Six black defectors and a band leader

Filipinos stayed up late Tuesday night to listen if Barack Obama in inaugural would have anything special to say about them. They were let down. The closest that America’s first black president came to discussing RP affairs was with the generic: “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history.”

Readers meantime e-mailed for more on the African American troops sent to islands during the Philippine-American War (Gotcha, 21 Jan. 2009):

Cpl. David Fagen, 24th Infantry, US Army, gained fame defecting to the Katipunan in 1899. He wasn’t alone; 30 others broke ranks. Lawyer-historian Gill H. Boehringer identifies six from the 9th Cavalry: “Having deserted and fought with the resistance, the defectors fared badly when caught. Lewis Russell and Edmond Du Bose were executed before a crowd of 3,000 in Albay. Of some 20 sentenced to death for desertion, only these two black privates were executed. All others, including about 15 whites, had their sentences commuted by President Theodore Roosevelt. Three other black soldiers were sent to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to serve life terms: John Dalrymple, Garth Shores, William Victor. The last of those ‘magnificent seven’, Fred Hunter, was ‘killed while escaping custody’.”

Writing in Luzon for the New York Herald, Pulitzer awardee Stephen Bonsal observed then: “The desertions from the Negro regiments were large — much larger than from the white organizations — and were invariably of a different character. The white man deserted because he was lazy and idle and found service life irksome. Sometimes he joined the insurgents; but he did so evidently because that was the only way in which he could obtain his dream of becoming a wild man in the woods. But the Negroes deserted in scores and for the purpose of joining the insurgents, and many of them, like the celebrated Fagen, became leaders and fought the white troops or their former comrades with zest and ability.”

Bonsal, later adviser to Woodrow Wilson, cited three inducers of African Americans to defect: lynching of blacks back home, abusive white officers, and empathy for Filipinos as “racial brothers”. For them William McKinley’s “Manifest Destiny” rang hollow: “I went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty for light and guidance . . . and one night late it came to me this way. We could not leave (Filipinos) to themselves — they are unfit for self-government — and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain’s was . . . There was nothing left for us to do but take them all and educate them, and uplift and Christianize them.”

For, what followed was the brutal subjugation of a race that had just won freedom from Spain. As the Philadelphia Ledger reported then: “Our (troops) . . . exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of 10 up . . . Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to ‘make them talk,’ and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later . . . stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses.”

The 24th Infantry’s sergeant major John W. Galloway couldn’t take it. An “immoral war”, he called it in a letter to Katipunero Tomas Consunji, writes George Lipsitz in The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. Authorities raided the latter’s house and found the letter. Galloway was busted down to private, then dishonorably discharged. His pension was withheld to serve as example to other unsolicited commenters, Boehringer says.

At any rate, the war ended with Filipino defeat in 1902. At least 500 members of the “black regiments” and other units chose to stay behind. One of them, the chief musician-sergeant of the 48th Infantry, was recruited to form the Philippine Constabulary band.

Walter H. Loving rose from lieutenant to colonel as fast as the band earned laurels. In 1904 he brought them to the St. Louis world fair where they wowed the crowd with classical and martial music. Doubling as a symphony orchestra, they toured other US cities and became a hit, writes Clairborne Richardson in The Black Perspective in Music. The son of former slaves from Virginia, Loving was an accomplished player and composer, adds Jose D. Fermin in 1904 World’s Fair. President Fidel Ramos awarded him posthumously in 1993 for writing the battle hymn, My Beloved Philippines.

Loving retired twice from the PC, first at age 44 in 1916 to marry his fiancée in California. President Manuel Quezon convinced him to return to band leading. He bade farewell again in 1923 but stayed in Manila, where the Second World War caught up with him. Loving and wife were jailed by the Japanese at the University of Santo Tomas, and beheaded along with other ailing American soldiers during the Battle for Manila.

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