A glaring example of racial prejudice and military injustice, the Brownsville Riot resulted in the unwarranted dismissal of 167 African-American soldiers. The riot occurred on the night of August 13, 1906, but the tensions that led to the attack had built since the troops had arrived two weeks earlier. At the core of the conflict was the opposition of the Brownsville, Texas, townspeople to the stationing of African-American troops at Fort Brown. The immediate cause was the claim made by a white woman on the night of August 12 that she had been assaulted by one of the African-American soldiers. Tensions were so high that on the night of August 13, the commander of the fort issued a curfew order requiring all soldiers to return to the fort. Later that night, soldiers were awakened by gunfire coming from outside the fort. By the time they could muster, the shooting was over. In the aftermath of the shooting, it was discovered that one man had been killed in the town.
The townspeople immediately claimed that the soldiers in the fort had rampaged through the town, shooting into houses and businesses, and murdering a man. The army convened a commission of officers and townspeople to investigate the incident. It quickly concluded that the African-American soldiers had done all the shooting. The commission was unable, however, to say which of the soldiers had been guilty. In fact, the commission ignored evidence that the soldiers had not been guilty of the attack. Accepting the commission’s report as fact, President Theodore RooSEVELT sought to force the innocent soldiers to turn in the guilty ones. To do so, Roosevelt threatened all three companies of soldiers with dismissal if the guilty ones were not found. None of the soldiers ever came forward. Seeing it as a conspiracy by the soldiers to cover for the guilty ones, Roosevelt dishonorably discharged 167 men and barred them from government service for life.
If not for the efforts of Senator Joseph Foraker of Ohio, the incident probably would have ended there. After reading the transcripts of the commission’s hearings, Foraker came to the conclusion that the evidence used to convict the soldiers was flimsy and unreliable. Foraker pressured the Senate into holding hearings into the dismissal. In these hearings, it became clear that many of the eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen the African-American soldiers shooting could not have, due to the darkness and their distance from the events. Other evidence used against the soldiers was also disproved. Nonetheless, the Senate voted to uphold the dismissal. The soldiers had their last chance when a Military Court of Inquiry convened in 1909. The court eventually ruled to reinstate 14 of the soldiers who had been dismissed. They never did indicate why those 14 were being reinstated while the other 153 remained discharged. In 1971, after reading John Weaver’s book, The Brownsville Raid, Representative Augustus Hawkins of California introduced a bill calling for the reinstatement of the men dishonorably discharged. The next year, the Department of Defense recognized the miscarriage of justice by granting honorable discharges to the soldiers.
See also RACE AND RACIAL CoNELICT.
Further reading: John Weaver, The Brownsville Raid (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1992).
—Michael Hartman
World History
