On the night of August 13, 1906, the small border town of Brownsville, Texas, became the stage for one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in U.S. military history. The 25th Infantry Regiment—an all-Black unit with a distinguished service record—had been stationed at nearby Fort Brown for barely two weeks when events unfolded that would stain their names for decades.
Shortly after midnight, shots rang out in town. A white bartender, Frank Natus, was killed, and a white police lieutenant, M.Y. Dominguez, was wounded. Local white residents swiftly accused the Black soldiers. Their case rested on rumor, circumstantial claims, and deep-seated racial prejudice rather than on solid evidence. Townspeople alleged that the soldiers had gone on a retaliatory rampage after being subjected to racial insults earlier that day.
Yet the physical evidence pointed in another direction. Investigators found no spent shells inside the fort, and the soldiers’ rifles showed no signs of recent firing. In fact, eyewitness timelines and guard duty rosters suggested that the men could not have left the post unnoticed. Despite this, the hostility of Brownsville’s white citizens—many of whom demanded that the soldiers be punished collectively—shaped the investigation from the start.
The War Department, led by Secretary of War William Howard Taft, ordered a probe. The soldiers, maintaining their innocence, refused to “name names” when interrogated—a principled stand that would be used against them. In November 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt took the extraordinary step of ordering the dishonorable discharge of all 167 African American enlisted men of the 25th Infantry’s Battalion C, citing a “conspiracy of silence.” The order was issued without court-martial, trial, or any judicial proceeding.
This collective punishment was devastating. A dishonorable discharge in the early 20th century carried severe consequences: loss of military pensions, exclusion from many forms of employment, and lasting social stigma. Many of the discharged men were career soldiers with spotless records; some had fought in the Spanish-American War and the Philippine–American War. Their protests—and those of Black newspapers and civic organizations—were ignored. Roosevelt defended his decision as necessary for discipline, though critics noted that no white regiment had ever been treated in this fashion under similar circumstances.
The Brownsville Affair became a rallying point for African American leaders, who decried it as an example of systemic racism in the armed forces. Booker T. Washington and the NAACP (founded a few years later) kept the case alive in public discourse. The episode also became a political issue—Democrats used it to attack Roosevelt’s integrity, while some Republicans privately expressed unease.
For decades, the discharged soldiers sought redress. In the late 1960s, historian John D. Weaver’s book The Brownsville Raid brought renewed attention to the injustice, meticulously dismantling the government’s case. Weaver’s research, combined with pressure from civil rights groups, led the Army to reopen the investigation.
In 1972—sixty-six years after the incident—the U.S. Army officially exonerated the soldiers, concluding that they had been wrongly accused. The records of the 25th Infantry men were corrected to show honorable discharges. This belated vindication cleared their names but offered no financial compensation to the men or their descendants. Many had died in poverty, carrying the burden of Roosevelt’s order to their graves.
