The Brownsville Affair: One Hundred Sixty-Seven Soldiers
Near Brownsville, Texas
On the night of August thirteenth, nineteen oh six, gunfire broke out in the streets near Fort Brown. A bartender was shot and killed. A police lieutenant was wounded.
When townspeople demanded answers, they pointed to the Black soldiers of the First Battalion, Twenty-Fifth Infantry Regiment, who had arrived at Fort Brown just three weeks earlier. The regiment was one of the original Buffalo Soldier units created by Congress after the Civil War, with a combat record that spanned the Indian Wars, Cuba, and the Philippines. The soldiers' white commanders at Fort Brown confirmed that every man was in his bunk during the shooting.
Shell casings were found in the street, but a later investigation suggested they had been planted. No soldier was ever tried in a court of law. No soldier was ever convicted of anything.
President Theodore Roosevelt discharged one hundred sixty-seven men without honor anyway, in November of nineteen oh six, stripping them of pensions and barring them from federal employment for life. The decision drew sharp condemnation from Senator Joseph Foraker of Ohio and from Black newspapers across the country, but the discharges stood. Sixty-six years passed.
In nineteen seventy-two, following publication of journalist John Weaver's history of the affair, the Army conducted a new review and found the men innocent. President Nixon issued honorable discharges. By that time nearly all of the one hundred sixty-seven were dead.
The sole surviving soldier, Dorsie Willis, received a one-time payment of twenty-five thousand dollars. He died in nineteen seventy-seven, age ninety-one. The Brownsville Affair remains one of the most documented cases of racially motivated military injustice in American history.
