The Easter Sunday massacre in Colfax, Louisiana, and the awful Supreme Court decision that followed

[sheshe2]

?
attribution: public domain Harper's Weekly "The Louisiana Murders—Gathering The Dead And Wounded"

When Christians think of the meaning of Easter Sunday, it symbolizes resurrection and hope. When I think of Easter Sunday in the black community, I think of all the ladies in their wonderful hats heading off to church. However, I don’t ever forget that Easter Sunday also marked one of the most horrible massacres of black citizens in U.S. history. It’s hard to erase the images in my mind of black bodies riddled with bullets, blown apart by cannon fire. They died at the hands of white supremacists who lost the Civil War but who won the years ahead, because they were able to destroy Reconstruction. I take a moment of silence and say a prayer for the dead, many of whose names we will never know.

This story from The Root on the Colfax Massacre, written by Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., gives the details. It’s worth reading in its entirety.

In Colfax, La., on Easter Sunday 1873, a mob of white insurgents, including ex-Confederate and Union soldiers, led an assault on the Grant Parish Courthouse, the center of civic life in the community, which was occupied and surrounded — and defended — by black citizens determined to safeguard the results of the state's most recent election. They, too, were armed, but they did not have the ammunition to outlast their foes, who, outflanking them, proceeded to mow down dozens of the courthouse's black defenders, even when they surrendered their weapons. The legal ramifications were as horrifying as the violence — and certainly more enduring; in an altogether different kind of massacre, United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the U.S. Supreme Court tossed prosecutors' charges against the killers in favor of severely limiting the federal government's role in protecting the emancipated from racial targeting, especially at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan.

Historians know this tragedy as the Colfax Massacre, though in the aftermath, even today, some whites refer to it as the Colfax Riot in order to lay blame at the feet of those who, lifeless, could not tell their tale. In his canonical history of the period, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, Eric Foner has called the Colfax Massacre "[t]he bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era."

Listening to the testimony of now Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch (heaven help us all) in which he harped on “judicial precedent” over and over again brought to mind Supreme Court precedents like Dred Scott v. Sanford, Plessy v. Ferguson, and the aforementioned United States v. Cruikshank—all of which have the dubious distinction of residing on lists of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time.



?1492027775

Read More: http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/4/16/1650660/-The-Easter-Sunday-massacre-in-Colfax-Louisiana-and-the-awful-Supreme-Court-decision-that-followed

Another lie another betrayal. How many years have blacks had to gather their dead and wounded, mourn them without ever receiving justice?

[JohnnyLib2]

1. Thank you for bringing this to attention, disturbing as it is.

[sheshe2]

2. Disturbing,

yet a sad and necessary truth.

Thank you Johnny.

[heaven05]

3. This one I hadn't heard about

or read about.....thanks....timely and appropriate for the times....I feel the times like Colfax are right around the corner, again. Union soldiers involved also...does not surprise me in the least with what I've seen emanating from the ameriKKKans of today, have seen from yesterday and expect to continue to see in the future.

AmeriKKKans have not eradicated hatred, racism and bigotry because ameriKKKans have a vested interest in keeping hate between the races alive. Gives them a feeling of safety and superiority. Why can't we all have safety and unity?

[sheshe2]

4. Sorry, or not to do it on Easter.

Memorializing the Colfax Massacre

April 13, 1921, whites in Colfax wrote their own narrative when they unveiled a 12-foot marble obelisk hailing the three white victims "Who fell in the Colfax Riot/fighting for White Supremacy." That same year, Tulsa, Okla., another Southern town two states over, would witness another deadly massacre

...

Perhaps aware of this history, some 30 years after Tulsa, in 1951, the Louisiana Department of Commerce and Industry passed up an opportunity to get the history of the Colfax Massacre right. Instead they retreated again into Lost Cause fantasy with the inscription, "On this site occurred the Colfax Riot in which three white men and 150 Negroes were slain. This event on April 13, 1873, marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South." To this day, it stands its ground, which reminds me …




Two weeks ago, many Americans were horrified to learn of the acquittal of Trayvon Martin's killer, George Zimmerman. In the background lurked Florida's "Stand your ground" law, which, while not tested by Zimmerman's lawyers, remains on the books and is a troubling part of our gun culture. As shaken as I was, I found myself revisiting another "set of experiences and a history" as I tried, for this column, to wrap my brain around the fact that less than 10 years after black people were guaranteed equal protection under the Constitution following the deaths of some 750,000 soldiers during the Civil War, the U.S. Supreme Court turned a blind eye to white supremacist groups like the KKK. Groups who, cloaked in their hate for the newly freed black citizens, legislated conditions which, over time, would justify racial targeting and which would help create the conditions that would manifest themselves into the racial profiling so common today. (The court might have called it "Take your ground," and history should call the events at Colfax what they were: a massacre.)



http://www.theroot.com/what-was-the-colfax-massacre-1790897517

Easter or not it is a sad fact in our history. Good question, heaven...why can't we have safety and unity? I know what the answer should be, I just do not know how to make it happen.

Thank you

[Croney]

5. Thank you for posting this.

It has caused upheaval in my family's memories of the 1950's, when I and my cousins spent every summer at our grandmother and great-grandmother's farm outside of Colfax. I remember going to Woolworth's to buy paddle balls on rubber bands. I remember swimming in the creek. I remember playing in the woods. I remember shelling peas on the porch. I remember watching my grandmother shoot armadillos in the garden at night. I remember nighttime singing at Bethel Baptist Church.

I do not remember hearing about this tragedy, ever. I just talked to my 94-year-old mother, and she doesn't remember ever hearing about it. (She didn't grow up there, it was her husband's family home.)

Perhaps white privilege extends to selective forgetting of unpleasant things. We children were unaware of these memories that surely must have haunted our old people. What a shameful legacy.