'The 24th': Kevin Willmott's Film About The Horrorifc 1917 Houston Riot Needs To Dig Deeper [Review]

Walker (Mo McRae) takes an immediate dislike to Boston (Trai Byers) when they first meet under Houston’s unforgiving sun: They’re digging a latrine, and Walker can’t abide Boston’s high mannered speech in conjunction with his skin tone, which is lighter than Walker’s by several shades. They tussle. Walker even pulls a razor. The altercation nearly cements their mutual disdain for one another until a late-night understanding is met between the two; Boston’s parents died in 1906 in Atlanta, which Walker recognizes as a reference to the Atlanta Massacre. Empathy dawns in his eyes.

“I needed to be united with the legacy that my parents lived for and died for,” Boston tells Walker. “I needed to be united with the blood in my veins. So I came here. And here is where I’m going to stay, Walker. This is my home now, right next to you.” 

This exchange unfolds about 40 minutes into “The 24th,” the new movie from Kevin Willmott, who co-wrote Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods.” It happens that Willmott co-wrote “The 24th” with Byers, and took the directing reins himself in his seventh feature, settling his eyes on a brief chapter in Black American history in which Black Americans pushed back against the constant parade of injustices—ranging from hurled insults, piss streams, and police abuse, all the way up to the ultimate expression of racist dialect, being state-sanctioned violence—with justice of their own: The Houston riot of 1917, perhaps better known as the Camp Logan Mutiny. The film’s title refers to the 24th Infantry Regiment, an all-Black unit tasked in the spring of 1917 with guarding the construction of military installations in Harris County, Texas. 

Boston and Walker belong to that unit, the former a proud participant in a military that doesn’t want him, serving a country that doesn’t view him as a man, and the latter burdened by experiences that have left him with little national pride and less tolerance for anyone who shares that pride. But their differences provide a catalyst that bonds them in common cause, and this, more than Wilmott’s history lesson, offers the film’s most compelling angle. Willmott’s goal is to tell an untold, or perhaps under-told, story of oppression met with forceful resistance. The greater accomplishment lies in his dissection of conflicts in Black American identities 55 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, as Boston and Walker first come to blows then later to a détente. 

Racism is a hierarchy, and America doesn’t validate Boston’s humanity. But he’s not as visible as Walker, either, which makes him more free than his Black American brethren, even if only by a hair. “The 24th” functions well as a poetic exploration of how American society pits subjugated peoples against one another; in fact, its most substantial conflicts arise within that dynamic. Cinema has staged violent defiance against white supremacy before, whether using the Civil War or the Civil Rights movement as context. “The 24th” uses World War I and the Progressive Era of America’s lifespan as its backdrop, which is somewhat new and builds to explosive vengeance exacted on whiteness.

But Willmott appears intent on maintaining neutrality. He crafts “The 24th” to measure the full circumference of the riot and its consequence; that “horror of war” approach frames all involved as victims (excepting the racist cops responsible for brutalizing Black men, women, and children). Because Willmott selects Boston as his audience surrogate character, and because Boston only stares in awe-struck dread as events unfold before his idealistic gaze, “The 24th” adopts an impartial stance: white supremacy bears down directly on Black lives but also subsumes all whiteness to satisfy its ideological purpose. Even Good Whites, notably Colonel Norton (Thomas Hayden Church), are helpless to stanch Black Americans’ bleeding beneath racism’s bootheel. (Norton may be the real audience identification character here, but it’s quite likely that viewers will see Boston as their anchor.)

This conciliation undermines “The 24th.” The movie plays like a treatise on racism’s effect on society at large instead of the barbarity suffered by the 24th regiment, and how that barbarity exposed the fruitlessness of their dream to belong in a culture that hates them. If Boston can’t change minds and hearts, who can? What’s left? Willmott finds no satisfying answers. His film embraces an even-handed perspective on an uneven history, shoehorning in Norton alongside Marie (Aja Naomi King), Boston’s love interest and another voice pleading with him to conform and behave rather than rebel. “The 24th” is in a picture conversation with “Da 5 Bloods,” but too many voices have a hand on the microphone, and so Willmott’s thesis blurs. In death, Boston unites with his legacy. On screen, “The 24th” muddles that same legacy.

This is a movie about Black Americans struggling with national selfhood; about one night of white American bloodshed as a toll paid for years of ruthless institutional repression; about reckoning with this country’s original sin. Occasionally, Willmott and his cinematographer, Brett Pawlak, get there. The final image, an overhead shot of Boston, Walker, and the other legally designated ringleaders of the riot post-execution as their corpses lie side-by-side in coffins, sees them as men, as brothers at arms, and as victims. But there’s performative dolor rather than anguish driving “The 24th” forward: “What a damn shame,” reads its message as if the Houston riot is a mere blip on the radar of American history. And perhaps to an extent, it is. But even a blip demands attention to detail and rigorous examination. [C]

“The 24th” is available now in virtual cinemas and on VOD.