“Your colour discrimination, legal or not, are all damnable, inasmuch as they draw an artificial and heartless line, give encouraging suggestions to the vicious and allow the stronger in brute power to force bastardy upon the weaker without remedy.”[291]
—three Negro companies in the United States Army indicated, in their own way, their disapproval of these distinctions. The incident is treated by Mr. Benjamin Brawley, a colored writer of culture, as follows:
“In 1906 occurred an incident affecting the Negro in the army that received an extraordinary amount of attention in the public press. In August 1906 Companies B, C and D of the Twenty Fifth Regiment, United States Infantry were stationed at Fort Brown, Brownsville, Texas. On the night of the 13th took place a riot in which one citizen of the town was killed and another wounded and the Chief of Police injured. The people of the town accused the soldiers of causing the riot and on November 9th, President Roosevelt dismissed, without honor, the entire battalion, disqualifying its members for service thereafter in either the military or civil employ of the United States.”[292]
The author states, that, later, the civil disabilities were, by President Roosevelt, revoked and he exhibits the terms of a resolution in the Senate to investigate the matter; but the fact that the President’s action was sustained[293] apparently was not of sufficient importance to be made a matter of comment; nor the behavior of the soldiers.
The President’s comment at the time was eminently sane, just and commendable. He wrote:
“The fact that some of their number had been slighted by some of the citizens of Brownsville, though warranting criticism upon Brownsville, is not to be considered for a moment as a provocation for such a murderous assault. All the men of the companies concerned including their veteran non commissioned officers instantly banded together to shield the criminals. In other words they took action which cannot be tolerated in any soldiers black or white, in any policeman black or white, and which if taken generally in the army would mean not merely that the usefulness of the army was at an end, but that it had better be disbanded in its entirety at once.”[294]
The inability of even cultured Negroes to sympathize with the view of the President was their misfortune rather than their fault. It indicated that they lacked the elementary principle essential to the rulership of themselves, much less to the rulership of others.
It was not so much the amount of attention as the amazing attitude of the vast majority of Negroes capable of understanding what had occurred, which attended that attention. To the vast majority of Negroes, irrespective of rank, culture or professions of Christianity, there was something noble and manly in the behavior of “the veteran non-commissioned officers”, so absolutely repugnant to the practical politician Roosevelt, a high type of white. The inability of the succeeding occupant of the highest office in this country, genial in disposition, liberal in view; but yet unable to appreciate the flaming zeal and prompt action, with which a real leader of a free people meets such behavior in armed underlings, marks a certain weakness in that Northern white. Such weakness coupled as it was with the behavior of such public men as Senator Foraker did much to produce the deplorable incident ten years later so properly stamped with executive disapproval and inevitable punishment to the last degree.
It is quite possible and to some degree probable that weak and vicious comments on Roosevelt’s action in the Brownsville matter had something to do with the Houston riot. The comment also affected the Southern white man profoundly in his attitude to colored soldiers and policemen.