men, this despite the Chief of Police declaring that they were “much better than we expected.” When they came to town they were discriminated against and there were very few places for them to go. There was one restaurant owned by a black man, which was frequently visited by many soldiers. And there was only one white-owned hotel that allowed black people to stay, especially those visiting family members or husbands on base. But it was of questionable reputation, it was raided several times by military police, and it was expensive—more than $3 a night for a single room.

Time spent at Camp Grant during the late winter and early spring of 1918 was not easy. Occasional heavy rains created mud that was often knee deep and there was much sickness among the troops. Some 56 men in Bowie’s unit were discharged owing to an outbreak of pneumonia. But something far worse occurred in May 1918, when twenty-two soldiers were arrested for an alleged assault, rape and robbery of a white woman, Louise Schneider of Bloomington, who had visited the camp. Rumors that the woman had been killed, as had her white soldier escort, and that a race war was about to erupt only inflamed the incident further, attracting national attention.

Although Private Bowie was not among the accused, his entire 7,300-man 183rd Brigade was ordered confined to barracks, and every black soldier in the 365th Infantry Regiment was instructed to appear one-by-one before a military board of inquiry, led by General Barnum, the brigade commander, until all of the assailants were positively identified by Miss Schneider and they were confined by heavily armed white guards in the camp stockade. At a court-martial rushed through later that month, seven of the men were said to have confessed to their crime, while eighteen soldiers were sentenced to be executed.  Thirteen of the men later appealed their death sentences and were given a new trial by the army, and six of them were found guilty. In April 1920, President Wilson ordered that their death sentences be commuted to life imprisonment.

Shortly after the Schneider incident, the 365th was hurriedly ordered to Camp Upton, five miles northeast of Yaphank, Long Island, New York, where other units in the 92nd already had concentrated awaiting ships for deployment overseas. Sailings from Hoboken, New Jersey, began on June 7. On June 10, Bowie’s regiment boarded the naval transport Agamemnon, a former German passenger liner, which carried 4,498 men. After arriving at Brest, France, on June 19, 1918, the 365th joined other units of the 183rd Brigade and the 92nd Division in moving to the 11th Training Area, around Bourbonne-les-Bains, Haute-Marne, in northeastern France, about sixty miles from the front, for an intensive, 8-week course in defensive and offensive tactics. Afterwards, Corporal Bowie wrote a letter to his mother, saying, “I am now going into the front-line trenches, mother. If you do not hear from me again, don’t worry.” This was the last Annie Bowie ever heard from him.

 

 

 

On August 12 the division, less artillery, moved to the vicinity of Bruyères, in the Vosges Mountains, in the area of the French Seventh Army. From August 23 to 30 the division, affiliated with the French 87th Division, and under control of the French XXXIII Corps, participated in the occupation of the Saint-Dié Sector. This sector, which was about 25 kilometers wide, lay in the Vosges north of St.-Dié.

Trench life consisted of intermittent shelling with shrapnel and gas, followed by attacks by patrolling and raiding parties. Skirmishes between raiding parties were frequent. The 365th was commended for repelling an attack on its line on September 1. Another enemy attack came nine days later, preceded by an intense artillery barrage that began at 5:30 in the morning. By the end of the day, the front-line trenches were badly damaged. Four men were killed in action, and sixteen others and one officer were wounded, eight severely. Ben Bowie was one of these casualties. He lost his left leg owing to shrapnel and suffered gunshot wounds. He died of his wounds later that day.

 

Three days later, on September 13, 1918, Ben Bowie was buried in Grave 26 in a French civilian cemetery in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges. On October 18, 1921, he was re-interred in Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, France. The army notified Mrs. Bowie of her son’s reburial on May 5, 1922. Not long afterwards, the Benjamin J. Bowie American Legion Post No. 228 in South Central Los Angeles was organized. Made up entirely of black veterans, it was named in honor of one of the first African Americans drafted from Los Angeles to die during the Great War. Like the army, the American Legion was also segregated.

 

On July 12, 1930, Annie Bowie sailed to France on the American Merchant, as one of a group of 58 Gold Star mothers and widows to visit their loved ones’ graves and to view the battlefields where they fell. The War Department determined that colored mothers who accepted its invitation to go on the pilgrimage would be required to travel and to be housed and fed separately from white mothers and widows.  In protest of the “Jim Crow” policy, 55 eligible mothers or widows cancelled their trip. But not Annie Bowie, who had moved from Tampa to Los Angeles since the war ended, and had taken a train from California to New York to go on the pilgrimage. “I’m going if there don’t nobody go but myself,” said one Gold Star Mother from Oklahoma as she was about to board the ship that would take her across the Atlantic. “Amen!,” agreed Annie Bowie, who was thankful she was physically able to make the trip.  Just as Ben Bowie had gone to France as part of a segregated unit in 1918, so did his and other African American mothers during the summer of 1930.