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  • Remembering the Colfax Massacre:Race, Sex, and the Meanings of Reconstruction Violence
  • David T. Ballantyne (bio)

The Colfax Massacre—dubbed a "riot" by the victors—left three white and at least sixty-three Black men dead on Easter Sunday 1873, making it one of Reconstruction's bloodiest racial confrontations.1 A disaster for southern Republicans, it showed that Louisiana's Republican government could not defend its supporters from white paramilitaries. Spilling over from the state's remarkably fraudulent 1872 elections, the crisis began as both Republicans and Fusionists (a combination of Democrats and others opposed to the state's regular Republican Party) claimed the parish offices at Colfax, in Grant Parish, a local jurisdiction with a slight Black majority created by state Republicans in 1869.2 In late March 1873, Republican office claimants, most of whom were white, occupied the parish courthouse under the protection of Black militiamen. Amid rumors of Black criminality and sexual threats against white women, white men from Grant and surrounding parishes quickly organized to expel the Republicans. [End Page 427] As tensions rose, the African Americans, facing assault from white paramilitaries, started digging defenses around the courthouse. On April 13, after all the white Republicans had fled, the Fusionist sheriff claimant Christopher Columbus Nash led an attack on the building. With the help of a steamboat cannon, the white paramilitaries burned the courthouse, forcing the Black militiamen to surrender. Later, the attackers murdered most of the prisoners. The ensuing trial of the white paramilitaries ended with the U.S. Supreme Court's U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876) decision, which gutted the federal government's ability to prosecute terrorist violence.3

Seeking to justify violence on a scale that had troubled even conservative Louisianans, local white elites argued that the Republican governor, William Pitt Kellogg, had caused the confrontation, and they embraced a series of implausible claims about Black deviance; initially, these ranged from allegations of interracial sexual threats, robberies, and coffin desecration in the days before the battle, to contending that African Americans fired under a flag of truce. Most brazenly, they later linked the massacre to an alleged October 1873 Black-on-white rape that occurred when a biracial state militia sought to arrest white Colfax paramilitaries. By the mid-1870s, some white Louisianans contended that one or more Black-on-white rapes had preceded the April 1873 battle, a tendency that became more pronounced in subsequent decades, even among the paramilitaries themselves.4

"[I]maginative errors," as oral historian Alessandro Portelli contends, are themselves useful to historians, as they provide "the shared subjective dreams, desires, and myths of the narrators."5 Psychological research [End Page 428] has also demonstrated individuals' susceptibility to false memory formation, especially when the new memory reinforces their prior beliefs.6 The errors that Colfax paramilitaries and their supporters embraced, such as the recurring motif that African Americans had fired during a truce, mirrored the struggle other narrators faced in rationalizing even seemingly "just" violence: for example, narratives of Italian antifascist fighting in the 1940s presented partisan violence as a defensive response to attempted fascist attacks.7 Moreover, though the claim was self-serving— and initially clearly false—an alleged Black-on-white rape, for white central Louisianans in the 1870s and later, was a far more plausible, justifiable, and seemingly proportionate cause for a white-led massacre than a disputed election, white paranoia about militarized Black citizenship, or rumored Black sexual threats against white women.8

White responses to Black men's sexual contact with white women, real and imagined, were never uniformly violent, but white conservatives deemed supposedly bestial Black behavior sufficiently persuasive in the 1870s to use it, together with supposed state-level Republican misrule and alleged Black criminality and dishonor, to excuse white paramilitary mass violence to a national audience.9 Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan apologists used nebulous claims of Black sexual impropriety and other misconduct to justify widespread vigilante violence; with Colfax, white conservatives used similar rationales to defend a mass killing.10 Although scholars have debated the key moment for the emergence of a Black rapist myth that demonized Black men and dis-empowered white women, the Colfax case...

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