The Senator and the Sharecropper's Son: Exoneration of the Brownsville SoldiersTexas A&M University Press, 1997 - 271 pages A mysterious midnight shooting spree that began on a dirt road in Texas between Brownsville and Fort Brown on August 13, 1906, killed one civilian and shattered the lives of 167 black infantrymen who had been summarily discharged without honor by a stroke of President Theodore Roosevelt's pen. In The Senator and the Sharecropper's Son, John D. Weaver completes the task he began with his 1970 book The Brownsville Raid, which, two years later, led to the soldiers' exoneration. Weaver now traces the intertwined lives of Ohio's Senator Joseph B. Foraker, who risked his political career in an eloquent defense of the soldiers, who "asked no favors because they are Negroes but only for justice because they are men"; of Dorsie Willis, the Mississippi sharecropper's son who emerged from obscurity as the black battalion's last survivor; and of the New York aristocrat who linked the fates of those two men--the flamboyant and popular Theodore Roosevelt. Weaver's narrative explores these tangled lives against the background of "the color line," which W. E. B. Du Bois defined in 1903 as "the problem of the twentieth century." The Senator and the Sharecropper's Son gives a powerful human dimension to the facts of history. The senator committed political suicide by championing the men caught up in this "Black Dreyfus Affair" and Dorsie Willis, who spent fifty-nine years shining shoes in a downtown Minneapolis barbershop, told a reporter, "That dishonorable discharge kept me from improving my station. Only God knows what it done to the others." |
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Page xii
... the men who shot up Brownsville that it did to convict the inno- cent soldiers of a crime they never committed , the truth would have been easily and long ago established . " 992 In the first week of spring , 1910 , the XII PREFACE.
... the men who shot up Brownsville that it did to convict the inno- cent soldiers of a crime they never committed , the truth would have been easily and long ago established . " 992 In the first week of spring , 1910 , the XII PREFACE.
Page xvi
... never been done before , ' he was told , and he simply said , ' Do it . " " 11 In the summer of 1972 , at the age of eighty - six , Dorsie W. Willis of Com- pany D , whose name was the last to appear on the roster of the 25th Infantry's ...
... never been done before , ' he was told , and he simply said , ' Do it . " " 11 In the summer of 1972 , at the age of eighty - six , Dorsie W. Willis of Com- pany D , whose name was the last to appear on the roster of the 25th Infantry's ...
Page xvii
... never got a dime's pay when I was sick . " 12 He had outlived two wives before he married Olive Allen in 1945 on his fifty - ninth birthday . She was thirty - one years younger . Her friends pre- dicted the marriage would last no more ...
... never got a dime's pay when I was sick . " 12 He had outlived two wives before he married Olive Allen in 1945 on his fifty - ninth birthday . She was thirty - one years younger . Her friends pre- dicted the marriage would last no more ...
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Contents
3 | |
2 The colored people of the South have been robbed of their votes | 19 |
3 No rebel flags will be returned as long as I am governor | 30 |
4 Slavery must be the greatest of crimes | 42 |
5 No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war | 54 |
6 what it is like when the wolf rises in the heart | 64 |
7 Theres only one life between this madman and the White House | 73 |
8 He laughed with glee at the power and place that had come to him | 82 |
13 The malice of politics would make you miserable | 134 |
14 Hes weak Theyll get around him | 150 |
15 whether Taft or the Titanic is likely to be the furthestreaching disaster | 162 |
16 It will take a very big man to solve this thing | 170 |
17 The Champion of People Who Had No Champion | 183 |
Afterword | 198 |
Bibliographic Essay | 215 |
Notes | 219 |
9 Prof Booker T Washington was in the city yesterday and dined with the President | 90 |
10 Regret to report serious shooting in Brownsville | 101 |
11 It is even more important to protect Americans in America | 110 |
12 They ask no favors because they are Negroes | 120 |
247 | |
259 | |
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Common terms and phrases
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