Springfield’s blacks likely were as excited as the rest of the city’s voters in that run up to the Ohio primary of 100 years ago. But as the campaigns stopped at a hall built for a religious revival, they knew another revival was under way: a revival of racial hatred.
And as the bitter campaign between the two former friends headed this way, the so-called race question was on the front burner.
“That former President Theodore Roosevelt will for the first time touch on the Brownsville affair in his speech in Springfield this afternoon was the information given the Daily News in a special dispatch form Bellefontaine,” the Springfield paper announced that May 15.
The “Brownsville Affair” was a thorny problem for both candidates.
In 1906, then President Roosevelt had discharged without honor three companies of black soldiers who had served honorably with him in the Spanish-American War.
The dismissal came after questionable, if not trumped-up charges, that, while stationed in Fort Brown, Texas, the troops had been involved in the shooting death of a Brownsville saloon keeper and the injury of a policeman. What really rankled Roosevelt’s critics was that the dismissals weren’t for wrongdoing; they were discharged for an alleged “conspiracy of silence” for failing to admit wrongdoing.
In a CSPAN interview this year, Khalil Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, said 1912 represented “the first time the Republican Party is not the heir apparent for African American voters.”
A Library of Congress report says outrage over the dismissal of the Brownsville troops was clearly part of that, finishing off the leadership career of Booker T. Washington. When the black leader failed to criticize Roosevelt, many longtime supporters abandoned him.
Although the criticism of Roosevelt might appear to be good news for Taft, he himself was serving as Secretary of War when the troops were dismissed.
So from his Columbus campaign headquarters, Taft issued a statement that squarely blamed Roosevelt.
“When Mr. Taft returned to Washington, he cabled to President Roosevelt, who was in Puerto Rico, asking that the order (to discharge the troops) be suspended until further hearing,” the statement said. “On Nov. 21 President Roosevelt cabled a reply denying Mr. Taft’s request and directing that the order be immediately executed.”
While in Springfield, Roosevelt jabbed at Taft with what amounted to an accusation wrapped in a confession.
“I have only myself to hold responsible for what I did, and I do not want to shift the responsibility,” Roosevelt confessed. “I have noticed, however, that in the three years in which President Taft has been president, not one word has been said of restoring any (of the troops) by the executive order which President Taft recommended to me when he was in my cabinet.”
The issue was big enough in the campaign for the black vote that the day after Roosevelt’s visit, Taft-backer and Illinois Congressman A.W. Rodenberg denounced Roosevelt before what the Daily News described as an audience of “almost wholly colored people” in city hall.
Although local minister Charles Johnson also preached at the affair, it’s likely the audience was most interested in seeing a third man: Sgt. Mingo Sanders, “one of the (black) soldiers dismissed with the 25th Infantry … at Brownsville.”
The audience knew that, whatever the rights and wrongs of the Brownsville case, a larger issue was at stake.
Six months before the Brownsville tavern owner was shot, gunfire had erupted in Springfield during an outbreak of racial violence.
It wasn’t as serious as the city’s riot of 1904, when a mob ripped from jail a black man who had fatally shot a white policeman, lynched and shot the accused on a downtown pole and proceeded to burn buildings in a black neighborhood.
Having learned a lesson, authorities in 1906 moved to Dayton two black suspects accused of shooting and stabbing two white railroad workers.
City officials were quicker to call in the National Guard, although not in time to prevent the mob deprived of its lynching from heading along the downtown railroad tracks to burn yet more black homes.
On its way, the mob surged through the Esplanade, where its bellowing and shooting cut short a Springfield City Council meeting.
“The hardware merchants had reported during the day that they had had a run on cartridges such as they had not experienced since the day of the riots of 1904,” The Sun reported.
Members of council who “tumbled down the stairs” from their meeting the day of the riot saw “a negro, cowering with fear and bearing many a wound and bruise, fell against the wall, and lay prone on the floor” The Sun said. “He had escaped from the mob.”
Whether that man was in the audience in May of 1912 to meet Sgt. Mingo Sanders is lost to history. But it seems a sure bet the audience was aware it was in the place the man had found refuge.
And nine years later, some of the audience members’ homes would be saved by black veterans of the sort Sanders served with.
In 1921, when a rioting white mob again threatened black neighborhoods south of City Hall, a group of black veterans of the Spanish American War and World War I took up positions with Springfield rifles bought from a Richmond, Ind., armory.
The revival of racial hatred was not over.
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