Brownsville in the Senate

Congress passes a bill that requires Brownsville soldiers to prove their innocence to President Roosevelt in order to re-enlist in the army.

“Yet truth will sometimes lend her noblest fires, and decorate the verse herself inspires; This fact, in Virtue's name, let Crabbe attest; Though Nature’s sternest painter, yet the best,” - Byron. We are of the opinion that if the administration at Washington expects to counteract the blighting effect of its action in the dismissing from the army without honor Companies B C and D of the Twenty-fifth Infantry, so far as it relates to the Negroes in all of the States in this country, it would be well to “get busy’ and pass the bill for relief as soon as possible. It would be well to state though that the measure introduced by Senator Warner of Missouri is worse and useless so far as it affects the colored vote in the doubtful States where men will carefully scan all such measure and will have explained to them the blighting effect of this kind of legislation. Here is the report as published in the newspapers of the country: Washington, March 19, -- With the approval and at the instigation of President Roosevelt, Senator Warner of Missouri introduced today the bill intended to permit the re-enlistment in the army of former members of the Twenty-fifth Infantry, who were discharged without honor by the President on the ground that they participated in or were engaged in a “conspiracy of silence” with reference to the shooting affray at Brownsville, Texas, in August, 1906. The bill authorizes the President to permit the re-enlistment of such of the Negro soldiers as can establish to the President’s satisfaction that they were not engaged in and had no guilty knowledge of the affray. One year from the date of the approval of the act is given the soldiers to establish their innocence. Men permitted to reenlist will get pay and allowance from the time of their discharge “without honor” in November, 1906. Senator Foraker had introduced a bill previously to provide for the restoration of the discharged men to the army. It differs from the Administration bill in permitting the Negro soldiers to re-enlist upon making oath that they were not involved in the affray. The point we desire to make is that President Roosevelt and that element of the Republican Party leaders supporting him have reversed the rules of criminal jurisprudence so far as they concern the soldier of this Black Battalion by requiring them to prove their innocence. Let us see. A white man is charged with stealing a thousand dollars, which theft constitutes a felony. He is arraigned in a court of law, either in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, or France. The judge’s instructions throw the burden of proof upon the commonwealth. In other words this alleged thief can fold his arms and say to the lawyers for the prosecution, “I refuse to say a word. You prove my guilt.” If the commonwealth or lawyers for the prosecution are unable to produce evidence to prove that the accused man did steal the thousand dollars, the court will instruct the jury to acquit the prisoner. This is the rule of law in all limited monarchies and republics. Insufficient evidence to convict is always the basis of the grounds for an application for a new trial. When you deny to any man or set of men, white or colored, Gentile or Jew, this inherent right vested in the constitutional provisions of every State in this Union, you deal him a staggering blow, which blow is morally speaking as criminal as the wound of an assassin. This is strong language but we mean no disrespect to the distinguished statesmen, whose public actions are now under discussion. It is the law in Texas as much so as it is the law in Virginia, and it is the law in Virginia as much so as it is the law in the District of Columbia. The report of the Committee on Military Affairs to the United States Senate is unanimous in one respect and that is that after four months of investigation, it has been impossible to determine the persons who shot up Brownsville, Texas August 13, 1906. There are only one set of men in this country, who seem to know who shot it up and they are the President of the United States, the Secretary of War and the War Department. These gentlemen did not content themselves with punishing the Black Battalion by dismissing it from service, but went so far as to visit individual punishment upon 167 men by dismissing them without honor and by marring their military records. One of them Sergeant Mingo Sanders of South Carolina, who had seen twenty-eight years of service and whose valor upon the battlefield had been sung in song and story, was among the number who were so scandalously treated. How then under our code of laws could President Roosevelt and Secretary of War William H. Taft extend to the individual members of the Black Battalion infamous punishment in violation of our Constitutions and our laws? In no country upon the globe, outside of an absolute monarchy, where the will of one man is law would such a course of action be permitted. Yet this is what Senator Warner of Missouri at the instigation and with the approval of the President of the United States offered in the Senate of the United States. Secretary Taft is a jurist. He is well informed on those points of law which form the basis of well nigh every limited monarchy and Republic in the world. He knows the laws as handed down and promulgated by Blackstone and he knows that such a proposition is foreign and antagonistic to every one of them. There should be no surprise then when he refused to answer the question propounded to him by Bishop Alexander Walters, pleading that it was “not according to the rules of the game”...

“Brownsville in the Senate,” Black Virginia: The Richmond Planet, 1894-1909, accessed December 7, 2025, https://blackvirginia.richmond.edu/items/show/534.