Summoned at Midnight: A Story of Race and the Last Military Executions at Fort Leavenworth

In this somewhat dry history, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Serrano examines the history of racial discrimination in the U.S. armed forces through the experience of the last soldier to be executed at “the Castle,” the U.S. Army’s death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kans. Although the military was desegregated in 1948, soldiers continued to experience differential treatment, Serrano writes, based upon their race. For instance, white inmates at the Castle nearly always attracted sufficient popular and political support to be spared execution, while African-Americans were taken at midnight to the prison’s gallows. John Arthur Bennett, a black private convicted of raping a white woman while he was stationed in Austria, was sentenced to death there. His family petitioned Dwight Eisenhower, his victim and her parents expressed their belief that the crime merited incarceration rather than execution, and the case attracted the attention of the distinguished psychiatrist and death-penalty opponent Karl Menninger, who maintained that Bennett, who suffered from severe epilepsy, was thus not guilty by reason of insanity. But newly inaugurated President Kennedy refused to overturn his predecessor’s decision, and Bennett was hanged on Apr. 12, 1961. Serrano’s prose is workmanlike, and his narration of what should be a gripping tale is often flat, but he has made an important contribution to the historiography of race and justice. (Feb.)