Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

Washington listened with misgivings as the President told him that he was about to dismiss 167 Negro soldiers, without honor and without trial. He had just been in Atlanta, and sensed that Roosevelt was making a terrible mistake. American blacks would have trouble understanding why “our friend” (as Washington always called him) should rush to judgment at such a time, without giving a single man of the Twenty-fifth Infantry a chance to testify in court. Even more distressing was the likelihood that redneck racists everywhere would applaud Roosevelt’s willingness to act on what passed for evidence in lynch country: unsubstantiated charges of rape, instant identifications of black men last seen in darkness, the “wooden, stolid look” of Negro terror, and a few dozen shell casings ejected from clean rifles.

Washington was right. Roosevelt was wrong.