Honored by his country at last, Snow died in peace

By Casey McNerthney, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 28, 2008

First Place, Society of Professional Journalists Northwest Excellence in Journalism Contest, Short Feature (2008)

When the moment Samuel Snow waited most of his life for finally came, he didn't speak. He just took the plaque affirming his honorable discharge - an honor that had been stolen from him more than six decades ago - held it against his chest in a Seattle hospital bed, and smiled.

That moment Saturday, family said, made his life complete.

A few hours later, Snow died at age 83.

"My father went home," son Ray Snow said, "to present his God his discharge papers from this life."

In 1944, Snow left Seattle as a 19-year-old in handcuffs, convicted of rioting on a night that led to an Italian POW's death. He and the other 27 convicted black soldiers knew they were innocent. During a Saturday ceremony at Discovery Park, where the slaying occurred at an Army fort 64 years earlier, a top military official formally acknowledged the men's innocence and offered words most of those convicted never lived to hear.

"We're sorry."

When Snow was stationed at Fort Lawton, the thousands of Italian POWs there were given more privileges than the black Army soldiers. The POWs were able to carouse in downtown Seattle, where they charmed local high school girls. White soldiers resented that, and incited a riot that ended with one shy Italian, Pvt. Guglielmo Olivotto, hanged from a cable noose.

Wanting a quick end to the largest court-martial of World War II, Army prosecutor Leon Jaworski - who later became famous as the special prosecutor in the Watergate scandal - didn't disclose evidence that likely would have cleared Snow and the others.

Instead, Snow returned to the rural, segregated town of Leesburg, Fla., with a dishonorable discharge - a "death sentence" for a black man in 1944, his son said.

He found work as a janitor. He worked in orange groves and with livestock under a scorching sun. When neighbors asked him to do handyman work, family said the deeply religious man never turned them down.

He was never bitter. "Yes I felt I had been served an injustice," Snow told the P-I's Robert Jamieson last fall. "But I decided I wasn't going to hold a grievance against anybody."

Snow spent his life in Leesburg, and for decades didn't talk about the mistreatment he received in Seattle. Instead, Ray Snow said, his father's convictions were like the words of a Maya Angelou poem:

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise.

In 2005, a book by Seattle author Jack Hamann forced historians and Army officials to rewrite what they knew about Snow.

The book, "On American Soil" - a work he and his wife, Leslie, spent more than a decade researching - gave convincing evidence that Olivotto was lynched by a white military policeman.

The world would know Snow was innocent.

In October, the appeals court reversed the convictions of the 28 men found guilty. Three months later, Hamann and local family members of those exonerated began talking about some kind of tribute to commemorate them. That four-day tribute began last week.

About 3:30 a.m. Thursday, Snow called his son. "You ready?" he asked, barely containing his excitement to fly to the city he left in handcuffs.

Snow returned to a complimentary stay at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel. During the two months of the 1944 court-martial, Jaworski had stayed there, while Snow slept in a tent near the Duwamish River and cleaned Army bathrooms on weekends.

Snow was a guest Friday night at the Northwest African American Museum, where he had dinner with sons and daughters of men he was imprisoned with.

But about 9 p.m., he told family he was having heart trouble.

Snow had double bypass surgery in the 1980s. In the past weeks, his congestive heart failure had worsened. But even around his son, Snow didn't talk of his ailing health - only of the honorable discharge that would correct the one wrong in his life.

"That meant more to him than anything else," Ray Snow said. "And the heart was just slowing, just beating it's time away."

On behalf of his dad, Ray Snow went to the ceremony and heard Ronald James, assistant secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, say on behalf of his comrades, "I am genuinely sorry."

Ray Snow posed for pictures, shared hugs and tears, then rushed to his father's room. "I got it," he told him.

Snow read to his father the Army's proclamation, which praised his service, and told of the doubts that made Congress take another look at the prosecution. It acknowledged an egregious error was made.

It didn't matter that an Army official didn't come there personally, family said. Samuel Snow didn't need the pomp and circumstance.

He took the framed honorable discharge, wrapped it with two arms next to his heart and smiled.

A few hours later, Ray Snow was called back to the hospital, where his father lay in the critical care unit. The room was dark. Snow was breathing on a ventilator. Machines that kept beeping interrupted the silence. Ray Snow stepped out and told nurses to clear the room.

He leaned into his Dad's ear and told how he loved him. Snow's longtime sweetheart, Margaret, said the same, and said goodbye.

Snow died at 12:43 a.m. Sunday morning. His family took comfort, saying he'd returned to the God that had given him strength to endure the wrongs done in Seattle.

"Today," Ray Snow said. "Daddy went home."

He did so an honorable man.