Writer Weaver dies in LV at 90

Monday, Dec. 9, 2002 | 8:55 a.m.

A bedtime tale told to author John D. Weaver led to a literary project that changed the course of history.

On a dirt road in Brownsville, Texas, one sweltering summer night in 1906, he was told as a child, 10 to 20 armed men went on a midnight shooting spree, leaving a young bartender dead and a local lawman wounded. The townspeople blamed the attack on 167 black infantrymen just arrived at Fort Brown.

President Theodore Roosevelt discharged all of the black soldiers dishonorably. As an adult in the 1960s, Weaver remembered the tale and began digging into the story he had heard from his parents.

"The Brownsville Raid" by Weaver debunked the popular notion that the soldiers were to blame and pushed the government in 1972 to restore their rights.

Weaver, author of two novels and eight nonfiction books, died Wednesday in a Las Vegas assisted-care home of Alzheimer's disease. He was 90.

Funeral services are private.

"The Brownsville Raid" was his favorite book, his second wife, Chica, said. The couple moved to Las Vegas from Los Angeles in 1993.

Weaver supported libraries all of his life, including the Special Collections Library at UCLA and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Lied Library. He was a member of the UNLV Library Society Board in the 1990s.

Born on Feb. 4, 1912, and raised in Washington, D.C., Weaver received a bachelor's degree from the College of William and Mary and a master's from George Washington University.

After college in 1933 he worked for the National Recovery Administration and other federal agencies.

In 1935 he worked for the Kansas City Star and met his future wife, Harriett, a Star correspondent. She died in 1988 at the age of 75.

His history-changing work on the Brownsville incident came after years of hearing his father, who had served as the official reporter for a 1910 government court inquiry, talk about the raid. The 1910 inquiry confirmed the black soldiers' guilt, but 60 years later the journalist found evidence that the cartridges had been planted at the shootout scene.

In September 1972 Army Secretary Robert Froehike rescinded Special Order 266 that had dismissed those black soldiers.

In 1997 Weaver published a follow-up book, "The Senator and the Sharecropper's Son," tracing the lives of Sen. Joseph Benson Foraker, D-Ohio, who risked his political career to defend the soldiers, and Dorsie Willis, a Mississippi sharecropper's son, who was the last survivor of the dismissed battalion.

A Los Angeles resident from the 1940s until he moved to Las Vegas, Weaver wrote the entry on Los Angeles for the 1974 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He also wrote the books, "Los Angeles: El Pueblo Grande" (1973) and "Los Angeles: The Enormous Village" (1980).

Weaver served in the Army Signal Corps during World War II before moving to Los Angeles to be a freelance writer.

"He knew everybody," Chica Weaver said Sunday.

After John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, Weaver researched and reported on the atomic bomb for the new president, Chica Weaver said.

Weaver was a friend of Ronald and Nancy Reagan and enjoyed playing board games with them in California, she said.

After researching and publishing a biography of the late Chief Justice Earl Warren, Weaver became a close personal friend.

In addition to political figures, Weaver corresponded with author John Cheever and published the letters of 37 years in a volume titled "Glad Tidings."

Weaver is also survived by a brother, William, of New York and two sisters, Jane Poulton and Ann Naylor of North Carolina.