One Last Vacation Disaster! I Promise!!

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They weren’t all “bad” disasters. After all, the USS Cairo sank during the Civil War and all hands were saved. This one, however, didn’t have that good an outcome. The Colfax Massacre was one of the countless, terrible atrocities that happened in the South during Reconstruction. As with most of the issues, it was angry southern Democrats (don’t think of Democrats then as being the same party as they are now) and their newfound friends the Ku Kux Klan (founded after the Civil War by angry Confederate veterans) attacking the recently-freed slaves who dared to actually attempt to try out their rights as free men. This time, it was in Colfax, Louisiana, the “county seat” of Grant Parish. The background of the massacre — and don’t stop me if this sounds familiar — was a contested election in 1872 for the state’s governor. The Republican candidate, William Pitt Kellogg, won the election; however, the anti-Reconstructionists claimed their candidate (John McEnery) won. (McEnery didn’t formally concede the 1872 election until September, 1874.) This led to skirmishes throughout the state, with each side commandeering government offices. On Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, an armed group of about 300 Klansmen went to the Grant Parish Courthouse, which was occupied by 50 freed slaves and supporters of Kellogg’s rightful election, and aimed a cannon at the building. The men inside the courthouse decided to surrender. Instead of accepting the surrender, however, the Klan turned it into a bloodbath. To this day, there’s no exact number of people murdered in the massacre, because many of the bodies were tossed into the Red River (which runs through Colfax) or tossed into hastily-dug graves. The estimate is 150 dead, along with three Klansmen. The Colfax Memorial lists 57 names of deceased, as these are the ones known to have been killed that day. All historians, however, agree that the Colfax Massacre was Louisiana’s worst Reconstructionist-era attack, and one of the worst in the entire South. The photo you see above is where the attack took place. There used to be an historical marker on the site; however, it was removed for what was deemed “racist” language (using terms such as Negro and carpetbag misrule) in favor of a much larger and more appropriate landmark that’s located elsewhere in the town. This is a painful reminder that some people are still trying to fight that war that ended nearly 160 years ago.