Brownsville affair  The Brownsville affair, or the Brownsville raid, was an incident of racial injustice that occurred in 1906 in the southwestern United States due to resentment by white residents of Brownsville, Texas, of the Buffalo Soldiers, black soldiers in a segregated unit stationed at nearby Fort Brown. When a white bartender was killed and a white police officer wounded by gunshots one night, townspeople accused the members of the African-American 25th Infantry Regiment. Although their commanders said the soldiers had been in the barracks all night, evidence was planted against the men. As a result of a United States Army Inspector General's investigation, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the discharge without honor of 167 soldiers of the 25th Infantry Regiment, costing them pensions and preventing them from ever serving in federal civil service jobs. The case aroused national outrage in both black and white communities. After more investigation, several of the men were allowed to re-enlist. Following publication of a history of the affair in the early 1970s, a renewed military investigation exonerated the discharged black troops. The government pardoned the men in 1972 and restored their records to show honorable discharges, but it did not provide retroactive compensation to them or their descendants. Only one man had survived to that time; Congress passed an act to provide him with a tax-free pension. The other soldiers who had been expelled all received posthumous honorable discharges. Since arriving at Fort Brown on July 28, 1906, the black US soldiers had been required to follow the legal "color line mandate" from white citizens of Brownsville, which included the state's racial segregation law dictating separate accommodation for black people and white people, and Jim Crow customs such as showing respect for white people, as well as respect for local laws. A reported attack on a white woman during the night of August 12 so incensed many townspeople that Maj. Charles W. Penrose, after consultation with Mayor Frederick Combe, declared an early curfew for soldiers the following day to avoid trouble. On the night of August 13, 1906, bartender Frank Natus was killed and police lieutenant M. Y. Dominguez was wounded by gunshots in the town. Immediately the residents of Brownsville cast the blame on the black soldiers of the 25th Infantry at Fort Brown. But the all-white commanders at Fort Brown confirmed that all of the soldiers were in their barracks at the time of the shootings. Local whites, including Brownsville's mayor, still claimed that some of the black soldiers participated in the shooting. Local townspeople of Brownsville began providing evidence of the 25th Infantry's part in the shooting by producing spent bullet cartridges from Army rifles which they said belonged to the 25th's men.