The Colfax Massacre

[struggle4progress]

Leeanna Keith
Oxford University Press (2009)]
219pp

Colfax is two hundred or so miles from New Orleans. The local cemetery contains an obelisk, erected in the 1920s



Nearby is a historical marker, placed by the state in 1950



This book is an account of events on Easter Sunday, 1873, placed in a rather careful context, beginning with the clearing of the Red River logjam forty years earlier and continuing through the outcome of the case US v Cruikshank, in which the US Supreme Court -- in a decision that effectively gutted the Reconstruction-era Congressional anti-Klan laws -- voided the very few federal convictions that resulted from the massacre, a decision almost immediately regarded as establishing that "no white man could be punished for killing a negro," with the result that a number of other murders followed almost instantly

The text is dense, well-documented, and an interesting read, which provides some insight into a time often quickly glossed over

[thucythucy]

1. "Carpetbag Misrule"

What a crock. State administration in the decade immediately following the civil war was among the LEAST corrupt in southern history. What made that era so infuriating to southern whites was the fact that African Americans could and did vote, and that African Americans were elected to office. The removal of federal troops made possible a reign of racist terror that undid all the gains made since Emancipation, ground which wasn't recovered until almost a century later.

Thanks for this post. An amazing image.