Research Catalog

The senator and the sharecropper's son : exoneration of the Brownsville soldiers

Title: The senator and the sharecropper's son : exoneration of the Brownsville soldiers / John D. Weaver.
Author: Weaver, John D. (John Downing), 1912-2002.
Publication: College Station : Texas A&M University Press, [1997], ©1997.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	F394.B88 W43 1997	Off-site

Description

xxii, 271 pages : illustrations, portraits; 24 cm

Summary

A mysterious midnight shooting spree that began on a dirt road in Texas between Brownsville and Fort Brown on August 13, 1906, killed one civilian and shattered the lives of 167 black infantrymen who had been summarily discharged without honor by a stroke of President Theodore Roosevelt's pen. In The Senator and the Sharecropper's Son, John D. Weaver completes the task he began with his 1970 book The Brownsville Raid, which, two years later, led to the soldiers' exoneration.
Weaver now traces the intertwined lives of Ohio's Senator Joseph B. Foraker, who risked his political career in an eloquent defense of the soldiers, who "asked 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 black battalion's last survivor; and of the New York aristocrat who linked the fates of those two 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."

Subject

Bibliography (note)

ISBN

0890967482

LCCN

96029637

OCLC

ocm36059910

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries