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Colfax Massacre finally memorialized, but you won't read about it in FL history classes [1]

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Date: 2023-04-29  

The Louisiana murders - gathering the dead and wounded

One hundred fifty years ago, on April 13, 1873, the bloodiest, most deadly, and least well-known civil rights massacre in American history occurred in Colfax, Louisiana. The slaughter of more than 60 Black men standing for their Constitutional rights inside the Colfax courthouse by White supremacists effectively ended the post-Civil-War Reconstruction era in the South. The oppressive event was reinforced by the outrageous Supreme Court decision in United States v. Cruikshank (1876) that overturned the convictions of the few White men convicted in the slaughter. The “arc of the moral universe” bending toward justice was stifled and would not resurface in the US for almost a century.

On April 13, 2023, exactly 150 years later, a monument to the brave men killed during the massacre was unveiled in Colfax, thanks to the efforts of two men, one Black, one White, each with an ancestor who was involved on opposite sides of the slaughter.

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.

Arguably the most outrageous aspect of this story is the fact that a memorial celebrating the White supremacists who instigated the attack was erected in Colfax by the state of Louisiana in 1951 and survived until it was removed in 2021.

The offensive memorial plaque was removed by the state in 2021.

And this:

Still standing in a cemetery a few blocks from where the old Colfax marker was removed, a large white obelisk built at public expense in 1921 commemorates three white men who died during the massacre while “fighting for white supremacy.”

Truly, there are no words.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/29/2166636/-Colfax-Massacre-finally-memorialized-but-you-won-t-read-about-it-in-FL-history-classes

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