Louisiana town erects monument to pay homage to victims of bloody Colfax Massacre

The Colfax Massacre was the deadliest atrocity of the Reconstruction Era in the South.

Apr 20, 2023

A new monument erected in a rural Louisiana town honors the Black residents killed in the 1873 Colfax Massacre, nola.com reports.

The marker installed last week in Colfax arrived in time for the 150th anniversary of the Colfax Massacre on Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873. The 7-foot granite structure lists 57 Black people slain in the melee. It also boasts artwork from visual artist Jazzmen Lee-Johnson highlighting the Black experience during Reconstruction.

Avery Hamilton and Charles Dean Wood stand on either side of the Colfax Massacre Memorial monument, which honors the Black residents who were killed in the 1873 Colfax Massacre. (Credit: Colfax Memorial Organization)

The original marker, placed near the Grant Parish Courthouse in 1951, commemorated the racial massacre when white Confederate sympathizers slaughtered newly emancipated Black voters, NBC News reports.

The unprovoked killing of Jesse McKinney at the hands of white people on April 5, 1873, is believed to have triggered the violence. Fearful Black residents sought refuge in the Grant Parish Courthouse after the killing of McKinney. Over the next week, whites allegedly spread false rumors that Black people were rioting in the town.

On April 13, a mob of angry white men attacked dozens of Black men guarding the courthouse, as NBC News reports.

“There was a band of whites, 10 to 15, rode up on my great-great-great-grandfather who was on his farm, mending his fences,” said Avery Hamilton, 57, a descendant of Jesse McKinney, NBC News reports. “And they rode up on him without a word or warning and just shot him. And his wife and their children witnessed this.

The Colfax Massacre was the bloodiest atrocity of the post-slavery era. According to estimates, 57 to 80 Black people died in the tragedy.

Blacks residents of Colfax, Louisiana gather the dead and wounded from the 1873 “Colfax Massacre.” (Published in Harper’s Weekly; Photo by MPI/Getty Images)

Federal troops arrested several white men in connection with the massacre and nine faced charges in the U.S. v. Cruikshank case. In 1876, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the defendants.

The original marker honored three white men who died in the slaughter but the town removed it in 2021. As nola.com reports, a cemetery in Colfax boasts an obelisk erected in 1921 that pays tribute to three white “heroes” who “fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy.”

Hamilton and Charles Dean Woods — descendants of those involved in the incident or events leading up to it — spearheaded the installation of the new marker for the Colfax Memorial Organization, NBC News reports. Donors reportedly raised around $65,000 to build the new monument.

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The new marker serves as a reminder of the larger impact of the people killed in the Colfax Riot. “The impact on Black Americans was much more than those 57 to 80 people that were killed,” said Woods, whose great-grandfather was reportedly involved in the massacre.

He continued, “It was on millions and millions of African Americans who were denied their rights until the early ‘60s. And even now, we still have struggles in America with people who don’t provide equal rights to all men.”