Brownsville Incident

Brownsville Incident (1906).In the summer of 1906, despite local white protest, the U.S. Army garrisoned Fort Brown in Brownsville, Texas, with three companies of the Twenty‐fifth Infantry, a regiment whose enlisted personnel were all African American. Racial tension became intense. Around midnight on 13 August 1906, eight to ten men marched through the town's streets firing their rifles. They killed one man, wounded another, and throughly terrified the townspeople. White Texans concluded that the raiding party came from the fort. After several investigations, the army reached the same conclusion. President Theodore Roosevelt authorized the army to present the soldiers with an ultimatum: The guilty men in the regiment must come forward or all would suffer punishment. No one responded, and all 156 men were discharged. Booker T. Washington tried but failed to change Roosevelt's mind. In 1909, Congress authorized an Army Court of Inquiry into the claims of the discharged soldiers. Eventually, fourteen were readmitted into the service. In 1972, the army changed the discharges to honorable, and Congress authorized a payment to the one living survivor. The controversy can be viewed from several perspectives. At the time, many whites accepted the notion that African Americans would naturally attack whites and join in a conspiracy of silence, while most blacks deemed the lack of due process typical of white justice. Though some of the African American soldiers probably were guilty of the shooting, a different standard of justice clearly prevailed for African Americans; all were presumed guilty and had to prove their innocence. Booker T. Washington's inability to achieve justice despite his long‐established policy of racial acquiescence became clear. Southern whites continued for many years to cite the Brownsville Incident to reinforce their fear of armed African Americans taking justice into their own hands.
See also Military, The; Progressive Era; Racism.

Bibliography

Marvin E. Fletcher , The Black Soldier and Officer in the United States, 1891–1917, 1974.
Garna L. Christian , Black Soldiers in Jim Crow Texas, 1899–1917, 1995.

Marvin E. Fletcher