The Brownsville Raid - Softcover

Weaver, John D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0890965285 ISBN 13: 9780890965283

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press, 1992

Synopsis

Around midnight on August 13, 1906, shots rang out on the road between Brownsville, Texas, and Fort Brown, the old army garrison. Ten minutes later a young civilian lay dead, and angry residents swarmed the streets, convinced their homes had been terrorized by newly arrived soldiers. Inside Fort Brown, the alarm was sounded. Soldiers leaped from their bunks and grabbed their rifles, thinking they were under attack by hostile townspeople. The soldiers were black; the civilians were white.

Still proclaiming their innocence, 167 black infantrymen of the segregated Twenty-fifth Infantry Regiment were summarily dismissed without honor (or a trial) by President Theodore Roosevelt.

The Brownsville Raid, first published in 1970, is John D. Weaver’s searching study of the flimsy evidence presented in a 1909-1910 court of inquiry. That court had upheld the president’s action and closed the case against the soldiers, not one of whom had ever been found guilty of wrongdoing. The case remained closed until 1971 when, after reading The Brownsville Raid, Congressman Augustus F. Hawkins of Los Angeles introduced a bill to have the Defense Department rectify the injustice.

Amid a flurry of national publicity, honorable discharges were finally granted in 1972. All were posthumous except for that of Private Dorsie Willis, who received his in a moving ceremony on his eighty-seventh birthday.

About this title

About the Author

JOHN D. WEAVER’s ten books include a novel based on the 1932 Bonus March, the seminal biography of Chief Justice Earl Warren, Glad Tidings, his thirty-seven year correspondence with John Cheever, and The Senator and the Sharecropper’s Son, the sequel to The Brownsville Raid

Reviews

Weaver's book reconstructs the events surrounding Theodore Roosevelt's dismissal of 167 black soldiers from the army in 1906. Photos.

Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0890965285
• ISBN 13: 9780890965283
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344