The Thibodaux Massacre – 60 Blacks Killed
By
John C Abercrombie
Today is day 24 of 28. Events like the Thibodaux massacre are significant, yet little mentioned in history. As Blacks sought to vote or to obtain better wages, they were subject to wholesale slaughter. This seems to betray the promise of liberty and justice for all. There is a lack of justice in a system that systematically refuses to investigate and administer justice to all. While Blacks are welcomed to give their lives when the country goes to war, those same people stand on the sidelines and do nothing when these acts are betrayed by the very people who should be behind guaranteeing them for all. If the tables were reversed, there would be a loud hew and cry for restoring rights for all. As is all too apparent, we are a nation of hypocrites.
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60 Blacks were killed, November 23, 1887. Black bodies were dumped in unmarked graves and the White press cheered a victory over a Black union seeking better working conditions and pay.
This is one of the deadliest events in labor history. Statures were erected and public places named for those involved in the killing but nothing for the Blacks killed.
Years after the Thirteenth Amendment brought freedom, cane cutters’ working lives were already “barely distinguishable” from slavery, argues journalist and author John DeSantis. With no land to own or rent, workers and their families lived in old slave cabins. They toiled in gangs, just like their ancestors had for nearly a century. Growers gave workers meals but paid famine wages of as little as 42 cents a day for a 12-hour shift. Instead of cash, workers got scrip that bought basics at high prices at plantation stores.
But they had advantages that their counterparts in cotton areas lacked. Planters needed their labor, and growers living on thin margins failed to attract migrant laborers to replace local workers, especially in the crucial rolling season when the sugarcane needed to be cut and pressed in short order.
The Republican Party, which supported black civil rights, was stronger in sugar country than anywhere else in the state and they were able to vote. By the late 1860s, Blacks had become legislators or sheriffs, and Black volunteer militias drilled, despite living and working conditions still bearing the marks of slavery.
Sensing they were in a strong bargaining position, workers banded together in several sugar parishes, including St. Mary, Iberia, Terrebonne, and Lafourche, demanding cash wages of $1.25 per day, or $1.00 if meals were included.
Keys led a march from Houma to Southdown Plantation in Terrebonne, rallying workers with a fiery speech. The sight of Black protesters riled growers, and acting with their interests in mind, the parish’s Black sheriff formed a posse of whites to face down strikers. Surprised at the opposition, the marchers retreated.
Republican Governor William Pitt Kellogg also backed growers, but he was under siege from the Louisiana White League, a paramilitary White supremacist group formed in 1874 to intimidate Republicans and keep Blacks from voting.
Despite Kellogg’s being a pro-growth moderate who favored low taxes, White Leaguers tried to oust him in a violent coup. The Battle of Liberty Place, as it was called, pitted White militiamen against federal troops and metropolitan police. Governor Kellogg was temporarily forced out of New Orleans. He returned under guard but would be Louisiana’s last Republican governor for more than 100 years.
America was retreating from Republican-led Reconstruction and abandoning civil rights. Blacks in sugar regions kept the right to vote, but their influence in state elections was waning. As W. E. B. Du Bois put it in Black Reconstruction in America, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again into slavery.”
Sugar workers attempted another strike in 1880, and both growers and workers resorted to sporadic violence. But time was on the growers’ side. Backs were being disarmed and thrown out of office, and some were leased out to hard labor for petty and trumped-up crimes. With few options available by 1887, Terrebonne sugar workers reached out to the Knights of Labor.
The Knights was the biggest and most powerful union in America. It began organizing Blacks 1883 in separate locals. Despite segregation, the Knights organized women and farm workers. And it made strides against Jim Crow. At the Knights’ 1886 national convention in Richmond, Virginia, leaders risked violence by insisting that a Black delegate introduce Virginia’s segregationist governor.
Across the states of the former Confederacy, Whites viewed organized labor as agitation that threatened the emerging Jim Crow order. Even in the North and Midwest, the Knights fought an uphill battle against authorities who sided with railroad and mine owners. Several states called out militias to break strikes during the late nineteenth century, but the Knights was at its peak of popularity in the 1880s.
In Louisiana, the Knights organized sugar workers into seven locals of 100 to 150 members each. Hamp Keys joined former Black leaders like ex-sheriff William Kennedy. In August of 1887, the Knights met with the St. Mary branch of the Louisiana Sugar Planters Association asking for improved wages. And again, the growers refused.
So, the Knights raised the stakes in October of 1887 as the rolling season approached. Junius Bailey, a 29-year-old schoolteacher, served as local president in Terrebonne. His office sent a communique all over the region asking for $1.25 a day cash wages, and local workers’ committees followed up, going directly to growers with the same demand.
But instead of bargaining, growers fired union members. Planters like future Supreme Court Chief Justice Edward Douglass White kicked workers off the land, ordering any who stayed arrested. Siding with growers, Democratic newspapers circulated false reports of Black-on-White violence. “The most vicious and unruly set of Negroes,” were at the Rienzi Plantation near Thibodaux, the New Orleans Daily Picayune reported. “The leader of them said to-day that no power on earth could remove them unless they were moved as corpses.”
As the cane ripened, growers called on the governor to use muscle against the strikers. And Samuel D. McEnery, Democratic governor, and former planter, obliged, calling for the assistance of several all-White Louisiana militias under the command of ex-Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard. One group toted a .45 caliber Gatling gun–a hand-cranked machine gun–around two parishes before parking it in front of the Thibodaux courthouse. An army cannon was set up in front of the jail.
Then the killings started. In St. Mary, the Attakapas Rangers joined a sheriff’s posse facing down a group of Black strikers. When one of the workers reached into a pocket, posse members opened fire on the crowd, “and four men were shot dead where they stood,” a newspaper reported. Terror broke the strike in St. Mary Parish.
In neighboring Terrebonne, some small growers came to the bargaining table, but larger planters hired strike-breakers from Vicksburg, Mississippi, 200 miles to the North, promising high wages and bringing them down on trains. The replacement workers were also Blacks, but they lacked experience in the canebrakes. As they arrived, militiamen evicted strikers.
And Thibodaux, in Lafourche Parish, was becoming a refuge for displaced workers. Some moved into vacant houses in town, while others camped along bayous and roadsides. Reports circulated of Black women gossiping about a planned riot. Violence broke out in nearby Lockport on Bayou Lafourche when Moses Pugh, a Black worker, shot and wounded Richard Foret, a planter, in self-defense. A militia unit arrived and mounted a bayonet charge on gathered workers, firing a volley in the air.
“Do the workingmen of the country understand the significance of this movement?” asked Washington D.C.’s National Republican, pointing out that sugar workers were “forced to work at starvation wages, in the richest spot under the American flag.” If forced back to the fields at gun point, no wage worker was safe from employer intimidation.
In Thibodaux, Lafourche Parish District Judge Taylor Beattie declared martial law. Despite being a Republican, Beattie was an ex-Confederate and White League member. He authorized local White vigilantes to barricade the town, identifying strikers and demanding passes from any Black coming or going. And before dawn on Wednesday, the 23rd of November, pistol shots coming from a cornfield injured two White guards.
The response was a massacre. “There were several companies of White men, and they went around night and day shooting Black men who took part in the strike,” said Reverend T. Jefferson Rhodes of the Moses Baptist Church in Thibodaux. Going from house to house, gunmen ordered Jack Conrad (a Union Civil War Veteran), his son Grant, and his brother-in-law Marcelin out of their house. Marcelin protested he was not a striker but was shot and killed anyway. As recounted in John DeSantis’ book, Clarisse Conrad watched as her brother Grant “got behind a barrel and the White men got behind the house and shot him dead.” Jack Conrad was shot several times in the arms and chest. He lived and later identified one of the attackers as his employer.
One strike leader found in an attic was taken to the town common, told to run, and shot to pieces by a firing squad. An eyewitness told a newspaper that “no less than thirty-five Blacks were killed outright,” including old and young, men and women. “The Blacks offered no resistance; they could not, as the killing was unexpected.” Survivors took to the woods and swamps. Killings continued on plantations, and bodies were dumped in a site that became a landfill.
Workers returned to the fields on growers’ terms while Whites cheered a Jim Crow victory. The Daily Picayune blamed Black unionizers for the violence, saying that they provoked White citizens, suggesting the strikers “would burn the town and end the lives of the White women and children with their cane knives.” Flipping the narrative, the paper argued, “It was no longer a question of against labor, but one of law-abiding citizens against assassins.”
The union died with the strikers, and the assassins went unpunished. There was no federal inquiry, and even the coroner’s inquest refused to point a finger at the murderers. Sugar planter Andrew Price was among the attackers that morning. He won a seat in Congress the next year.
The massacre helped keep unions out of the South at just the moment it was industrializing. Textile manufacturers were moving out of New England, chasing low wages. And after textile factories closed in the 20th century, auto, manufacturing, and energy companies opened in southern states in part for the non-union workforce.
Southern Black farm workers would not attempt to unionize again, until the 1930s when the Southern Tenant Farmers Union attracted both white and African American members. But it too was met by a violent racist backlash. The struggle for southern unions continued into the Civil Rights era. On the night before he was assassinated in Memphis, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech supporting striking sanitation workers. He urged his audience “to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. …You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together.”
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Thibodaux Massacre – Books and Videos
The Thibodaux Massacre Recovery Project
Author John Desantis, Jack Conrad’s descendants, and others have a website devoted to the victim recovery project for the victims of the 1887 Thibodaux Massacre at https://www.la1887.com. Please make a donation of any amount to this non-profit overseeing the effort.
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Book
The Thibodaux Massacre: Racial Violence and the 1887 Sugar Cane Labor Strike (True Crime)
On November 23, 1887, white vigilantes gunned down unarmed black laborers and their families during a spree lasting more than two hours. The violence erupted due to strikes on Louisiana sugar cane plantations. Fear, rumor and white supremacist ideals clashed with an unprecedented labor action to create an epic tragedy. A future member of the U.S. House of Representatives was among the leaders of a mob that routed black men from houses and forced them to a stretch of railroad track, ordering them to run for their lives before gunning them down. According to a witness, the guns firing in the black neighborhoods sounded like a battle. Author and award-winning reporter John DeSantis uses correspondence, interviews and federal records to detail this harrowing true story.
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A Forgotten Atrocity: The Thibodaux Massacre of 1887
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Book
Jack Conrad and the 1887 Thibodaux Massacre: Enslaved Man, Union Solider, Voice, and Survivor of the 1887 Thibodaux Massacre
This book will explain the role of Jack Conrad as a survivor of the 1887 Thibodaux Massacre.
The Thibodaux Massacre was a direct result of greed from the owners of the sugar cane plantations. A strike by the sugar cane workers for increased wages was organized in October of 1887. The harvest season for sugar is November, so the workers felt that to stage a strike at this time would force the plantation owners to give them an increase of $1.25 more a week.
This book is a true story about a survivor of the 1887 Thibodaux Massacre.
Thibodaux is a small town about 60 miles south of New Orleans. Jack Conrad is my fourth great grandfather and he was shot five times and survived. His 19 years old son, Grant was shot and killed and his brother-in-law was shot and killed.
Jack Conrad was born in 1834 as an enslaved man, on the Caillouette Plantation also known as St. James Plantation. He was a Union soldier, 84th Company C of the US Colored Infantry, who fought in the Battle of Port Hudson, the Red River Campaign and Milliken Bend. He survived his five gunshot wounds and became the voice of the 1887 Thibodaux Massacre. All these facts are in his veteran’s pension file which is in the US Archives.
Oral history tells us that there were 60 to 200 people killed in cold blood in the River Parishes of Louisiana. The parishes involved were Lafourche, Terrebonne, St. Mary’s, Accession and Assumption. These parishes were the largest sugar cane producers in the state.
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Black History Monday – Thibodaux Massacre (S2:E7)
Less than two decades after slavery was outlawed in the United States, many African-Americans working in the South began to realize the power their labor represented. This led to an increasing number of strikes, especially among sugar workers. In 1887, some sugar workers reached out to the Knights of Labor, the biggest union of them all. With the help of organized labor, the black workers soon began to demand appropriate wages. Instead of negotiating, the plant owners began firing union members. Ignored, 10,000 sugar workers – 90% of whom were African-American – went on strike November 1st at a critical production time for the industry, bringing the entire region’s economy to a stop. Plantation owners asked Louisiana Gov. John McEnery, a sugar planter himself, and state militia for help, which they got. When the strikes began, soldiers kicked out all the striking workers and sent them packing to live in an African-American section of Louisiana known as Thibodaux.
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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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Searching for mass grave of victims in 1887 racial massacre
Mobs went door-to-door for more than two hours, shooting unarmed blacks to break a strike by sugar plantation field hands.
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The Destruction of Black Civilization took Chancellor Williams 16 years of research and field study to compile. The book, which was to serve as a reinterpretation of the history of the African race, was intended to be “a general rebellion against the subtle message from even the most liberal white authors and their Negro disciples: ‘You belong to a race of nobodies. You have no worthwhile history to point to with pride.'”
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As we look at this horrible incident there is a giant racial divide. Whites are completely unaware of this event and may even be shocked at the brutality. Blacks are also unaware of this event but less are shocked because if they know anything about history this is consistent with we have learned and it did not come from school because it is not taught in schools, but is consistent with what we have lived through. Before body cameras, we were subjected to this type of incident, during this time, when anything resulted in charges against White police the body cameras were not turned on or did not work and this was acceptable. Law enforcement is shielded by the policy of Qualified Immunity. In other words this is no different than what Black people have seen all of their lives. What we see and express in, is just a monetary blip on the radar screen of justice and results in a moment of silence designed to allow us to forget, not correct. It is time to break the chain and insure a prosperous future for us all.