Enlightened Free Thinking Nubian Kings And Queens

Of the 167 enlisted black soldiers of the 25th Infantry discharged from the U.S. Army “without honor” by order of President Theodore Roosevelt after the shooting in Brownsville, Texas in 1906, Pvt. Dorsie Willis was the only to live long enough to see justice. According to census records, Willis was born in Mississippi in 1886. His parents, Corsey and Dochie Willis were free born.  Willis joined Company D, 25th Infantry of the U.S. Army on January 5, 1905.  In July 1906 Willis’s battalion was sent to Fort Brown in Brownsville on the American bank of the Rio Grande and near its mouth.  His battalion replaced the white 26th Infantry.  The local residents, mostly Mexican and about 20% white, were not happy with the prospect of African American soldiers being stationed there, and the soldiers of the 25th Infantry immediately encountered harassment. Less than  three weeks later , between 12 and 20 men shot up Brownsville, killing one civilian and badly wounding...

Painter and educator Laura Wheeler Waring was born on May 16, 1887, in Hartford, Connecticut.  The fourth child of six born to Reverend Robert Foster and Mary Wheeler, Laura was unusual in some respects because she had the advantage of a superior education and middle and upper class associations. Her father studied Theology at Howard University and received his diploma ten years before Laura’s birth. Laura’s education was exemplary.  She graduated from Hartford High School in 1906 with honors and went on to study for another six years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, one of the leading art institutes in the United States. In 1914, she received the A. William Emlen Cresson Memorial Travel Scholarship that allowed her to continue her studies of arts in major cities of Europe for a period of time. On that first trip she spent much time in the Louvre where she studied the works of several master painters.   While in Europe she produced her first paintings, ...