Colfax

That's the end of the experiment of a multiracial democracy in the United States.

That's the ugliness of Colfax, Louisiana.

Hundreds of Black folk murdered.

That's the ugliness of Vicksburg, Mississippi.

It's really been discovered by American publishers and certainly by American writers.

There are no less than three new books out on either the Colfax Massacre, which we'll talk about in a minute, or what Lemann does mostly in his book, which is the story of Mississippi, sometimes called the Shotgun Policy, sometimes called the Mississippi Plan, but in effect the coup d'état whereby the white Democrats of Mississippi took back control of that state largely by terrorist violence, political violence in 1875.

The titles of these books strike me.

Redemption, The Last Battle of the Civil War.

Charles Lane's book, a good journalistic popular writer, a whole book on the Colfax Massacre entitled The Day Freedom Died.

One Day.

Then there's another book by a young New York private high school teacher, proof that good books can be written by anyone.

The Colfax Massacre, The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction.

You know, this is, you know, it's not, you know, just limited to the voting context.

And one of those cases, I think, that really needs more attention is involving Colfax in Colfax, Louisiana, the Colfax massacre.

Why don't you talk more about the Colfax case, if you would?

Yeah, for sure.

The Colfax Massacre was a massacre of dozens of black men in a small town called Colfax in Louisiana.

There was a dispute over who had won the local elections there in 1872 between the black majority and the white minority in that parish.

And the black people in the parish gathered to protest.

We don't see any race-based motive there.

But eventually, you can only run for so long.

And I ended up getting arrested in fucking Colfax, central Louisiana, Bunky and Dry Prong, all that shit.

I got arrested on some bullshit writing graffiti.

That's what I went to jail for.

The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866, and it quickly became a terrorist organization, targeting Republicans, both black and white, beating and murdering men and women in order to intimidate them and keep them from voting.

The worst act of violence was probably the massacre at Colfax, Louisiana, where hundreds of former slaves were murdered.

And between intimidation and emerging discriminatory voting laws, fewer black men voted, which allowed white Democrats to take control of state governments in the South and returned white Democratic congressional delegations to Washington.

These white Southern politicians called themselves Redeemers because they claimed to have redeemed the South from Northern Republican corruption and black rule.