Mobilizing from Hopelessness: Black Military Service, the Brownsville Affair, and Black Politics

• In Event: Historical Perspectives on Crime, Culture, and Ethnicity

Abstract

This paper returns to a little-remembered episode that occurred during a racial-justice nadir in US history: the 1906 trial and dishonorable discharge of several members of the 25th Infantry Regiment in response to racial unrest and the regiment's alleged involvement in a fatal shooting in Brownsville, Texas. The travails of this all-Black unit garnered the attention of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B DuBois and sparked efforts to enlist leading members of the Roosevelt administration to intervene on their behalf, to little avail. Black leaders recognized that the episode could be used to generate political mobilization, but the mobilization itself, while successful, could have little lasting impact in the highly racist environment of the time. Nonetheless, it provided important insights for how to persist and build justice-based coalitions that have remarkable current resonance.

Author

• Julie Novkov, University at Albany, SUNY