Senator & the Sharecroppers Son by J Weaver

Senator & the Sharecroppers Son by J Weaver

A mysterious midnight shooting spree that began on a dirt road in Texas between Brownsville and Fort Brown on August 13, 1906, killed one civilian and shattered the lives of 167 black infantrymen who had been summarily discharged without honor by a stroke of President Theodore Roosevelt's pen. In The Senator and the Sharecropper's Son, John D. Weaver completes the task he began with his 1970 book The Brownsville Raid, which, two years later, led to the soldiers' exoneration.

Weaver now traces the intertwined lives of Ohio's Senator Joseph B. Foraker, who risked his political career in an eloquent defense of the soldiers, who asked 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 black battalion's last survivor; and of the New York aristocrat who linked the fates of those two men--the flamboyant and popular Theodore Roosevelt. Weaver's 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 and the Sharecropper's Son gives a powerful human dimension to the facts of history. The senator committed political suicide by championing the men caught up in this Black Dreyfus Affair and Dorsie Willis, who spent fifty-nine years shining shoes in a downtown Minneapolis barbershop, told a reporter, That dishonorable discharge kept me from improving my station. Only God knows what it done to the others.

Weaver, John D.: - John Weaver is Principal of the South Wales Baptist College in Cardiff. Combining careers as a geologist, Baptist minister and theology tutor, he has continually sought to explore the dialogue between science and theology in ways that help people to make sense of their experience of the world, and the ways in which God can be understood to act.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780890967485
ISBN 10	0890967482
Title	Senator & the Sharecroppers Son
Author	John Weaver
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Texas Aandm University Press
Year published	2006-06-30
Number of pages	271
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable