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The Brownsville 167: A Whole Battalion Discharged Without Honor, Without a Trial

They were regulars — Black enlisted men of the 25th Infantry, veterans of Cuba and the Philippines, some of them a year or two from retirement. In August 1906 their battalion was blamed for a shooting in Brownsville, Texas that no investigation ever tied to any one of them. Their officers said the men were in their barracks and their rifles unfired. It did not matter. President Theodore Roosevelt discharged all 167 of them "without honor" — no trial, no hearing, no individual charge — in the largest summary dismissal in the history of the United States Army. This page is the documented record of what happened at Fort Brown in 1906, what was done to the men afterward, and the sixty-six years it took the Army to say the record was wrong.

The service and the promise

The 25th Infantry was one of the Black regular regiments of the post–Civil War Army — the men the Plains Indians are said to have named the Buffalo Soldiers. Congress created the regiment in 1869, consolidating the old Thirty-ninth and Fortieth regiments, and for a decade its companies garrisoned the Texas frontier forts — Clark, Davis, Duncan, McKavett, Quitman, Stockton — building roads, escorting mail, and patrolling a border almost no one else wanted. Its enlisted men were Black; its officers were white. The regiment fought in the Spanish-American War’s Santiago campaign in Cuba and then in the Philippines until 1902. These were career soldiers in an era when the Army was one of the few employers a Black man could count on: steady pay, a pension at the end of long service, and a record that meant something.

The First Battalion — Companies B, C, and D — arrived at Fort Brown, at Brownsville on the Rio Grande, on July 28, 1906, coming from duty in the Philippines and at Fort Niobrara, Nebraska. Brownsville was a town of about 6,000 people, and it did not want them. The Texas State Historical Association’s account records that the soldiers “immediately confronted racial discrimination from some businesses and suffered several instances of physical abuse from federal customs collectors.” The uniform bought them nothing in Brownsville. They were expected to observe the town’s color line like any other Black men in Jim Crow Texas.

The promise made to men like these is the same one made to every regular: serve out your enlistment honorably and the Army stands behind you — your pay, your pension, your name. The men of the First Battalion had kept that bargain for years, some for more than twenty. What follows is what the bargain was worth when their own commander-in-chief decided, in advance of any evidence against any individual man, that all of them were guilty of something.

What happened

On the night of August 12, 1906, a white woman reported an attack, and Brownsville blamed a Black soldier. The town was, in the TSHA’s words, so incensed that Maj. Charles W. Penrose, the battalion commander, after consulting Mayor Frederick Combe, declared an early curfew for the soldiers the following day to keep them inside the post and out of trouble.

The evening of August 13 passed peacefully — until around midnight. In a brief shooting spree in town, bartender Frank Natus was killed and police lieutenant M. Y. Dominguez was wounded — his arm shattered. It is the first fact of this case that no one has ever established who fired those shots. It is the second that Brownsville decided within hours anyway.

Residents claimed to have seen soldiers running through the streets shooting — claims the TSHA notes were made “despite the darkness of the hour and vantage points of considerable distance.” Against those claims stood the battalion’s own record: Penrose and his officers attested that every man was accounted for in barracks, at the curfew check and again after the shooting, and that the companies’ rifles were inspected and had not been fired. Officers and a sentry reported hearing pistol fire outside the reservation — not the battalion’s rifles. Townspeople produced spent Army cartridge cases as proof; the cases were, on the later scholarly record, planted — evidence a Senate minority report would eventually assail as “contradictory, insufficient, and contrived.”

None of it produced a case against any man. Investigation followed investigation — a citizens’ committee, Penrose’s own inquiry, Maj. Augustus P. Blocksom for the Army’s Southwestern Division — and, in the TSHA’s summary, the several sets of “civilian and military investigations presumed the guilt of the soldiers without identifying individual culprits.” Texas Ranger Capt. William Jesse McDonald arrested twelve enlisted men he said held positions key to a conspiracy; a Cameron County grand jury failed to return any indictments — not one. The men, pressed to name the guilty, said what they had said from the first night: they knew nothing about the shooting, because they had been in barracks.

That answer became the charge. Blocksom deemed the soldiers uncooperative and urged their dismissal if they refused to turn evidence. Inspector General Ernest A. Garlington charged the companies with a “conspiracy of silence” and urged that Blocksom’s suggestion be carried out. An ultimatum came down from the President himself: name the guilty men, or every soldier who had been at Fort Brown would be discharged without honor. The men did not name anyone. There was, on the record the Army itself would eventually accept, no one for them to name.

What the institution did afterward

On November 5, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt summarily discharged “without honor” all 167 enlisted men of the battalion. It remains, in the TSHA’s words, the largest summary dismissal in the annals of the United States Army.

Understand what the order did, because its wording is the whole of it. “Without honor” was not a court-martial sentence — no court-martial of these men was ever held, no hearing convened, no man confronted a witness or heard a charge against himself. It was an administrative erasure, and it took everything: the men’s careers, their accrued pay and retirement — the discharge stripped them of the right to retire on three-fourths pay that long service had earned — their pensions, and their eligibility for any federal civil service job for the rest of their lives. Some of the 167 had served more than twenty years; ten, by one contemporary accounting, had more than fifteen. Among them was Sgt. Mingo Sanders, a veteran of the regiment’s famous Bicycle Corps, a little more than a year from retirement. A popular claim that six of the men were Medal of Honor recipients has itself been examined and found untrue — historian Frank N. Schubert showed none were — which changes nothing about what was taken from them: they did not need to be medalists to be owed a hearing.

The timing was noticed at the time, and resented. The order was dated November 5 — the eve of the 1906 congressional elections — and the Constitution League, the civil-rights organization that took up the men’s case, decried the lack of due process and impugned the timing, charging that the country learned of the discharges only after Black voters had cast their ballots. Roosevelt never revisited the decision. Booker T. Washington, who had been Roosevelt’s guest at the White House five years earlier, asked the President privately to reconsider; Roosevelt dismissed the plea and let the decision stand. The Black press and civic organizations kept the case in print. Roosevelt, who had fought beside Black cavalry in Cuba and had conspicuously appointed African Americans to office, held his ground for the rest of his presidency and never apologized.

The fight went to the Senate, and there it was carried by one man at real cost. Sen. Joseph B. Foraker of Ohio, chairman in that fight and a rival of Roosevelt’s within their party, forced an investigation by the Senate Military Affairs Committee. The hearings ran through 1907 and into 1908. Courts-martial in the same period tried the battalion’s white officers for alleged negligence — and cleared both Penrose and Capt. Edgar A. Macklin. The committee’s majority report, issued in March 1908, concurred with Roosevelt. But the record the hearings built would not stay closed: a minority of four Republicans found the evidence inconclusive, and a further minority report by Foraker and Sen. Morgan G. Bulkeley of Connecticut asserted the soldiers’ innocence outright, assailed the evidence as contradictory, insufficient, and contrived, and suggested that townspeople or outsiders had staged the raid to drive the Black troops out of Brownsville. Foraker kept the issue alive in speeches and writings for years; it helped end his Senate career, and he did not win renomination.

What the men themselves got from all of it, in their lifetimes, was a door opened a crack for a few. Under pressure, the administration appointed a board of retired officers to hear applications for reenlistment. The Court of Military Inquiry in 1910 interviewed somewhat over half the discharged men and — in the TSHA’s word, inexplicably — approved only fourteen of the 167. Eleven of those re-entered the Army. The other 153 carried the discharge out of the hearing room and into the rest of their lives, where a “without honor” discharge from the United States Army, for a Black man in 1910 America, was a brand on every job application he would ever make. Dorsie Willis, who had enlisted in 1905, spent more than sixty years shining shoes in a Minneapolis barbershop. In the late 1950s he tried on his own to clear his name; the Minnesota Historical Society records that the response from Washington questioned his identity, and without proof he abandoned the effort. The institution that had discharged him without a hearing now could not be satisfied he was who he said he was.

There the matter closed — for more than sixty years, as the TSHA puts it — with the Brownsville version written into the history books as fact.

Where it stands now

The case was reopened by a book. In 1970, historian John D. Weaver published The Brownsville Raid (W. W. Norton), a full reinvestigation that argued the accused men were innocent and had been discharged without the due process the Constitution guarantees. Weaver’s book moved Rep. Augustus F. Hawkins of California to press the Defense Department to reinvestigate, and the Army did. The Army’s new review found the accused members of the 25th Infantry innocent.

On September 22, 1972, Secretary of the Army Robert F. Froehlke ordered the men’s discharges changed to honorable. The Nixon administration awarded honorable discharges — the TSHA is precise about the limit — without back pay. Willis learned what had been done from his newspaper: the Minnesota Historical Society records that he read of the change in the Minneapolis Star of September 29, 1972, and bought about twenty copies to give away.

The survivors’ arithmetic needs one careful sentence, because the accounts differ in how they count. The TSHA calls Willis “the only surviving veteran,” and he was the only man still living under the 1906 discharge. A second man, Edward Warfield — one of the fourteen readmitted in 1910, whose service had been restored decades earlier — was also located alive in 1972; he died in 1973. Every other man of the 167 was already dead. The honorable discharges of 1972 were, for all but one of them, posthumous.

Congress finished what the Army’s correction had left undone — for the one man left. In 1973, in legislation carried by Hawkins and Sen. Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, Congress provided Willis a tax-free payment of $25,000. On January 10, 1974, in Minneapolis, the 87-year-old Willis received the check. The contemporary wire caption on the photograph records his verdict on it: “I’m very grateful (for the check). It’s a great birthday present. But it comes too many years too late.” Congress also provided $10,000 payments to widows of the men — the Encyclopedia’s account counts ten widows receiving $10,000 each; the Minnesota Historical Society names the surviving battalion widow Louella Conyers, wife of Boyd Conyers, among them. Humphrey had proposed more — $40,000 per survivor plus pensions. What passed was $25,000, once, for the one man alive.

Willis died on August 24, 1977, at ninety-one, and was buried with full military honors at Fort Snelling National Cemetery — in the uniform’s ground, under the honorable discharge it had taken sixty-six years to restore. The account the Army corrected in 1972 was the record. The account it never settled was the money, and the lives the discharge had already spent.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

No camera was rolling in Brownsville in 1906, and the film record of this case is honestly thin — thinner than for any other story in this section. What exists is the telling kept by the Valley itself, the full documentary history of the Buffalo Soldiers in which Brownsville is the central disgrace, and the Texas classroom film that carries the regiment’s wider record. Three films:

The raid, told where it happened. Neta RGV, the Rio Grande Valley's community media outlet, on the Brownsville Raid of 1906 — the shooting, the accusation, and the 167 men, in two minutes. (Neta RGV.)

The full history, Brownsville at its center. Julian the Historian's feature-length documentary on the Buffalo Soldiers — sourced to Leckie, Schubert, and Weaver's *The Brownsville Raid* — gives the affair its full segment: the night of August 13, 1906, the mass discharge, and the 1972 reversal. (Julian the Historian.)

The regiment's Texas record. The Texas Center's classroom film on the Buffalo Soldiers — the 1866 regiments, the frontier posts, and the service the 25th Infantry carried into Brownsville. Context, honestly labeled: the film tells the regiment's story, not the affair itself. (The Texas Center.)

Sources

Further record

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.