The Uniform and the Badge: Roland Price, Brownsville and the Black Soldier's Reward

Service Without Citizenship

Black Americans have worn the nation's uniform in every war, and again and again the nation has answered that service with suspicion. Two November entries on the Equal Justice Initiative's calendar, forty-one years apart, show how little the uniform protected the men who wore it.

Rochester, November 6, 1947

Roland T. Price was 25 years old, a World War II veteran who had received the Purple Heart. On November 6, 1947, he walked into a bar in Rochester, New York, in his military uniform, wearing the medal. After an argument with the white bartender over his change, the bartender drew a gun and a waitress called the police.

Patrolman William Hamill ordered Price outside at gunpoint. Price complied. Five more officers were waiting. Although no one saw a weapon, the officers opened fire and shot him several times, twice in the chest and once in the head. A search of his body confirmed that he was unarmed. No officer was indicted, and the killing was ruled "justified."

Price's death was not a Southern story. It happened in an industrial city in New York, and it fit a national pattern. In the months after the war, Black veterans who expected the dignity they had fought for met violence instead. In February 1946, South Carolina police blinded Sgt. Isaac Woodard hours after his discharge, a case that pushed President Harry Truman to create his Committee on Civil Rights.

Brownsville, November 19, 1906

The pattern was already old. In the summer of 1906, the War Department stationed soldiers of the segregated 25th Infantry at Fort Brown, Texas, even though it knew Black troops would "not be welcomed" in nearby Brownsville. After shots were fired in town on the night of August 13, killing a white man, suspicion fell on the Black soldiers at once. Their white commanders confirmed that the men had been in barracks.

It did not matter. President Theodore Roosevelt dishonorably discharged 167 soldiers without a trial, stripping them of pay and pensions. When dozens of these veterans went to San Antonio seeking work on November 19, 1906, white employers across the city coordinated to refuse them, trying to drive them out of town. In 1972, after historian John D. Weaver's research reopened the case, the Army reversed the discharges. Only one of the men, Dorsie Willis, was still alive.

The Presumption That Followed Them

Brownsville and Rochester share a logic. In both, Black men in uniform were presumed dangerous, evidence of their innocence was brushed aside, and the institutions charged with fairness, the Army and the police, refused accountability. Black veterans answered by organizing. Many returned to become leaders of the civil rights movement, from Medgar Evers to Hosea Williams, carrying the demand that service be matched by citizenship.

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