MEMORIALIZE THEIR SERVICE, NOT HIM:

As a youngster, John Downing Weaver paid little attention to his mother when she told him stories of her and his father's trip to Brownsville, Texas, in 1909. It wasn't until the journalist was in his 50s that he got around to asking her about it. After all, it didn't sound like a glamorous trip.

"Some Negro soldiers shot up the town," she said, "and Teddy Roosevelt kicked them out of the Army." Weaver figured his father, a stenographer for the House of Representatives, had been tapped to cover a trial for the soldiers and summoned to Brownsville, a town on the Mexico border.

"They didn't have a trial," Mrs. Weaver responded. "He just kicked them out."

"But not even the President can go around kicking people out of the Army without a trial," John said.

"Teddy Roosevelt did," she insisted.

Just to prove his mother wrong, Weaver dug into the official records of the case housed at the Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA. It turned out that his mother was right.

On November 6, 1906, Theodore Roosevelt signed Special Order No. 266. With a stroke of his pen, the president triggered the dishonorable discharge of 167 Black soldiers of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry stationed in Brownsville, Texas. Weaver's father was sent down about three years later, to report on the proceedings of a court of inquiry composed of five retired generals.

Weaver, after meticulously researching the events, concluded that these generals were "less interested in righting the wrong than in making the wrong appear right." Weaver, then a reporter for the Los Angeles Times "West" section, published his findings in a 1970 book, The Brownsville Raid: The Story of America's Black Dreyfus Affair.

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