The Massacre That Emboldened White Supremacists
By William Briggs and Jon Krakauer
An hour after sunset on Easter Sunday in 1873, a stern-wheel riverboat put ashore at Colfax, La., a ramshackle settlement surrounded by cotton plantations on the east bank of the Red River. Rain was falling. As passengers disembarked, they found themselves stumbling in the dark over what turned out to be the lifeless bodies of African-Americans who had been freed from slavery eight years earlier at the conclusion of the Civil War. Most of the dead were lying facedown in the grass “and had been shot almost to pieces,” according to Charles Lane in his book “The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, The Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction.” Others had been bludgeoned or mutilated, and some had burned to death.
Danny Lewis, writing in the Smithsonian Magazine online stated, “The bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era, the Colfax massacre taught many lessons, including the lengths to which some opponents of Reconstruction would go to regain their accustomed authority,” historian Eric Foner writes in Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. “Among blacks in Louisiana, the incident was long remembered as proof that in any large confrontation, they stood at a fatal disadvantage.”