Las Vegas author shines a literary spotlight on controversial moment in history

Bob Shemeligian

Tuesday, Sept. 16, 1997 | 11:33 a.m.

Thirty years ago, journalist John D. Weaver headed for Brownsville, Tex., to begin a literary project that would eventually change history.

In this Mexican border town on a sultry summer night in 1906, 10 to 20 hoodlums carried out a midnight shooting spree which left a young bartender dead and a local lawman wounded.

Blame immediately fell on the 167 black infantrymen newly arrived at Fort Brown.

The only physical evidence of their guilt -- army shell casings -- later indicated a frame-up, but by then all of the men had been summarily dismissed without honor by a few strokes of a presidential pen.

Execution of "Special Order 266" had been held up to give the North's black voters time to go to the polls. In the Ohio congressional district dominated by Sen. Joseph Benson Foraker, they helped return the president's son-in-law to the House of Representatives.

Sixty-five years later, on Sept. 28, 1972, Richard Nixon's Secretary of the Army Robert Froehlke rescinded Special Order 266. Notably missing from the wording of the Army secretary's press release was the name of the president who had signed the order to discharge the soldiers "without honor."

It was President Theodore Roosevelt, whose face graces Mt. Rushmore, and whose flank at San Juan Hill had been protected by the very same soldiers only eight years earlier during the Spanish American War.

Tracing history

Weaver's latest book, "The Senator and the Sharecropper's Son" (Texas A&M University Press, $24.95) traces the intertwined lives of Sen. Foraker, whose defense of the soldiers and criticism of Roosevelt cost him his political career, and Dorsie Willis, the Mississippi sharecropper's son who emerged from obscurity as the black battalion's last survivor.

"In this book, I set out to place the Brownsville story in its proper historical context," said Weaver, a former Los Angeles free-lance writer, who began his career in 1936 as a reporter earning $15 a week at the Kansas City Star, and who moved to Las Vegas with his wife Chica four years ago.

Weaver's eight books include "Another Such Victory," a novel based on the Bonus March of 1932; the first biography of Earl Warren, and "Glad Tidings," an account of his 37-year correspondence with writer John Cheever.

"The Senator and the Sharecropper's Son," as Mary Kate Tripp recently pointed out in the Amarillo, Tex., News-Globe, presents "an enthralling picture of a time almost a hundred years ago, when Teddy Roosevelt's hasty action was obviously politically correct, while the moral high ground occupied by Senator Foraker was just as obviously hazardous to political survival."

Ironically, Foraker had been among the first to defend the president when he came under racist fire for having invited black educator Booker T. Washington to a family dinner Oct. 16, 1901. President McKinley's widow had vacated the Executive Mansion a few weeks earlier and the Roosevelts had moved into what the young president renamed "The White House."

Foraker, who as governor had put an end to Ohio's infamous "Black Laws," applauded Roosevelt's insistence that he would not forfeit his self-respect "by fearing to have a man like Booker T. Washington to dinner if it cost me every political friend I have got."

In Roosevelt's remaining 7 1/2 years in the White House, however, the nation's leader never again broke bread with an African-American guest. When his friend Dr. Washington called on him, it was always between meals.

In this gilded age over which Roosevelt presided, more than 100 African-Americans were murdered by lynch mobs every year, but in a four-hour film biography of Roosevelt produced last year for classroom use, there was no mention of the nation's treatment of blacks during the early 20th century.

"Our school children," Weaver points out, "are being shown a film in which the only black faces they see in Theodore Roosevelt's world are those of two young natives carrying the plump ex-president across a shallow stream on his 1910 African safari."

"The Senator and the Sharecropper's Son" is Weaver's second book on the First Battalion, 25th Infantry. It follows "The Brownsville Raid," (Norton, 1970), reprinted by Texas A&M in 1993.

Aiming for justice

"I wrote 'The Brownsville Raid' in the form of a legal brief purposely to gain a congressional hearing for the black infantrymen who were summarily dismissed without their day in court," said Weaver, seated in his Las Vegas study, his lion-colored cat, Missy, sleeping by the shredder.

"In my new book, I set out to place the Brownsville story in its proper historical context and to seek exoneration for Senator Foraker, whose gallant defense of the soldiers etched a profile in courage."

Foraker and Roosevelt squared off in a "battle royal" at the Gridiron Club dinner in Washington on Jan. 26, 1907, only a few months after the president discharged the 167 soldiers.

"Some of these men were bloody butchers; they ought to be hung. The only reason that I didn't have them hung was because I couldn't find out which ones of them did the shooting," Roosevelt said.

In his response, Foraker reminded the president of the time "when I loved him as though one of my own family" and added that his personal feeling could not be permitted to stand in the way of his differing with his old friend "when, in my judgment, he was in error."

Foraker also argued that "no man in the United States stood so high or so low that, if guilty, he would not be punished for breaking the law, and if innocent, would not be granted the law's full protection."

The Brownsville affair came to dominate national politics in the years following 1906, and actually "triggered a glacial shift" of the black vote from the Republican party to the Democratic party, Weaver said.

Controversy over the dismissal of the soldiers also continued to haunt Roosevelt's administration until, finally, the president used unauthorized public funds to pay for his own investigation of the raid.

The investigation, which produced no evidence linking any of the soldiers to the raid, nevertheless was heralded by Roosevelt as enabling "us to fix with tolerable definiteness a least some of the criminals who took the lead in the murderous shooting of private citizens at Brownsville."

Foraker was driven out of public life in 1908 by Roosevelt and his hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft, who as Secretary of War had carried out Special Order 266.

As his years in the Senate drew to a close, the Ohio senator delivered an eloquent defense of the Brownsville soldiers, ending with a sentence Weaver believes should be taught in American history courses: "They ask no favors because they are Negroes, but only for justice because they are men."

Life after Brownsville

To illustrate the effect that Brownsville had on the soldiers, Weaver explores the life of Willis, the last survivor of the original battalion of soldiers discharged in 1906.

Following his discharge, Willis spent the next 60 years sweeping floors, shining shoes and brushing coats in a Minneapolis barber shop.

In the late summer of 1972, the shop changed hands and Willis, who by then was in failing health, his hands crippled by arthritis, was given two weeks notice.

Meanwhile, Rep. Augustus F. Hawkins, a leader of the newly formed Congressional Black Caucus, had read "The Brownsville Raid" and introduced legislation which prompted the army to overturn Roosevelt's order dismissing the black battalion.

Later, in 1974, Hawkins prodded Congress into voting $25,000 in reparations for the last survivor and $10,000 for widows who had not remarried.

"Are you bitter?" a reporter asked Willis after he was presented the government check to accompany his honorable discharge.

"No," Willis replied. "They can't pay me for the sacrifice I've made, the sacrifice that my family had to undergo. You can't pay for a lifetime. Some people feel the world owes them a living. I never thought that. And I never took a dime in welfare. I did figure the world owed me an opportunity to earn a living myself. But they took that away from me. That dishonorable discharge kept me from improving my station. Only God knows what it done to others."

Willis died Aug. 24, 1977 at the age of 91, and was given a soldier's burial at Fort Snelling National Cemetery outside Minneapolis.

Perhaps the one person who is most overlooked in the aftermath of the Brownsville affair is the author.

"That's true," said Betsey Hardeman, a school superintendent in Westchester County, N.Y. and granddaughter of Boyd Conyers, one of the Brownsville soldiers. "It was John who decided to pick up and run with it. If he hadn't done so, I'm not sure the soldiers ever would have been vindicated, and I will be forever grateful to him."

Conyers "was a good soldier," Hardeman said, and didn't allow Brownsville to ruin his life.

"He was a sweetheart to us as a grandfather, and when he was raising a family in Georgia, he provided for seven children in a two-room house, and he always put food on the table."

Conyers never spoke about Brownsville, Hardeman said.

"Most people don't understand that if you were a Negro, if they said you were wrong -- then you were wrong," said Hardeman, who added she hopes history doesn't take the same taciturn approach to Brownsville.

"What happened in Brownsville and the aftermath should be taught in school," Hardeman said. "It could be introduced as part of Black History Month. Then again, maybe we shouldn't wait until Black History Month."

Indeed, history has waited long enough.

archive