President Theodore Roosevelt’s Special Message to the U.S. Senate of December 19, 1906, explained his summary dismissal of 167 members of the segregated Twenty-fifth Infantry Regiment from the U.S. Army. The dismissals resulted from charges that the soldiers had engaged in a conspiracy of silence after some members of their regiment had attacked the Mexican-border city of Brownsville, Texas, on the night of August 13, 1906. Reported shootings by the military took the life of a civilian and seriously wounded a police officer. The message was a response to two Senate information- gathering resolutions that had been submitted to Secretary of War William Howard Taft, and it was presented together with several documents, including a letter from General A. B. Nettleton and memoranda demonstrating precedents for the summary discharges. The dismissals involved virtually all members of Companies B, C, and D (the only companies of the regiment that went to Brownsville); they also led to the expulsion of black troops from Texas and the heightening of racial tension in the United States.