On Exhibit

John D. Weaver. Wind before rain. New York : Editions for the Armed Services, 1942. John D. Weaver. Wind before rain. London : Chapman & Hall, 1943. John D. Weaver. The Los Angeles handbook. Los Angeles : Price/Stern/Sloan Publishers, 1972. John D. Weaver. Los Angeles: the enormous village 1781 - 1981. Santa Barbara, CA : Capra Press, 1980. John D. Weaver. Warren, the man, the court, the era. Boston : Little, Brown, 1967. John D. Weaver. Warren, the man, the court, the era. London : Victor Gollancz, 1968. John D. Weaver. Carnation : the first 75 years, 1899-1974. [Los Angeles] : Carnation Co., 1974. John D. Weaver. Glad tidings : a friendship in letters : the correspondence of John Cheever and John D. Weaver, 1945-1982. New York : HarperCollins, 1993. John Weaver on writing The Brownsville Raid "After writing short stories and two novels in the first twenty-odd years of my career as a free-lance writer, I turned to non-fiction in the 1960s and stumbled on to a mystery story I’d heard about as a child and had long since forgotten when my mother happened to mention this one afternoon in 1967. She got to talking about a trip she and my father had made to the Mexican border town of Brownsville, Texas, in the early years of their marriage. When a friend asked her what had taken her so far from her home in Washington D.C., she said: ‘Some colored soldiers shot up the town and Teddy Roosevelt kicked them out of the army.’ My father had served as the official reporter for a court of inquiry which had looked in to the shooting incident and affirmed the soldiers’ guilt in 1910. Sixty years later my book, The Brownsville Raid, reopened the case, arguing for the men’s innocence, and Representative Augustus F. Hawkins of Los Angeles introduced legislation calling for the exoneration of the 167 members of the First Battalion, 25th Infantry, who had been dismissed without honor by a stroke of President Roosevelt’s pen. When the military records of the black infantrymen were cleared in 1972, one survivor of the battalion -- Dorsie Willis of Company D -- surfaced in Minneapolis where he had been shining shoes in the same barber shop for fifty-nine years. He was given an honorable discharge and a tax-free government check for $25,000. Each of a dozen widows received $10,000, and reference works, including the Encyclopaedia Britannica, began to call attention to this massive miscarriage of justice which two generations of historians had, for the most part, ignored or misrepresented." On Exhibit John D. Weaver. The Brownsville raid. New York : W. W. Norton, 1970. On the book’s dust jacket, events are summarized as follows: On the night of August 13, 1906 shots were heard around Fort Brown, located on the edge of Brownsville, Texas, and occupied by three companies of black infantrymen. The soldiers assumed they were being attacked by a local mob inflamed by rumors of the attempted rape of a white woman who had identified her assailant as a black man in an Army uniform. The townspeople thought the black soldiers were attacking the town because some of them had been assaulted by white men. After a ten-minute shooting spree, which left one of the townspeople dead and a police official wounded, an armed mob shouted for vengeance on "the nigger soldiers." The soldiers signed affidavits disclaiming any knowledge of the raid. The War Department accused them of forming a "conspiracy of silence" to shield the guilty. They were given an ultimatum: either they told what they saw they did not know, or they faced summary dismissal. If the men were innocent, as they insisted (and as Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence assumes), they had nothing to tell. But for not telling it, they were discharged without honor. The order was issued by President Theodore Roosevelt and executed by his successor, Secretary of War William Howard Taft. Because of this harsh, unjust treatment more blacks voted against Taft in the 1908 election than had ever voted against any Republican presidential candidate. The Brownsville raid marks a watershed in the development of black power. John D. Weaver. The senator and the sharecropper's son : exoneration of the Brownsville soldiers. College Station, Tex. : Texas A&M University Press, 1997. Weaver here completes the task he began with The Brownsville raid in 1970, which two years after its publication had led to the soldiers’ exoneration. He 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. His 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 ended up committing political suicide by championing the cause of the soldiers. Dorsie Willis, who spent fifty-nine year 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." "Dishonorably discharged." Illustration from Harper’s Weekly, January 12, 1907. A comment on the fact that many of the 167 dishonorably discharged soldiers of companies B, C and D were only a few years from completing 30 years of service in the army which brought with it an honorable discharge and a pension. They had nothing to gain and everything to lose by not revealing those supposedly involved in the raid. Photograph of Dorsie Willis, of Company D, 25th Infantry, the last surviving dishonorably discharged soldier, with a copy of The Brownsville raid. Photograph of John Weaver with copy of the Los Angeles Times announcing the exoneration of the 167 men of the 25th Infantry dishonorably discharged for the Brownsville raid. Bill introduced in the House of Representatives by Augustus Hawkins on February 20, 1973 to confer pensionable status on all those involved in the Brownsville raid and pay compensation to and survivors and their heirs. Signed by Dorsie Willis. 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