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The Senator and the Sharecropper's Son Exoneration of the Brownsville Soldiers by John D. Weaver |
". . . a work that . . . illuminates as few other works [have] the era of Theodore Roosevelt and Joseph Foraker . . . "—Willard B. Gatewood author of Theodore Roosevelt and the Art of Controversy
A mysterious midnight shooting spree that began on the dirt road between Brownsville, Texas, and Fort Brown on August 13, 1906, killed one civilian. But the events of that night shattered the lives of 167 black infantrymen stationed there. In The Senator and the Sharecropper’s Son, John D. Weaver completes the task he began with his 1970 book The Brownsville Raid, which led two years later to the exoneration of the black soldiers, who had been summarily discharged without honor by a stroke of President Theodore Roosevelt’s pen.
In this new volume, Weaver traces the intertwined lives of Ohio senator Joseph B. Foraker, who risked his political career in an eloquent defense of the soldiers, who “ask 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 last survivor of the dismissed battalion; and of the New York aristocrat who linked the fates of those 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. Dorsie Willis, who spent fifty-nine years shining shoes in a Minneapolis barbershop, told a reporter, “That dishonorable discharge kept me from improving my station. Only God knows what it done to the others.”
JOHN D. WEAVER is the author of eight books, including The Brownsville Raid (reissued in 1992 by Texas A&M Press) and Glad Tidings: A Friendship in Letters, the Correspondence of John Cheever and John D. Weaver, 1945–1982.
The Senator and the Sharecropper's Son
ISBN 0-89096-748-2
$29.95
LC 96-29637. 6x9. 296 pp. 1 line drawing.
6 b&w photos. Bib. Index.
American History. African American Studies.
Publication Date: June 1997.
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