Taking on Theodore Roosevelt

by Harry Lembeck

  DID FORAKER SENSE GRIMKÉ'S suddenly detached language? Did he wonder if it had to do with his earlier checkered history when dealing with Negroes? He lost his first run for governor of Ohio in 1883, and the common wisdom of the day blamed it on what historian Percy E. Murray called his “limited contact with blacks…and lukewarm support from black voters.”35 To say the least. Foraker had about the same contact with blacks as he had with the surface of the moon, and black support for him was no warmer than the blizzard at Taft's inaugural. Two years later, in a second run for the governor's mansion, he again found himself face-to-face with black hostility. Because he was a Republican and could expect very few Democratic votes, without the votes of blacks, almost to a man Republican, his election was again doubtful. Angry black opposition presented itself in the person of Reverend J. W. Gazaway, who, wanting his daughter to attend a school closer to their home, went to court to confront the racially segregated Springfield, Ohio, schools. Foraker was the school system's lawyer and successfully defeated Gazaway's challenge. Ignoring how it looked, Foraker insisted he was acting only in his professional capacity and not because the segregation policy reflected his own personal feelings. Gazaway rejected Foraker's professional indifference and characterized Foraker's legal work for the schools as “an injustice against black people.”36 Talk against Foraker grew even more heated when Richard T. Greener, the first black man to graduate with honors from Harvard University, wrote in the Boston Advocate that Foraker was “an enemy to the manhood of the negro race” and asked Ohio's black voters to “whip” him in the upcoming election.37

  Harry C. Smith, the editor of Cleveland's black newspaper, believed Foraker had a greater concern than blacks realized and urged Foraker to make a point of showing it. Meanwhile, to his readers he promoted Foraker as a friend of the black race. Working together they overcame black distrust for Foraker, and in November, Foraker won the governor's mansion with black support that he kept all the way to the Senate. And after Brownsville, no black person would question the extent and sincerity of his friendship with them on the march to equality. The Ohio Afro-American League was sure of this; its letterhead prominently displayed Foraker's photo, and above it was the legend “Our Great and Good Friend.”

  Foraker's attention returned to the pulpit as Grimké took his seat and lawyer Armond Scott formally presented the loving cup along with his own thoughts. To Scott, Foraker stood shoulder to shoulder with Abraham Lincoln, Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass. Those in attendance that night knew these heroes and understood what it meant to be included with them, and as Scott handed Foraker the loving cup, the ovation for him was deafening.

  When it quieted down, it was the man of the hour's turn to speak.

  “Close up your doors, boys, here come the niggers.”

  Joe Crixell's warning to men on the

  sidewalk in front of the Ruby Saloon, August 13, 1906

  IT HAS BEEN CALLED the shooting (to emphasize its violence), the affray (to minimize it), the raid (to make it bigger), the riot (to make it more brutal), and the incident (to expand its scope). Just as there are different names, there are different accounts of what happened. All agree there was gunfire around midnight on or close to Garrison Road, the street running parallel along and on the city side of the waist-high wall separating Fort Brown from Brownsville. From there it advanced into the city through Cowen Alley, which ran not quite perpendicular to Garrison Road, then turned corners and down streets until its strength ebbed three or so city blocks from where it started. It lasted no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. Along its path, homes and buildings were riddled with bullet holes, a policeman was so badly wounded his arm had to be amputated, and a bartender was shot dead.

  Some townspeople, both Anglo and Mexican, who claimed to be witnesses were positive the men who rampaged through Brownsville wore army uniforms; some others saw they were Negro. Either way, this identified the raiders as soldiers from Fort Brown.

  FREDERICK J. COMBE, A lifelong resident of Brownsville, was, like his father and brother, a physician. They lived together in a house at the corner of Tenth and Elizabeth Streets, a quarter of a mile from Fort Brown.1 In 1902, after four years as an army surgeon starting with the Spanish-American War and ending with the insurrection in the Philippines handed off to America by Spain after that war, he came home to practice medicine. With him on the troop transport ship across the Pacific Ocean was the Twenty-Fifth Infantry, also returning from the fighting in the Philippines, and Dr. Combe acted as its medical officer during the voyage.2 Back in Brownsville, Dr. Combe stood in for the army's regular physician when he was away, and in that role he again cared for its soldiers.3

  The Brownsville he returned to was a nondescript town deep in south Texas. Photographs taken right after the shooting show some sturdy buildings, telephone poles, and street lighting for unpaved streets.4 Lamenting a bright but brief past of prosperity, the town's leaders were seeking ways to bring more people in and the good times back, not unlike so many Rust Belt cities and their chambers of commerce at the end of the century. Its population was about six thousand, and only about one-third of its citizens were white Anglos. Fewer than a dozen Negroes lived in Brownsville itself and only two hundred in surrounding Cameron County.5 Except for the very bottom tip of Florida, Brownsville was the farthest south place in the United States. Yet the ways reflected more the American West. Some of this perhaps was the overall western character of Texas that sifted down from the rest of the state. A greater influence was the proximity of Mexico, just across the Rio Grande.6 Unlike the rest of what had been the rebellious Confederacy, in which by far the largest nonwhite population was black, in Brownsville it was Mexican.7 Mexicans, by ancestry and culture if not citizenship, were the majority of Brownsville's residents.8

  After the 1890 population count, the US Census Office decreed the American frontier was closed. The raw society of the American West had been gentled by demands for civilization. But Brownsville retained something of the Wild West. As the newly returned Dr. Combe walked the streets of his hometown, he saw men passing along with one or two revolvers—sometimes as many as six or seven—strapped to their waists.9 A man toting a rifle was not uncommon, even if he was simply taking the air as he strolled with his lady. This was not nostalgia nor a reluctance to let go of the robust pioneer era the historian Frederick Jackson Turner said helped define what it was to be American.10 Men carried these weapons because they used them. Two or three nights a week, the streets crackled with gunfire. It was so commonplace that people stopped noticing it.11 In Brownsville, a man felt he had to be armed to the teeth to protect himself because the city's woeful police department would not. Law enforcement was at best inadequate; at worst, it was a criminal enterprise. One problem was there were not enough police to accomplish anything. The city had only ten full-time cops, and only one spoke English. Police could supplement their pay by clopping civilians on the head with a pistol butt, throwing them in jail, and then demanding money to set them free.12 Soldiers stationed at Fort Brown were especially vulnerable to this. One soldier in the Twenty-Sixth Infantry, the white regiment replaced by the black Twenty-Fifth, was shot in the leg. Another was badly beaten. The assaulting police in both these cases were not taken to court; instead, in pre-Combe Brownsville, it was the soldiers, the victims of violence, who were criminally tried (though both of these would be acquitted).

  (1) Rendall residence/Western Union

  (2) Cowen house

  (3) Leahy Hotel

  (4) Thorn house

  (5) Miller Hotel

  (6) Tillman's Ruby Saloon

  (7) Crixell's Saloon

  (8) location where Dominguez was shot

  (9) intersection where raid split in two

  (10) Starck house

  (11) Tate house

  (12) Company B barracks (barracks for Companies A, C, and D not shown)

  → arrows indicate route taken by shooters

&
nbsp; Brownsville map. From Senate Document 155, vol. 11, Parts 1 and 2, The Brownsville Affray, 59th Congress, 2d Session, 1906–1907. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1907.

  Dr. Combe set out to do something about Brownsville's lawlessness. In 1905 he ran for mayor and won. He wasted no time instituting “decided reforms.”13 The quality of men recruited for the police department increased measurably, though the force's size grew only modestly. With now a professional police force, for the first time wearing uniforms and badges, and with a new chief who instilled discipline and a professional attitude, civilian self-help would not be needed. Or tolerated. No longer would civilians be permitted to brazenly carry guns. Though Mayor Combe was a strict man, from his time in the army he retained a soft spot in his heart for soldiers, and he accepted some slack where they were concerned. He instructed his new chief of police that “a soldier is a soldier, and he should be allowed some latitude.”14 When the Twenty-Sixth Infantry made way for the soldiers of the Twenty-Fifth, the departing soldiers had come to think of him as a friend.15

  THOUGH HE LATER SAID he never remembered a time the town was quieter and he had no reason to anticipate any trouble, on the evening of Monday, August 13, 1906, Mayor Combe was uneasy.16 There was a disquieting incident the day before involving Mrs. Lon Evans, who lived with her husband in “the lower part of town” and claimed she had been assaulted in her yard by a soldier. The way the incident was treated in the headlines of the August 13 Brownsville Herald (“INFAMOUS OUTRAGE. Negro Soldier Invaded Private Premises Last Night and Attempted to Seize a White Lady”) created, in Mayor Combe's words, “a good deal of excitement in the town,” and in particular in the lady's husband. The outraged Mr. Evans and the mayor paid a call late that afternoon on Major Charles W. Penrose, the battalion's commanding officer, to demand the guilty soldier be found and punished. Brownsville was so stirred up the mayor cautioned Penrose that if soldiers went into town that night, they would be in danger. Penrose agreed to revoke all passes, keep the men on post, and send patrols into Brownsville searching out men violating his orders.17 Calmed by this reassurance, Mayor Combe and the aggrieved Mr. Evans returned to town.

  The mayor deliberately may have overstated his fears to Major Penrose to make certain the soldiers were kept on post. After the Evans matter and the incendiary treatment it had been given in the newspaper, it wasn't a bad idea to separate them from the townspeople for a while and buy a little peace and quiet. Or maybe he put on a show to calm the distraught Mr. Evans, who, according to Mayor Combe, had tears in his eyes as he told Major Penrose what had happened to his wife.18 Nevertheless, it was clear to the Brownsville mayor that some precaution was in order. After meeting with Evans and Penrose, Mayor Combe made a beeline to Police Chief George Conner and instructed him to ensure his force was on high alert. “You will be especially on the qui vive—I remember using that expression.”19 As with the warning to Major Penrose, this stern directive may have masked the mayor's calmer assessment of the situation. Regardless of what he said to both men, he saw no signs of trouble and was confident that if any was brewing, he would have known it. Otherwise he might have coupled his warning to the police chief with a directive to increase the size of the force on duty that night and put them out on the streets to discourage hotheads from getting the wrong ideas. After reconnoitering the town and seeing nothing out of place, he headed home and, reclining on a cot on his back porch (called a gallery in that part of Texas), he quietly read until around 11:30 p.m. By then he was confident there would be no trouble. With the soldiers confined to Fort Brown, they and the citizens were safe from each other. Brownsville was quiet. Mayor Combe relaxed his guard and, without getting up from his cot, quickly dozed off.

  Almost immediately he was awakened by gunfire.

  THE RIO GRANDE SEPARATES the southern edge of Brownsville from Mexico. Because of a small oxbow in the river, a narrow part of Matamoros, the city's Mexican neighbor, stabs up into Brownsville, and were its streets to run true to the four compass points, this poke into its belly would interrupt their orderly arrangement. Brownsville's planners tilted its geometric grid so that streets ran northeast to southwest (generally those with numbers) and northwest to southeast (generally those with names). As a consequence, Brownsville's downtown was out of plumb with the compass, but its streets intersected each other at right angles and formed perfectly rectangular city blocks at regular intervals. This out-of-kilter city map conveyed the sense of order and orderliness Mayor Combe had been working to bring about in reality and not just on a surveyor's plat.

  Fort Brown was on the western side of the oxbow's bulge. Brownsville's downtown and its inclined matrix of streets angled away from the post to the northwest, but Brownsville residents disregarded this and thought of the city as splaying out to the north.20 The fort's main gate was at the southeastern (or as Brownsvillites would say, southern) dead end of Elizabeth Street (along with other named streets, it ran north and south; numbered streets ran east and west), where it met Garrison Road and the waist-high wall that divided fort from city. The first street east of Elizabeth Street was Washington Street. After it in sequence, matching the order of presidents, came Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and so on. In between them were alleys, usually named informally after a person or a family whose house backed onto it. Inside the fort, close to the wall and parallel to it, was a line of four two-floor barracks buildings. Since for strategic reasons the fort was built to face Mexico, the barracks had their backs to Brownsville.

  The result of all of this was that outside the fort, Elizabeth Street, the presidents’ streets, and the alleys started at the fort's wall and ran north (that's “Brownsville north”) away from it. Immediately inside Fort Brown were the four enlisted barracks with their back porches (galleries in Brownsville) looking down Elizabeth Street, the presidents’ streets, and the alleys; and on the other side of the barracks was the rest of the post, the Rio Grande, and, across the river, Mexico.

  THERE IS AN ACCOUNT of the shooting most people, then and now, can agree on. It begins with the sound of gunfire just before midnight, close by the fort's main gate where Elizabeth Street dead-ended into Garrison Road. Most believe it took place at the mouth of Cowen Alley (named after the Cowen family that lived on it), half a block away from the gate.

  While the exact number of shooters was never determined, it was not more than twenty, and probably fewer than that. They funneled through Cowen Alley toward the downtown. When they had gone one block to Fourteenth Street, the closest numbered street to the fort (the numbers getting lower the farther north one went from the fort) and running parallel to the waist-high wall, they came to the Cowen family home on their left and shot into it, then continued away from the fort.

  At Thirteenth Street they divided themselves into two groups; one turned left toward Elizabeth Street and the other to the right toward Washington Street, where each group again turned to continue separately into the town and away from the fort. As they moved along, they kept shooting.

  Before the one group could make the turn onto Elizabeth Street, a Brownsville policeman on horseback riding down Thirteenth Street spotted it as he crossed Cowen Alley. He continued down Thirteenth Street to warn guests at the Miller Hotel. To put distance between himself and the shooters, he sped up past the hotel to make a right turn onto Elizabeth Street. The shooters, still on Thirteenth Street but now behind him, shot at him, and just as he made the turn, one of their bullets struck him in the arm and another hit his horse. The animal fell dead, its body pinning the policeman's leg underneath. He managed to extricate himself from beneath the horse and continued on foot down Elizabeth Street in the direction of Twelfth Street.

  Meanwhile, as these shooters followed him down Thirteenth Street, they repeatedly shot into the Miller Hotel. When they turned onto Elizabeth Street and got abreast of the Ruby Saloon on their right, they fired into it, killing the bartender inside.

  The band of raiders that had turned onto Washington Street got a bit
farther north, almost to Twelfth Street. It stopped at the house in which the Fred Starck family slept and shot into it.

  By then, the riot's momentum slowed and the shooting ended, with the shooters on Elizabeth Street about two and a half blocks away from the fort and those on Washington Street almost three blocks away. The raid was over.

  SO MANY PEOPLE CAN agree with the foregoing narrative because it leaves out so much. Who were the shooters? Why did they do it? What happened to the two clusters of shooters when the rampage ended? The Brownsville townspeople who claimed to see and hear the violence had their answer: the shooters were Negro soldiers from Fort Brown. The civilians were convinced of this because they wore army uniforms, looked black, and from the way they spoke sounded black. Some witnesses claimed they saw soldiers coming out of the fort and into the town by climbing over the garrison's waist-high wall. Most people said the soldiers were paying the town back for abuse received from whites since they took up duty at Fort Brown. As for what happened to the two groups of shooters when they stopped shooting, some were seen running in the direction of the fort to get back there quickly and avoid detection. This was further proof the shooters were soldiers.

  Because it was very late at night, few of the eyewitnesses were in the street. Most were inside their homes when they first heard shots, and only a few of them ran outside to see what was going on. The others stayed safely inside and peeked through the curtains. There also were some people in saloons playing cards, eating, and drinking, and they stayed there. Yet almost all were very sure about what they had seen and heard. The shooters were well-armed soldiers. And they had to be from the Twenty-Fifth Infantry, the only unit at Fort Brown.