The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction [Hardcover]

LeeAnna Keith (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195310268 | ISBN-13: 978-0195310269 | Publication Date: January 28, 2008 | Edition: First Printing

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.
If there was a single historical moment that effectively killed Reconstruction and erased the gains blacks had made since the civil war, it was the day of the Colfax Massacre. LeeAnna Keith gives readers both a gripping narrative account of that portentous day and a nuanced historical analysis of its far-reaching repercussions.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

It happened in Colfax, La., on Easter Sunday, 1873; when it ended, the the largest number of victims in the history of racial violence in the United States, more than one hundred and fifty African-Americans, were dead. Keith places the massacre at the center of her book, but her sharpest focus is upon white political figures and the slave-holding Calhoun family (the character Simon Legree in Uncle Tom's Cabin was based upon a Calhoun forebear), most notably William, who witnessed the violence. Keith traces the fortunes of the Calhoun family to the events leading to the massacre, then turns to the Colfax Courthouse assault and judicial aftermath that deepened the complexity of this tragic event. Three white men were convicted, not for murders but for conspiracy in one murder. These convictions were then overturned, and Reconstruction effectively ended according to Keith. Louisiana's Governor Kellogg declared no white man could be punished for killing a negro. Later memorialized by the state with a plaque celebrating the demise of 'carpetbag misrule in the South,'  the horrific massacre has received scant attention from American historians. Keith's aim is admirable, but the execution could be bolstered with more substantive research. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"In The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction, LeeAnna Keith powerfully accomplishes what she set out to do, to shed new light on a tragically under-reported but significant chapter in America's past.... Meticulously researched, painstakingly recreated, and full of insight into the times, this book is a much needed and important addition to the permanent record of American history."--Lalita Tademy, author of Cane River (an Oprah Choice) and Red River

"The Colfax Massacre brings to light one of the most notorious, yet forgotten, events of the 1870s--the object of Congressional Investigations, a historic Supreme Court case, and a special address by President Ulysses S. Grant. In the decades since, the town of Colfax, Louisiana--a bastion of racism and black poverty--has struggled with the massacre's legacy. The High Court's decision in U.S. v Cruikshank takes on new meaning as Keith traces its role in the rise of Jim Crow, chronicling this true Old South drama with striking characters, heroic acts, and chilling violence."--Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; First Printing edition (January 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195310268
• ISBN-13: 978-0195310269
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #496,502 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling and Engaging--Top Notch, February 15, 2008

By 

Connie (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (Hardcover)

The Colfax Massacre is a fabulous book--insightful, colorful, and very thorough. I don't understand what that other reviewer could possible be referencing in regard to this author's so-called "mistakes." The author's sources are impeccably researched, and there is such a variety and depth of materials in all the footnotes, sources and index. Ms. Keith brings these characters to life. I was left with a concrete picture of this horrible event. The storytelling really offers the texture and the experience of those times. For anyone interested in this subject matter, this is a must read. Ms. Keith has created a gem of a masterpiece with this book!

17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent book, and all too timely, January 8, 2008

By 

Maxwell Grant (Pelham, NY) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (Hardcover)

LeeAnna Keith's book explores what was surely one of the most tragic moments in the history of Reconstruction -- a moment when the hopes of African-Americans and the anger and fear of Southern whites clashed with particular violence. This alone would make it an important story.

However, the book also represents a recovery effort of sorts, because subsequent historians of the period have not given the massacre the treatment it merits. And so, an event that the white community claimed initially with pride for their own defiance has all but ceased to be part of the larger history of Reconstruction...and the massacre has almost seemed to pass in silence.

The recent events in Jena, Louisiana prove that the tensions and ironies surrounding race, class and identity in the American South remain, and that they draw on an old, old symbolic and dramatic vocabulary -- a vocabulary that our history compels us to see clearly.

Keith's work will help us immeasureably to see history and current events with a deeper, if painful new honesty.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars How Louisiana Lightning Jolted Reconstruction, September 2, 2009

By 

bronx book nerd (Bronx, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (Hardcover)

As I read more history I begin to undertand why historians say that the transition from the end of the Civil War through Reconstruction, perhaps a total decade or so, shaped the social and cultural landscape of this country for the next 100 years, until the civil rights movement of the 1960's turned things around. One of the emblematic episodes of the Civil War-Reconstruction period was the Colfax Massacre, an incident where more than 150 blacks were killed in a confrontation with whites at a local courthouse in Colfax Louisiana. In 1873, recently freed African Americans sought to ascertain and enforce the rigths that they had won as a result of their freedom, particularly the right to vote. Elections in the South since the end of the war were fraught with irregularites, fraud, intimidation and murder, as they were caught up in the continuing battle between the Federal government's efforts to reconstruct and restrain the old Southern imperatives and the southern conservative white population's efforts to return to their ante bellum world. Northern carpetbaggers, southern Republicans aligned with Federal goals, southern Democrats advocating for southern interests, and white supremacists, in the form of the Klu Klux Klan and similarly motivated groups, created a political landscape that constantly shifted, with democrats and republicans trading elected offices, at one point resulting in the first contested ballot for the governorship.

It is under these circumstances that author LeeAnn Keith relates the events leading up to and following the Colfax Massacre. Her effort to impart the significance of the event generally succeeds; however, at times her writing style - here and there overly dramatic - congests the narrative and makes it difficult to follow the sequence of events and more so the wide and changing cast of characters. Nevertheless, her work provides an important higlight of a particular event that helped set the tone for the next 100 years: after the Colfax defendants were released based on a Supreme Court ruling, giving southern whites unintended judicial endorcement of their pre-war policies, and for all intents and purpose, despite the implicit mandate of the south's loss of the war, sending the message that social and political relations could pretty much return to their pre-war configurations.

I think the book could also have benefited from more details about daily life in Colfax and Louisiana, as these details make only cameo appearances and leave the reader with a superficial sense of the daily context of living in this era. Nevertheless, the book is an important contribution to Civil War and American History literature, provides a clear view of the role that judicial decisions would play in unintentionally aiding and abetting Jim Crow laws, and brings to light the extent of potential political and economic power that freed African Americans had immediately after the end of the war, in the form of judgeships, sherrifs posts and other elected positions, only to be lost after the Colfax Massacre and related judicial decisions.