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Friend,
In a bold swap engineered by a Black man and a white man working together, reckoning has come at last to Colfax, Louisiana.
It was 150 years ago in the rural parish seat that scores of Black citizens trying to protect their right to vote were shot, stabbed, brutally beaten and, in at least one case, burned to death by white supremacists in what has become known as the Colfax Massacre.
The ruthless slaughter on April 13, 1873, was the bloodiest single-day death toll of the Reconstruction era and may have forever changed the course of the nation. When attempts by federal authorities to prosecute the murderers failed, prospects that newly emancipated people would achieve the full rights of citizenship in the U.S. were diminished for generations.
This month the Rev. Avery Hamilton, whose great-great-great-grandfather was the first Black man murdered in the rampage, and Dean Woods, whose great-grandfather was part of the paramilitary force that left the courthouse grounds soaked in blood, dispelled the ghosts of their family histories to achieve some measure of justice for the victims of the Easter Sunday massacre. They presided over the unveiling of a monument to the victims.
The memorial, which the two men conceived and shepherded, is their answer to a racist, blatantly dishonest historical marker the state of Louisiana put up in 1951. That marker glorified the murderous rampage as “the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.” Thanks to the efforts of Woods, following years of attempts by Hamilton, it was yanked out two years ago.
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Sincerely,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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