Brownsville Raid
On August 13 and 14, 1906, unknown persons "raided" Brownsville, indiscriminately shooting bystanders, wounded one man and killing a townsperson named Frank Natus. The townspeople of Brownsville quickly blamed the black soldiers stationed at nearby Fort Brown and, as such, the Army investigated the matter and concluded that the black soldiers were indeed guilty. William H. Taft, then President Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of War and soon to be President himself, discharged all 168 black soldiers "without honor". Sixty years later, another investigation was held and the black soldiers had their honor restored. However, by then, only 2 of the original 168 men were still alive. Recent theories have come out regarding who shot up Brownsville. The History Channel's program "History's Mysteries" attributed it to Brownsvillians shooting up the town with rifles using the same caliber ammunition as the soldiers and then framing the soldiers. (Three books have since been written devoted wholly to or partially to the Brownsville Raid, The Brownsville Raid and The Senator and the Sharecropper's Son by John D. Weaver and Racial Borders: Black Soldiers along the Rio Grande by James Leiker.)
Read more about this topic: Fort Brown
Famous quotes containing the word raid:
“John Brown and Giuseppe Garibaldi were contemporaries not solely in the matter of time; their endeavors as liberators link their names where other likeness is absent; and the peaks of their careers were reached almost simultaneously: the Harper’s Ferry Raid occurred in 1859, the raid on Sicily in the following year. Both events, however differing in character, were equally quixotic.”
—John Cournos (1881–1956)