netmgr@coax.net
Published by Texas A&M University Press, College Station
From Chapter 1
SUGGESTED READING: John D. Weaver. BROWNSVILLE RAID (The book that prompted congressional action to rectify a U.S. president's shocking act of racism). College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1992. |
[THE TROUBLE IN Brownsville, Texas, began around midnight on August 13, 1906, and lasted about ten minutes. The official records lists two casualties - a young bartender killed, a police lieutenant wounded - but the records were compiled by white men who counted as casualties only other white men, not the one hundred and sixty-seven black soldiers who were administratively savaged by order of President Theodore Roosevelt on the basis of information he had received from a blundering military bureacracy headed by his heir presumptive, William Howard Taft.
Although the Brownsville Raid left an ugly stain on the records of two presidents, it has been swept under history's rug. Every schoolchild knows that Teddy Roosevelt stormed San Jaun Hill, but not that black soldiers supported his celebrated charge. Every schoolchild knows that Taft was a fat, jolly President who later became Chief Justice, but not that it was his disagreeable task as Roosevelt's Secretary of War to summarily dismiss three black infantry companies, including some veterans of the Cuban adventure.
The men were discharged without honor and without any sort of public hearing. Afterward, some of them appeared as witnesses at the court-martial of two of their white officers, some gave testimony before a Senate committee and a court of inquiry, but none of the soldiers was ever brought to trial on specific charges and, with the assistance of counsel, given a chance to confront and cross-examine his accusers.
Just one month before the White House and the War Department trampled the civil rights of the black battalion, the French supreme court had finally righted the judicial wrong done Captain Alfred Dreyfus. the Alsatian Jew, like the black soldiers, had been the victim of a military establishment permeated with prejudice. In Paris as in Washington, the generals had blundered into an indefensible position, and had then tried to defend it against repeated attacks of law, logic, and, when Zola took up the Dreyfus affair, literature as well.
The Brownsville soldiers found their Zola in Senator Joseph Benson Foraker of Ohio, who was politically destroyed before he finished arguing their case. At first, along with everyone else, including the Afro-American press, the Senator had not questioned the accuracy of news reports from Texas that the border town adjoining Fort Brown had been shot up by Negro soldiers. Then, with mounting incredulity and indignation, he had begun to study the evidence.
"No, that isn't true," his wife heard him muttering to himself as he dug into the records. "that doesn't follow at all. . . . No, no, there is nothing in that."
"By George! The men's guilt is as clear as day!" Roosevelt snapped, but not one of the soldiers was ever proved guilty of the crime for which all of them were punished.
"That Texas mystery, involving a Negro Dreyfus, sprang out of the night, baffled the country for years and died unsolved," Mrs. Foraker wrote in 1932, and a generation later the mystery remains unsolved, the injustice unrequited.......]
RETURN TO Military Record of The Enlisted Men Who Were Discharged Without Honor - Company "B" - Twenty-Fifth United States Infantry
RETURN TO ANTHONY POWELL'S PORTRAITS IN BLACK - THE BUFFALO SOLDIERS
RETURN TO LEST WE FORGET HOMEPAGE