The Brownsville Raid:
Mercy, Not Justice

Armed sub-Saharans march through Brownsville, Texas.

2,542 words

The most important supporter of the 2020 BLM/Antifa terror campaign was the Department of Defense (DoD), led by its treacherous Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley. He supported this terror by being absent. The Department of Defense could have sent a single division of light infantry to quell the rioting in the various hot spots, but no help ever came.

Why didn’t Milley act? He might have calculated that there was a considerable risk that BLM/Antifa sympathizers among the African soldiers might create internal troubles in the form of fraggings, disobedience, insubordination, and so on that would have made the whole of the DoD would look pretty bad. Milley’s argument with Trump over invoking the Insurrection Act has the feel of someone generating a smokescreen to keep other problems hidden.

Sub-Saharan integration in the military closely parallels the foolish decisions of the late Roman Empire. Rome’s border with Germania was secured by an army made up mostly of German mercenary hirelings. On top of this, they decided to hire the Anglo-Saxons to defend their unarmed and wealthy villas in Britain from the Picts. In both cases, the Romans ended up badly served by their foreign soldiers.

In the American context, the biggest threat to any American today is a sub-Saharan criminal. Nobody gets mugged by “the Russians.” Since the US military was integrated, wars have mostly gone badly and riots are allowed to continue. There was a time, however, when the idea of the need for a whites-only military nearly broke into the national conversation. What happened?

Brownsville

America’s great warning about what would happen when it began to use sub-Saharan troops took place in 1906 in a dusty frontier town called Brownsville in Texas. The mainstream account of what happened is as follows.

A group of noble Negroes who were serving their ungrateful and racist country in the 25th Infantry Regiment of the US Army were deployed to Brownsville. Once there, they faced discrimination from the white Texans. There was a shooting in which one white was killed and a white policeman was injured. The evidence pointing to the soldiers’ guilt was planted by racists. Then the Theodore Roosevelt administration cruelly dismissed the soldiers from the service “without honor.” This was a further betrayal by their country, since those Christs of the Congo had in fact “saved” Roosevelt during the Battle of San Juan Hill.

It was a story of Racial Injustice!^TM

I first got an inkling that there was something wrong with the official narrative of this event, often called the “Brownsville raid” or the “Brownsville affray,” more than 20 years ago, when a sub-Saharan soldier in my battalion became a victim of a drive-by shooting. He was attacked in his home by “military-looking” Africans dressed in mufti and wielding M-16 rifles with three-round burst automatic fire capabilities. No one was hurt, but it showed me that yes, it is certainly possible for sub-Saharans to use military-issued weapons to commit violence just off-base. All it would take is for one of the company armorers to be in on the plan.

Armed sub-Saharans march through Brownsville, Texas.

What Really Happened

What really happened at Brownsville is best described in the original report:

First. That in the opinion of this committee the shooting in the affray at Brownsville, on the night of August 13-14, 1906, was done by some of the soldiers belonging to the Twenty-fifth United States Infantry then stationed at Fort Brown, Tex.

Second. That the testimony fails to identify the particular soldier or soldiers who participated in the shooting affray at Brownsville, Tex., on the night of August 13-14, 1906. The following facts, in the opinion of your committee, have been proven and established:

About the hour of midnight on the night of August 13-14, 1906, a number of soldiers of the First Battalion, Twenty-fifth U. S. Infantry, then stationed at Fort Brown, Tex., armed with the new model (1903) Springfield rifle and Government ammunition, then in use in that battalion, jumped over the wall of the Government reservation separating the post from the town, went hurriedly into the nearby town of Brownsville, and wantonly shot into the houses and attacked the citizens thereof. This squad of soldiers, numbering, perhaps, not less than eight nor more than twenty, deliberately attacked and shot at citizens wherever seen in the streets, and shot into many houses. They fired into hotels filled with guests, and into residences occupied by men, women, and children. In fact, their conduct indicated a wanton purpose to terrorize the inhabitants of the town, and to kill and destroy with utter and reckless disregard of age, sex, or condition of helplessness. In carrying out their unlawful purpose they respected neither the sanctity of the home nor the innocence and helplessness of women and children. They fired into houses where women and children were sleeping, in some instances the bullets passing through the rooms and only a few feet over the beds in which the people were lying. In this midnight raid one unoffending citizen, Frank Natus was killed in his place of business; the lieutenant of police, M. Ygnacio Dominguez, was so severely wounded in the arm that amputation was necessary; the horse he was riding was killed under him; and the inhabitants of the town, men, women, and children, were aroused to a high state of excitement and fear.

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There are a few other things to point out that further indicate the sub-Saharans’ guilt.

First, most of Brownsville’s populace was not Southern white in the Jefferson Davis sense; they were white Hispanics. I looked through the town’s 1900 and 1910 census records and found that nearly the entire population was of Mexican origin. The only Africans in Brownsville were soldiers.

Second, the Springfield 03 rifle was still very new in 1906, and its ammunition hadn’t yet filtered out to every hardware store[1] and few civilians owned one.

Third, it is not difficult to identify sub-Saharans by the timbre, syntax, and accents of their speech, even at night. The attackers were also speaking English in a Tex-Mex area where Spanish was likely more common.

Fourth, eyewitnesses reported that the sub-Saharan shooters were wearing Army issue trousers and boots.

There was no “Mark Furman” out “planting” Army-issued shell casings or bandoleers around Brownsville. The parallels between Johnny Cochran’s defense of O. J. Simpson and the Brownsville attackers’ defense are striking. In both cases the evidence was overwhelming, but the Afro-centric media and pandering whites pointed to technicalities and cried about “injustice.”^TM

The 25th US Infantry During the Spanish – American War

When the Spanish-American War broke out, Congress created several new artillery regiments and deployed them to the US coastline to defend against possible Spanish naval attacks. The coastal artillery never fired a shot. In fact, the only damage inflicted anywhere in the United States during the conflict was in Tampa, Florida. The cause was sub-Saharans of the 24th and 25th US Infantry Regiments who attacked the town on the night of June 6, 1898. The ensuing riot was so bad that white troops from a Georgia regiment had to be deployed to deal with it.

All historical documentation pertaining to the event tends to split the difference of the “rowdiness” of the whites versus the black troops who were preparing to deploy. I suspect that the sub-Saharans weren’t “rowdy” in the same manner of the white soldiers. They were behaving appallingly. Reports survive of rape and other outrages. When I was in the service, there was usually a rape charge every other week involving a sub-Saharan soldier, so it is likely that the contemporary accounts are accurate.

What of the claim that these same sub-Saharans had rescued Roosevelt during the war? Some were indeed present at the Battle of San Juan Hill. Most of the fighting was done by the 16th US Infantry, a white regiment, however. The 25th US Infantry was not at San Juan Hill at all; they were at El Caney. So while it is true that the men of the 25th served with Roosevelt during the war, none of them were in a position to “save” Roosevelt or anyone else in the 1st US Volunteer Cavalry.

Of the white regular regiments, Roosevelt wrote that “[t]he newspaper press failed to do full justice to the white regulars, in my opinion, from the simple reason that everybody knew that they would fight.”[2] Meanwhile, the colored regiments and volunteers were praised to the sky.

In The Rough Riders, Theodore Roosevelt argued that the best regiments deployed to Cuba were the white regulars. Here, the men of the 16th US Infantry wait to advance during the Battle of San Juan Hill.

The Republican Party’s Normalization of Deviance

The Brownsville affray took place squarely within the context of the mainstream American political culture of the time. In 1906, this culture was influenced by increasing national harmonization between the North and South, progressivism, and the Spanish–American War, as well as other military operations in China, the Philippines, and the Pacific Islands. Meanwhile, the sub-Saharan vote was firmly in the Republican Party’s pocket.

And yes, sub-Saharans were (justly) denied the privilege of voting in many places at this time, but they did vote within the Republican Party as delegates. Many of President William McKinley’s political allies, like Mark Hanna, controlled black delegates. Hanes Walton, Jr. and C. Vernon Gray tell us that

[i]t was the Southern Black Republican delegations — dubbed the Black and Tan Republicans by journalists — that proved to be crucial in securing the presidential nomination at the 1892, 1908, 1912, and 1928 Republican National Conventions. In other words, McKinley, Taft and Hoover achieved the Republican Party’s nomination because of black delegate voting in a period in which black Republicans were influential.[3] (emphasis mine)

In fact, in 1895 black delegates had physically attacked delegates from a Republican faction called “The Combine” on behalf of Hanna and McKinley.

This situation shouldn’t be seen as “racial justice.” Rather, it was an enormous flaw in the Republican Party of the era. The Republican political elites injected a foreign element into their political councils and empowered that element to do violence. In engineering and the business world, this sort of problem is called the normalization of deviance: when an organization allows an unsafe situation to develop in ordinary operations. It’s like driving drunk without a seatbelt: It works until it doesn’t.

The Republican political elite empowered a group that they could whip up against a rival in whatever contest when needed, but that group was only partially controllable and prone to crime.

The Republican Battle at the Gridiron Club

After the rogue elements of the 25th US Infantry went on their shooting rampage in Brownsville, the US government launched an investigation that advanced in typically slow bureaucratic style. Roosevelt eventually concluded that the sub-Saharans stationed at Brownsville were culpable and dismissed the rumors of a frame-up as preposterous. He then discharged all the enlisted men, feeling that they’d cooperated in protecting the guilty.

In 1908, the Roosevelt administration published a full report on the affair. If one reads the original account, it is clear that Roosevelt made a difficult but correct call. Still, there were all those sub-Saharan delegates in the Republican Party, and Theodore Roosevelt had very capable and jealous rivals. Roosevelt captured the presidency only because his predecessor had been murdered by a Left-wing anarchist.

One of Roosevelt’s rivals was Senator Joseph B. Foraker (R–Ohio).[4] Foraker wrote and gave thorough speeches on the matter, insisting that the men were innocent and denied due process. He probably wanted to use the Brownsville affray to gain the support of the sub-Saharan delegates for the Republican nomination in the 1908 election.

The defenders of the Brownsville rioters worked along lines which we would be familiar with today. They ignored evidence, blamed “conspirators,” and declared the problem to be “racism.”

At a dinner at the prestigious Gridiron Club on January 27, 1907, President Roosevelt was expected to deliver a light-hearted speech. Instead, he gave a serious one defending his decision to dismiss the sub-Saharan soldiers. Because Foraker had been so clearly addressed by the President in the speech, the Master of Ceremonies allowed Foraker to reply. In a plain manner, Foraker defended the sub-Saharans.

The remarks at dinner became a firestorm, and Foraker’s political career came to an end as a result. That the sub-Saharans in the Brownsville affray were guilty had the ring of truth to it, and Foraker’s pandering angered a great many whites. Foraker didn’t seem to recognize that using the sub-Saharan delegates only worked when the whites were evenly divided between several candidates. If all the whites disliked one candidate, the swindle couldn’t work. The sub-Saharan delegates ended up going to Taft in 1908.

After Roosevelt and Foraker returned to private life, the controversy died down. Only one Congressman, a Democrat from Texas, called for an end to recruiting sub-Saharan soldiers. Towns in the South lobbied hard to keep African regiments out, and during the First World War, Negro military units were often billeted in out-of-the-way parts of the North.

Foraker deserves scorn for his cynical hyping of this issue. His writings and speeches on it ignored the overwhelming evidence concerning the men of the 25th’s treachery. He turned wrong into right. He also diverted what should have been a national conversation mandating an all-white military. Because of Foraker, the military continues to be saddled with semi-competent Africans who are always on the edge of mutiny.

Brownsville: A Harbinger of the Fall of Kabul and the Oppressive “Civil Rights” Regime?

There are some remarkable parallels between the conditions that led to the Brownsville affray and today’s dysfunctional Department of Defense. The sub-Saharans were equipped with the most advanced weapons of the day. They attacked a town by surprise at night, but they were thwarted by a single policeman riding a horse, Lieutenant Dominguez. He had a horse shot from under him, was outnumbered, and lost an arm, but managed to defend his town. Dominguez was a credit to his Visigoth ancestors in Hispania.

For their part, the sub-Saharan raiders had no genuine strategy, and captured no strategic positions such as the customs house or telegraph exchange. They had no specific grievance or other reason to attack the town. The attack was a low-IQ affair from start to finish.

I suspect that the accusations of “racism” were an ex post facto justification for the attack. It is more likely that the Africans simply disliked Brownsville’s Tex-Mex population and attacked them in the same way as sub-Saharans today attack Asians. It was cruelty for cruelty’s sake.

In 1970, after the “civil rights” regime was in full swing, the sub-Saharans of the 25th US Infantry became a cause célèbre, and there were pardons and panderings. These pardons were an injustice and a corruption of morality. The 25th US Infantry received mercy from Roosevelt, not justice.

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Notes

[1] In 1906, the Springfield rifle was rechambered from the .30-03 round to the .30-06. Either way, this ammunition was rare in 1906. Today, the .30-06 cartridge is very common.

[2] Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), Kindle Loc. 933.

[3] Hanes Walton, Jr. & C. Vernon Gray, “Black Politics at the National Republican and Democratic Conventions, 1868-1972,” Phylon (1960-), 3rd Qtr., 1975, Vol. 36, No. 3 (3rd Qtr., 1975), pp. 269-278. Published by Clark Atlanta University.

[4] For Foraker’s side of the story, see Joseph Benson Foraker, Notes of a Busy Life (Cincinnati: Stewart & Kidd Company, 1916).