The Colfax Massacre [View all]
Leeanna Keith
Oxford University Press (2009)]
219pp
Colfax is two hundred or so miles from New Orleans. The local cemetery contains an obelisk, erected in the 1920s
Nearby is a historical marker, placed by the state in 1950
This book is an account of events on Easter Sunday, 1873, placed in a rather careful context, beginning with the clearing of the Red River logjam forty years earlier and continuing through the outcome of the case US v Cruikshank, in which the US Supreme Court -- in a decision that effectively gutted the Reconstruction-era Congressional anti-Klan laws -- voided the very few federal convictions that resulted from the massacre, a decision almost immediately regarded as establishing that "no white man could be punished for killing a negro," with the result that a number of other murders followed almost instantly
The text is dense, well-documented, and an interesting read, which provides some insight into a time often quickly glossed over
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