Racism, 1906
Lahr, Anthea
Racism, 1906 The Brownsville Raid, by John D. Weaver. W. W. Norton. 320 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Anthea Lahr "If there must be Negro troops, which is far from evident, it would seem to be the part...
...The guns were locked up, and on inspection the next morning were found not to have been fired...
...Du Bois' message was a forerunner of modern black pride: "He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of White Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world...
...Taft and moderation won...
...Senator from Ohio, Joseph Benson Foraker, who combined indignation at the injustice of the summary discharges with an eye for the Negro vote that might help him challenge William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt's heir-presumptive to the Presidency...
...Around midnight, marauders rode through the town, shooting...
...And yet it was presumed by the town, the Army investigation, and most significantly by President Roosevelt and Secretary of War Taft, that the soldiers were unquestionably guilty...
...Reviewed by Anthea Lahr "If there must be Negro troops, which is far from evident, it would seem to be the part of wis-dom to station them elsewhere than in Texas, or anywhere in the South...
...While paying lip service to law and order, they do not respect the rule of law...
...The official records list two casualties —a young bartender killed, a police lieutenant wounded...
...Unfortunately, unlike the Dreyfus affair, the wrong was never righted, and the public passion aroused was negligible, compared to Sacco-Vanzetti and the Rosenbergs...
...On the other hand, Booker T. Washington, who had dined with Roosevelt at the White House ("The action of President Roosevelt in en-tertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again"—Tillman) encouraged black people to vote for Taft, and propounded moderation: "We are trying to instill into the Negro mind that if education does not make the Negro humble, simple, and of service to the community, then it will not be encouraged...
...The chaplain, the regiment's only black officer, wrote the regiment's adjutant: "Texas, I fear, means a quasi battleground for the Twenty-fifth Infantry...
...W.E.B...
...Because there is still little justice for black Americans, The Brownsville Raid is a book to be read by those who are willing to plow through the painstaking work that John Weaver has done in compiling the evidence...
...The New York Times August 20, 1906 HHhe Brownsville Raid is a much neg-lected case of injustice that John D. Weaver puts on a par with the Dreyfus case...
...Du Bois, with other prominent blacks, refused to vote for Taft in 1908, even though Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan "defended the South's disenfranchisement of the Negro, refused to discuss Brownsville, and outraged black newspaper readers with his views on lynching...
...Despite this literary sleight of hand to make the book exciting reading, there is a feeling that the book is a lawyer's brief and that Weaver is perhaps not giving us an unbiased account...
...A roll was called in the barracks and no one was found absent...
...But the real victims were the 167 black soldiers who were dishonorably discharged by President Roosevelt without the benefit of courts-martial or any trial or hearing where the soldiers could have the opportunity to cross-examine their accusers and challenge the veracity of the witnesses...
...This is probably because black soldiers were involved...
...As only one of many instances of wrongs against blacks, it is indicative of the right, even duty, that many white Americans feel to take the law into their own hands...
...Weaver has used his material in a way that makes the book read like a novel...
...The black leaders were divided in their response to the incident...
...Fearing trouble, Major Penrose ordered an eight p.m...
...But Weaver makes quite clear from the beginning his sympathies for the black soldiers...
...In Brownsville, police officer Victoriano Fernandez said: "The colored fellows will have to behave themselves or we will get rid of them...
...On the basis of conflicting evidence, obvious perjury, and statements obtained by threats and bribes, Roosevelt ordered the dishonorable discharge of the entire battalion (fourteen men were anomalously found eligible for re-enlistment four years later) because he believed that the soldiers were shielding the guilty men...
...When no black soldiers were arrested, Captain McDonald of the Texas Rangers arrived in Brownsville with a pair of six-shooters and an automatic shot gun: "Why them hellions have violated the laws of the state, shooting into the people's houses and committing murder...
...Senator Ben Tillman of South Carolina echoed these sentiments: "I will say . . . that as long as the Negroes continue to ravish white women we will continue to lynch them...
...When Americans feel that "justice" is not being done, they substitute vigilantism for due process...
...The trouble in Brownsville, Texas, began about midnight on August 13th, 1906, and lasted about ten minutes...
...In the third, there was a Jim Crow arrangement...
...The contradictions and absurdities accelerate to make the reader increasingly frustrated at the obstinacy of Roosevelt and Taft...
...But on the following Monday morning the town buzzed with the rumor of an attack on a white woman by a Negro soldier...
...The champion of the Negro soldiers was, ironically, a big-business, laissez-faire U.S...
...Conspiracy charges and contempt of court sentences have replaced lynchings, but the principle of presuming a black man guilty remains as American as ever...
...It would be hard to believe in the intransigence of Roosevelt, if we were not daily reminded by trials such as the Seattle 8 and the Panther 21 of the persistence of the lack of legal due process...
...curfew...
...By 1971, the United States has grown more sophisticated...
...This, of course, was what the whites had feared most, and immediately the "decent" citizenry protested to the mayor and the commander of the post, Major Penrose...
...Brownsville was obviously not a propitious place for the black soldiers to be stationed, and on arrival, they were denied service in the drugstore and in the two bars nearest the Fort...
...The significance of the case reaches far beyond Texas and beyond 1910, when it was officially closed...
...The black soldiers adapted to these indignities, set up their own bar, and even Victoriano Fernandez admitted that the men were models of good behavior: "It was the quietest payday I ever saw...
...When the First Battalion, Twenty-fifth Infantry (Colored) was assigned to Fort Brown, both the officers and the town were worried...
...Senator Foraker's words are just as relevant to Bobby Seale and others as they were to the First Battalion, Twenty-fifth Infantry (Colored) : "They ask no favors because they are Negroes, but only for justice because they are men...
Vol. 35 • March 1971 • No. 3
