Brownsville Riot

On the night of August 13, 1906, unknown raiders fired on the border town of Brownsville, Texas, killing one man and [Page 92]wounding two others. White townspeople blamed the soldiers of the all-black 25th Infantry Regiment, which had three companies of its 1st Battalion stationed nearby at Fort Brown. Although all members of the battalion maintained their innocence, Army investigators concluded that approximately 15 soldiers had taken part in a raid on the town. Unable to wrest confessions from any of the alleged participants, Pres. Theodore Roosevelt dishonorably discharged all 167 enlisted men and noncommissioned officers stationed at Fort Brown and barred them from future military or civil service. African American leaders recoiled at Roosevelt's draconian response, while unsympathetic white commentators declared the shootings typical behavior of African Americans in uniform. Reflecting and rooted in the politics of white supremacy, the Brownsville Riot of 1906 laid bare the tensions involved in stationing African American Army enlistees in the deep South.

In multiracial Brownsville, where white Americans and European immigrants lived among a predominantly Mexican American population, a strict code of racial separation was maintained through a combination of so-called Jim Crow statutes and vigilante violence. In the weeks after black troops’ arrival on July 28, 1906, white citizens of Brownsville physically assaulted the soldiers in the streets. One man pistol-whipped a private for purportedly insulting his wife, and another shoved a trooper into the Rio Grande for wandering around drunk in public. Charges that members of the 25th Infantry were attempting to rape white women circulated through town alongside the boasts of some townspeople that they would do everything in their power to run off the unwelcome regiment. Faced with the hostility of the civilian population, black troopers endured countless slurs and insults with considerable restraint.

Army officials would later argue that the soldiers chafed at their treatment and decided to retaliate. Minutes after midnight on August 14, rifle fire rang out between the edge of Fort Brown and the border of town. Soldiers on duty assumed an attack on the fort, but when the firing stopped 10 minutes later, the only victims were a white bartender, a Tejano policeman, and a Tejano bookbinder. Although the bartender died from his gunshot wounds, the other men survived and confirmed reports that the assailants had come from the First Battalion at Fort Brown. In investigating the incident, the Army's inspector general based his conclusion of guilt on civilian testimony, physical evidence (spent cartridges from Army-issue rifles found piled in a Brownsville street the morning after the raid), and his own conviction that African American troops were inherently deceitful. Submitting his report to Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, he recommended that the president dismiss all of companies B, C, and D to punish the unknown culprits and the men whose silence protected them. To the dismay of his black constituency, Roosevelt followed the recommendation, forgoing any semblance of due process of law.

With the evidence against the soldiers too circumstantial to sustain a court-martial, some white observers also questioned the guilt of the accused raiders. The discharged men found their most influential defender in the Roosevelt rival and Republican senator from Ohio, Joseph E. Foraker. Spurred by political ambition and encouraged by the interracial civil rights organization, the Constitution League, Foraker took a hard look at the evidence in the Brownsville raid and found it lacking. He urged the Senate Committee on Military Affairs to conduct a hearing on Brownsville and the president's response to it.

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