Colfax Massacre 1873

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(Last Updated On: February 21, 2023)

Colfax Massacre 1873

By

John C Abercrombie

 

Today is day 21 of 28 and we see once again that attitudes do not automatically change or are slow to do so. Once again, we see the way citizens were divided by race over the issue of voting.

Voting is a right of all Americans, yet there were blody encounters over that right. Not one of America’s finest moments

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After the Civil War, many actions by Whites and White organizations were taken to restore the before the war status of former slaves, this included restrictions in many forms from the work given (mostly highly physical and least desirable and lower paying jobs) and particularly disenfranchisement of rights, especially voting since there is power in the ballot.

Thousands of Blacks were killed by domestic terrorists, including such groups as the Ku Klux Klan in an effort to resurrect the good old days of White supremacy and free labor from Blacks. One of the bloodiest acts took place in what is now known as the Colfax Massacre of 1873.

The thousands killed sounds like an outlandish number but it is only because history has neglected to include what must be an embarrassment to people who believe that they may have decendended from slave owners. Yes, it is uncomfortable to hear, but unless the history that we are to learn from is true, we don’t learn anything meaningful or useful. It is time to face the facts, learn from them, and make for a brighter future for all.

Many Whites were infuriated by the loss of the Confederacy and were bound and determined to restore the disenfranchisement that they prospered from. White insurgent and supremacist groups terrorized Blacks for anything they could imagine. The fight was particularly bloody and deadly in Louisiana.

There was resentment between the former slave owners who were Southern Democrats and the federal government which represented the anti-slavery interests. This resulted in an explosive encounter during the 1872 election for governor of Louisiana. The factions were evenly divided, and the Whites were represented by Democrats, while the former slaves were Republicans. United States President Ulysses Grant sent federal troops to support fair elections. White Southerners rebelled and formed a heavily armed insurgent army which were called the “White League.” They joined forces with the Ku Klux Klan to intimidate those wanting to vote Republican.

The White Democrats sought to control the Grant Parish which was evenly split between Black and White citizens. An all-Black militia in return took control of the local courthouse. At this time a mob of 150 White men, most former Confederates, and members of the Ku Klux Klan along with the White League surrounded the courthouse. They fired a cannon on the men in the courthouse. They forced a Black man at gunpoint to take a burning rag into the building which started it a fire. The two forces fired on each other’s until the Black others were forced to surrender. The Blacks had white flags and as they came from the building they were shot. As the Blacks surrendered, the Whites murdered them, shooting some, hanging others. The exact total is not known but the estimates range from 60 to 150 Blacks killed for defending their right to vote.

This incident demonstrates the lengths that opponents of equal rights were willing to go to regain their antebellum position of White supremacy.

The incident made headlines across the country and resulted in 97 Whites being indicted, charged with violating the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871. These are known as the Ku Klux Klan Acts and were intended to guarantee the rights of freedmen under the 14th and 15th Amendments.

The Enforcement Act of 1871 also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, Third Enforcement Act, Third Ku Klux Klan Act, Civil Rights Act of 1871, or Force Act of 1871, is an Act of the United States Congress which empowered the President to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to combat the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and other terrorist organizations. The act was passed by the 42nd United States Congress and signed into law by United States President Ulysses S. Grant on April 20, 1871. The act was the last of three Enforcement Acts passed by the United States Congress from 1870 to 1871 during the Reconstruction Era to combat attacks upon the suffrage rights of African Americans. The statute has been subject to only minor changes since then but has been the subject of voluminous interpretation by courts.

Lawyers for the victims brought charges in federal court instead of murder charges which would have been held in heavily Democratic courts. It is well known and easily demonstrated even today that White juries do not convict Whites for crimes committed against Blacks. This strategy backfired when the case came to the Supreme Court in 1876, the justices overturned the lower courts’ convictions, ruling that the Enforcement applied only to actions by the state, not by individuals.

This ruling essentially neutered the federal government’s ability to prosecute hate crimes. Without the threat of being tried for treason in federal court, White supremacists now only had to look for legal loopholes and corrupt officials to continue targeting their victims.

The Colfax Massacre was more or less ignored until the 1920s, when local officials raised a monument honoring the three White men who died in the attack on the courthouse, which called the battle a “riot.” In 1951, officials marked the site of the massacre with a plaque, once again calling it a riot that “marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.” The plaque still stands to this day.

This also shows the desire to honor those responsible for denying American citizens their rights are often praised over those fighting for those rights. This is the case of those honored for taking unlawful actions to

The incident was a massacre of many Blacks, the term riot is sometimes applied. The difference:

Definition of RIOT: a tumultuous disturbance of the public peace by three or more persons assembled together and acting with common intent. Definition of MASSACRE: the act or an instance of killing a number of usually helpless or unresisting human beings under circumstances of atrocity or cruelty.

In some instances, it is a matter of finances since some insurance policies have clauses that disallow payment for loss due to a riot or civil disturbance.

Massacre also denotes savagery which tends to tarnish the mythical image that historians try to maintain, depicting Europeans as gentlemanly and of high integrity rather than as they are.

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Colfax Massacre 

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The Colfax Massacre Of 1873

Phillip Scott reports on more history that the WS would love to bury out of Colfax, Louisana.

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Book

The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction

America after the Civil War was a land of shattered promises and entrenched hatreds. In the explosive South, danger took many forms: white extremists loyal to a defeated world terrorized former slaves, while in the halls of government, bitter and byzantine political warfare raged between Republicans and Democrats.

In The Day Freedom Died, Charles Lane draws us vividly into this war-torn world with a true story whose larger dimensions have never been fully explored. Here is the epic tale of the Colfax Massacre, the mass murder of more than 60 black men on Easter Sunday, 1873, that propelled a small Louisiana town into the center of the nation’s consciousness. As the smoke cleared, the perpetrators created a falsified version of events to justify their crimes.

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The Colfax Massacre 1873

Grant appears to have set about to make the nation whole again after the Civil War ended, but events in Louisiana thwarted that effort. The echos of those events may still reverberate within the United States.

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Book

The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction

On Easter Sunday, 1873, in the tiny hamlet of Colfax, Louisiana, more than 150 members of an all-black Republican militia, defending the town’s courthouse, were slain by an armed force of rampaging white supremacists. The most deadly incident of racial violence of the Reconstruction era, the Colfax Massacre unleashed a reign of terror that all but extinguished the campaign for racial equality.

LeeAnna Keith’s The Colfax Massacre is the first full-length book to tell the history of this decisive event. Drawing on a huge body of documents, including eyewitness accounts of the massacre, as well as newly discovered evidence from the site itself, Keith explores the racial tensions that led to the fateful encounter, during which surrendering blacks were mercilessly slaughtered, and the reverberations this message of terror sent throughout the South. Keith also recounts the heroic attempts by U.S. Attorney J.R. Beckwith to bring the killers to justice and the many legal issues raised by the massacre. In 1875, disregarding the poignant testimony of 300 witnesses, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in U.S. v. Cruikshank to overturn a lower court conviction of eight conspirators. This decision virtually nullified the Ku Klux Klan Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871–which had made federal offenses of a variety of acts to intimidate voters and officeholders–and cleared the way for the Jim Crow era.

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Heart of Louisiana: Colfax Massacre

What was once called a riot is now being called a Reconstruction-era race massacre in the small northern Louisiana town of Colfax.

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Unpunished Murder: Massacre at Colfax and the Quest for Justice (Scholastic Focus)

The riveting story of how the Supreme Court turned a blind eye on justice, stripped away the equal rights promised to all Americans, and ushered in the era of Jim Crow.

On Easter Sunday of 1873, just eight years after the Civil War ended, a band of white supremacists marched into Grant Parish, Louisiana, and massacred over 100 unarmed African Americans. The court case that followed reached the highest court in the land. Yet, following one of the most ghastly incidents of mass murder in American history, not one person was convicted.The opinion issued by the Supreme Court in US v. Cruikshank set in motion a process that would help create a society in which black Americans were oppressed and denied basic human rights — legally, according to the courts. These injustices paved the way for Jim Crow and would last for the next hundred years. Many continue to exist to this day.In this compelling and thoroughly researched volume for young readers, Lawrence Goldstone traces the evolution of the law and the fascinating characters involved in the story of how the Supreme Court helped institutionalize racism in the American justice system.

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Colfax massacre

The Colfax massacre, sometimes referred to by the euphemism Colfax riot, occurred on Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, in Colfax, Louisiana, the parish seat of Grant Parish. An estimated 62-153 black militia men were killed while surrendering to a mob of former Confederate soldiers and members of the Ku Klux Klan. Three white men also died in the confrontation.

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White fear has shaped our democracy and society from the beginning—and today, it’s more intense and visible than ever. To neutralize it, we must first understand it.

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For two centuries, the deep-seated fear that many White people feel—of losing power, of losing economic standing, of losing a particular “way of life”—has been the driving force behind American politics and culture. And as we approach a future where White people will become a racial minority in the US, something estimated to occur as early as 2043, that fear is only intensifying, festering, and becoming more visible. Are we destined for a violent clash? What can we do to step into our country’s inevitable future, without tearing ourselves apart in the process?

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One of our preeminent historians of race and democracy argues that the period since 2008 has marked nothing less than America’s Third Reconstruction.

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Once again we see an image that most of never knew that seems to show sharp contrast to what we say we stand for and what we actually stand for. When we fail to say anything against atrocities like this, it is the same as condoning it. We refrain from speaking because we don’t want to be identified as a person opposed to the racism being practiced daily in this great country.

As a country, we fail to speak out against evil as if we condone it. We also ignore those brave enough to stand up for what is right, yet once again we honor those who fought or even died to deny others the rights and privileges they hold so dear. We need to rethink this …

 

 

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