ALEXANDRIA — “Don’t kill me, I’ll get off,” exclaimed Private Edward Green, a U.S. Army soldier, to bus driver Odell Lachney on March 13, 1944.

It was the third public bus that Green, who had lived in New York City, tried to take that evening. He and a fellow soldier had sat down in the whites-only section in the front of the first bus, only to have that driver threaten Green with a club and demand that they get off. 

It’s not clear if Green, then 23, was trying to make a point about civil rights or was hoping there was some leeway for Blacks serving in the military in the midst of World War II.  

"Where I come from, you don’t have to sit in the rear," Green said, according to the driver. A second bus lumbered up, but that operator refused to let them board, saying they were cursing.

Shortly after 10 p.m., they finally got onto city bus No. 7, driven by Lachney, who had made part of his living earlier in life as a street boxer. The Black section was jam-packed, and Green sat in the last seat reserved for whites. 

Witness accounts varied about what happened after Green followed Lachney’s order to get off the bus. One passenger said Green had a knife. But other witnesses saw only one weapon, a .45 Colt revolver pistol, as the driver shot Green in the chest at point-blank range. And after a brief inquest the next day, no charges were brought against Lachney.

On one level, the incident and its outcome were not surprising at the time, coming more than a decade before Rosa Parks helped intensify the civil rights movement by refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. 

“It all falls in line with this story of this African American who was murdered, whose crime was never solved,” Michael Wynne, a historian who specializes in central Louisiana, told the LSU Cold Case Project, which examines these types of killings. “Not that it could not be solved, but that nobody was really interested in solving it.”

But the case is attracting new attention. Since November 2024, the federal Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board has released 1,600 pages of documents on the Green shooting and 15 other cases in which Black World War II servicemen or veterans were killed in the South in the 1940s and 1950s. The attacks occurred at a time when Black leaders were seeking a “Double Victory” over enemies abroad and racism at home.

The records also help illuminate the work of Thurgood Marshall, who was the NAACP’s top lawyer at the time and later became the first Black Supreme Court justice. Marshall was appalled that Black men serving in World War II were beaten or killed for running afoul of segregated practices in the South. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt shared his concern and asked about Green’s case, the documents show.

Marshall was frustrated that there was no law then making it a federal crime to kill military personnel, according to documents. He also pushed for expanding the Justice Department’s authority to prosecute racial attacks as a violation of federal civil rights laws. It took several decades for changes to come in both areas.

“There have been numerous killings of Negro soldiers by civilians and civilian police,” Marshall wrote to a top Justice Department official on May 5, 1944. “There have been many more instances of severe beatings of Negro soldiers in certain areas in the South. We are not aware of a single instance of prosecution or of any steps being taken by the Federal Government to either punish the guilty parties or to prevent the recurrence of these crimes against the uniform of the United States Army.”

 

Tensions in Alexandria

 

Despite President Franklin Roosevelt's executive order in 1941 to ban discrimination in the Armed Forces, the military remained largely segregated, just like the South. Few Black men were permitted to serve as officers, and they were generally allowed to lead only Black troops. The vast majority of Black service members were assigned to support roles, not combat ones. 

Still, wearing a uniform evoked a sense of pride among Black Americans who equated it with being full American citizens, said Matthew Delmont, a professor of history at Dartmouth University. But to some white people, the uniform seemed to have the power to disrupt the status quo.

“I think it's easy for a lot of Americans to look back and think that that was a more peaceful, unified time,” Delmont said. “But the reality is that it was a very fraught time in terms of racial discrimination and race relations, that there were competing visions for what kind of state Louisiana was going to be, what kind of country the United States was going to be.”

Alexandria, a town of 30,000 people, was surrounded by military training bases. Black soldiers would head into town to visit minority-run restaurants and bars on Lee Street, and military police were assigned to help keep order. 

In early 1942, racial tension boiled over after a white military police officer shot at a Black soldier leaving the Ritz Theater, and at least 10 Black soldiers were killed in the brawl that followed. Later that year, a local grand jury declined to indict a state trooper who shot and killed a Black military police officer in downtown Alexandria.

“If you have been ordered to Camp Livingston, Alexandria, LA, don’t disobey orders but ask to be assigned elsewhere,” a reporter for the New York Amsterdam, one of the nation’s premier Black newspapers, wrote. He suggested that Black soldiers “ask your commanding officer to be transferred to overseas service because Hitler’s Germany can’t be any worse than Alexandria. This is the most damnable place in America.”

Green was born in Thomaston, Georgia, about an hour south of Atlanta, and should have been aware of the racial norms. He moved to New York City at some point and lived in an apartment in Harlem with his wife. He enlisted in the Army as a private in 1942 and was assigned to the 993rd field artillery battalion at Camp Livingston in the Kisatchie National Forest near Pineville. The base was deactivated in 1945. 

Relatively few of the Black soldiers had cars. So buses became a lifeline for soldiers wanting to get off base.

Lachney, who was born and raised near Alexandria, had become a bus driver in July 1943, and he was not the kind of man to back down in an argument. During his days as a streetfighter, the Daily Town Talk wrote that he slammed his opponents hard and often in the early rounds. According to an article in 1936, Lachney–who also used “Lachenette” as his last name–had been sentenced to a $50 fine or 30 days in jail for beating his wife. A notecard at the Rapides Parish Sheriff's Office lists another charge for assault and battery in September 1943, six months before Lachney shot Green.

 

Cleared in 90 minutes

 

There were two investigations into the shooting. One was a coroner’s inquest the next morning, with 13 witnesses testifying. The other was run by the Army.

No records are available from either. But based on what was reported about the inquest, Lachney was running late and commanded Green to move to the back of the bus. Some witnesses said Green paid the driver no mind. Another said he asked: "Are you talking to me?” Others said he began to talk back. Lachney reached for his club and told Green to get off the bus. 

Aymond Lodra, a white witness who sat directly behind the driver, testified he saw Green reach into his pocket. Lachney grabbed his .45 Colt pistol, and Lodra said he told Lachney not to shoot Green on the bus. Lachney walked around the side of the bus, calling for Green to come out the back door. 

Green “had his knife in his hand by this time,” Lodra said, “and slashed at Odell’s sleeve.” But Johnnie Mae Gunter said she saw the pistol in Lachney’s hand but did not see Green strike the driver. W.E. Hutzler said he saw the gun but did not see a knife. He said the two men were less than a foot apart when the shot was fired. A detective said a knife was near Green’s body when police arrived. The New York Amsterdam News, the Black newspaper, later maintained that a white passenger had tossed a knife onto Green’s body.

On the advice of his attorney, Lachney did not take the stand at the inquest. The hearing lasted 90 minutes, and no charges were brought against Lachney. There is no indication that the soldier on the bus with Green testified at the inquest. But Army investigators, who would likely have interviewed him, filed a report saying: “The conclusion is inescapable that there was no justification, moral or legal, for the taking of the life of Private Edward Green.”

 

Thurgood Marshall’s Push

 

When Marshall and the NAACP appealed to the U.S. Department of Justice for help, officials said they could not prosecute Lachney because he had not committed a federal offense. At that time, a law making it a federal crime to kill federal officers, like congressmen or the president, did not apply to military personnel. And federal prosecutors could only bring charges against someone for violating another person’s civil rights if the suspect was a law enforcement officer.

“There does not appear to be any violation of any civil rights statutes for the reason that the bus driver who shot Private Green is not a police officer, nor does he have police power under the statutes of Louisiana or the ordinances of Alexandria,” Assistant Attorney General Tom Clark wrote to Marshall in May 1944. 

Marshall responded that Lachney continued to drive a bus, and Black soldiers were wondering if he would face any penalty for killing Green.

“I hope you can realize the effects on the morale of the Negro soldiers who realize that although one of their members is killed without provocation,” Marshall wrote, “the same government for which they are fighting refuses to take any action whatsoever to prosecute the guilty party.”

Eleanor Roosevelt’s secretary wrote to the U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle, saying the First Lady “would appreciate you letting her know” if the department would intervene in the Green case.

“I regret that we cannot offer protection by way of federal prosecution for the wrongful killing of members of the armed forces,” Biddle wrote back.

It was not until after the Rev. Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968 that Congress made it a federal crime for anyone to harm or kill someone because of their race, color, religion or national origin. In 1996, Congress made it a crime to assault or kill military personnel on account of their service, a condition that would have been hard to meet in the Green case. 

Lachney’s Legacy

 

Lachney’s propensity to take matters into his own hands did not stop after Green’s death. The Louisiana Weekly, a Black paper in New Orleans, reported that he slapped a Black woman on a bus in December 1950 when she refused to keep quiet, prompting her husband and another man to intervene. 

The men were convicted of battery against Lachney. But noting that Lachney seemed to have provoked the altercation, the judge suspended their sentences, saying: “I have also taken into consideration the record of the person who made this complaint, and it appears that on several occasions complaints have been filed against him in the city court.”

Lachney also served at some point as a captain of the Rapides Parish Motorcycle Patrol Reserve, according to his obituary. One of his grandsons, Harvey Slater, said Lachney was no one to mess with. 

“Man, he was freaking a bad cat, man,” Slater said. Slater could not recall the shooting involving Green, but he was adamant that Lachney would have acted only in self-defense. “That wasn’t like medals he pinned on his chest,” Slater said. “It wasn’t like he carved a notch in the gun handle of his gun. He wasn’t proud of some things he did, but some things he had to do to stay alive.”

Danny White, another grandson, said he remembered bringing Lachey dinner when he was still driving a bus at night. He said his grandfather told him about shooting a service member.

“But now the story that he told wasn't the same one that the paper had out, you know,” White said.

White also insisted that any act of violence would only have been in self-defense. He said his grandfather armed himself on the bus because he and other drivers had been robbed.

“My grandpa wasn’t the type of guy to just walk up there and shoot somebody for no reason,” White said.

Green’s family buried him in Georgia at a cemetery where his mother lies. Lachney died in 1975 at age 62 and is buried in Alexandria in a grave marked “Lachenette.” 

Lachney passed the .45 Colt revolver down to his oldest child, Dorothy Slater. Harvey Slater, her son, ended up with the gun when she died. He said Lachney won it playing dice.