John D. Weaver, 90; Author Righted a Racial Injustice

John D. Weaver, who wrote extensively about the history of Los Angeles and was a prominent figure on the Los Angeles literary scene for nearly half a century, has died. He was 90.

Weaver, who had Alzheimer’s disease, died Wednesday at an assisted-care home in Las Vegas, where he had lived in recent years.

During his 65-year writing career, the onetime Kansas City Star reporter served stints as West Coast editor of Holiday, and Travel and Leisure magazines and wrote hundreds of short stories, articles and book reviews for Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Saturday Evening Post, New West and other magazines.

He also wrote two novels and eight nonfiction books, including one that helped change history: “The Brownsville Raid,” a 1970 book that led to the exoneration of 167 black soldiers who had been discharged without honor 64 years earlier.

A resident of Los Angeles from the 1940s to the early 1990s, Weaver wrote the entry on Los Angeles for the 1974 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, as well as the books “Los Angeles: El Pueblo Grande” (1973) and “Los Angeles: The Enormous Village” (1980) -- an expansive look at the growth of the city during its different eras.

“He was the first person to really give a true historical sensibility to everyday Los Angelenos,” said Digby Diehl, book editor of the Los Angeles Times from 1969 to 1978 and a friend of Weaver. “Until his book came out, there was really nothing that made the history of Los Angeles comprehensible to the guy on the street.

“John clearly loved the city and imbued that particular book with his love, but he did so many things as a citizen and as a writer. He was a passionate partisan for the city of Los Angeles.”

Weaver, Diehl said, “was probably the most important advocate of his era of the Los Angeles Public Library.”

In the 1970s, Diehl recalled, there was a battle over how downtown Los Angeles should be redeveloped.

One of the arguments, Diehl said, was that the Cental Library should be torn down and a new library incorporated into a skyscraper to be built on the library site.

“John was very strongly in defense of maintaining the library and its beautiful architecture,” said Diehl. “I’d say present-day experience proves him right. It’s the cornerstone of one of the most lovely areas downtown.”

Novelist Carolyn See, another longtime friend, remembers another side of Weaver, “a man of perfect kindness and gentility.”

“He was a natural teacher,” See said. “Back in the days before MFA [writing] programs, he was like a walking MFA program. He would spend incredible amounts of time with young writers, explaining what it is they had to do in order to not just get published but to keep their self-respect.”

Weaver, who once served as president of the Friends of the UCLA Library, donated more than 400 boxes of his research notes, working manuscripts and other papers to the university library’s Department of Special Collections, as well as a collection of Los Angeles ephemera.

Born and raised in Washington, Weaver received a bachelor’s degree from the College of William and Mary and a master’s from George Washington University.

After college in 1933, he worked for the National Recovery Administration and other federal agencies.

In 1935, he was hired by the Kansas City Star, where he worked the next five years and met his future wife, Harriett, a Star correspondent, who died at the age of 75 in 1988.

After Weaver served in the Army Signal Corps during World War II, the couple moved to Los Angeles to freelance, settling into a hillside home above the Sunset Strip in 1948.

In the late 1960s, after turning to nonfiction, Weaver began digging into a story he had heard from his parents as a child.

During the early years of his parents’ marriage, they had made a trip to the Mexican border town of Brownsville, Texas, where Weaver’s father served as the official reporter for a 1910 government court of inquiry into the Brownsville raid four years earlier.

On Aug. 13, 1906, shots were heard near Ft. Brown, which housed three companies of the 1st Battalion, 25th Infantry, an all-black unit.

The soldiers, according to facts uncovered during Weaver’s lengthy search of official records, assumed they were being attacked by a local mob inflamed by rumors of the attempted rape of a white woman who had identified her assailant as a black man in an Army uniform.

The townspeople thought the black soldiers were attacking the town because some of the soldiers had been assaulted by white men.

By the end of the 10-minute shooting rampage by 10 to 20 armed men, one of the townspeople was dead and a police officer was wounded. An armed white mob began shouting for vengeance.

Although blame fell on the black soldiers, the only evidence was spent cartridges found in the street that were said to have come from Army rifles.

The 1910 inquiry confirmed the black soldiers’ guilt.

But, Weaver told The Times in 1972, “all the evidence showed the [black] soldiers couldn’t possibly have done it. I’m positive the cartridges were planted there.”

The black soldiers denied knowledge of the shooting, which the military regarded as simply refusing to inform on one another.

President Theodore Roosevelt ordered all 167 discharged without honor because of their conspiracy of silence.

After Weaver reopened the case with his book, Rep. Augustus F. Hawkins (D-Calif.) introduced legislation calling for the exoneration of the soldiers.

In 1972, the Army, calling the soldiers’ discharge the only documented case of mass punishment in history, exonerated all 167 of them. Secretary of the Army Robert F. Froehlke ordered the discharges changed to honorable, declaring that the mass discharge without honor in 1906 was a gross injustice.

In 1972, only one of the 167 black soldiers surfaced -- Dorsie Willis, who had been shining shoes in the same Minneapolis barbershop for 59 years.

In addition to his honorable discharge, Willis was given a tax-free government check for $25,000. Each of a dozen surviving widows also received $10,000.

“ ‘The Brownsville Raid’ was always the one book he was most proud of,” Weaver’s second wife, Chica, told The Times this week.

In addition to his wife of 13 years, Weaver is survived by a brother, William, of New York City; and two sisters, Jane Poulton of Durham, N.C., and Ann Naylor of Chapel Hill, N.C.

No services will be held.