White Terrorists – book review by Kevin Boyle

(Thank you to Sam Anderson for posting this review of two books about white terrorists)

THE COLFAX MASSACRE
The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of
Reconstruction.

By LeeAnna Keith.
Illustrated. 219 pp. Oxford University Press. $24.95.

THE DAY FREEDOM DIED
The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of
Reconstruction.

By Charles Lane.
Illustrated. 326 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $27.

In the middle of the Colfax, La., cemetery stands a 12-foot-high obelisk.
It’s weathered now. But in its day it must have been a grand sight,
towering over the rows of gravestones, its marble glinting in the
Southern sun. The monument was built as a tribute to three local white
men, “the heroes,” according to its inscription, “who fell in the Colfax
riot fighting for white supremacy” on April 13, 1873 — Easter Sunday.
There is no mention of the estimated 81 black people who were murdered
that day.

The omission is hardly unusual. Many communities harbor stories of
horrific racial violence — lynchings, expulsions, even mass murder — that
were so thoroughly suppressed they’re only now coming to light. What’s
more startling is the monument’s frankness. The “heroes” of Colfax
certainly did go to war on behalf of white supremacy. And in the course
of one bloody Sunday, they assured its triumph across the nation.

The violence in Colfax grew out of the complexities of Reconstruction-era
politics. By 1868 the federal government, under the control of radical
Republicans, had forced Louisiana to rewrite the state constitution to
guarantee African-Americans equal rights, including the right to vote.
Immediately, black voters swept into office a full slate of Republicans
committed to Washington’s agenda: the new governor was a former colonel
in the Union Army, while a quarter of the 137 state legislators were
black. As soon as the results were in, enraged whites took up armed
resistance against the new government. And, inevitably, Louisiana tumbled
into chaos.

The violence was particularly ferocious in tiny Colfax, in central
Louisiana. The town and its surrounding parish, once a sprawling sugar
and cotton plantation, constituted a Republican stronghold anchored by
the area’s black majority. But local whites mounted a sustained campaign
of terror against party loyalists. Black and white Republicans were
threatened, beaten and killed, all in a desperate bid to drive them away
from the polls and out of office. In 1872 — after four years of bloodshed
— the Republicans finally cracked. Amid widespread intimidation and
obvious fraud, white supremacists, running as Democrats, swept that
year’s election in Colfax.

But the Republican governor refused to accept the results. So 1873 began
with two factions claiming to be Colfax’s legitimate government. The
conflict peaked in March, when a contingent of black Republicans occupied
the courthouse right in the center of town. The white Democrats promised
to drive them out. For three weeks the two sides prepared for battle. On
Easter, the whites — 165 men strong — attacked. Within a few hours they
had overrun the Republicans’ defenses and set the courthouse on fire.
When the black men tried to surrender, the whites slaughtered them. By
dawn on Easter Monday, Colfax was littered with corpses.

LeeAnna Keith and Charles Lane bring significantly different perspectives
to this appalling story. In “The Colfax Massacre,” Keith, who teaches
history at the Collegiate School in New York, painstakingly recreates the
town’s complicated racial and political dynamics, both before and after
emancipation. She places its leading family, the Calhouns, at the center,
and their twists and turns take up almost a third of her brief book.
Centering a story of black activism on a slave-owning family might seem
strange, but it works, largely because the Calhouns never played to type.
Having made their fortune on the labor of 700 slaves, Meredith and Mary
Calhoun abandoned Louisiana in 1859 for a tasteful Parisian pied-à-terre,
leaving control of their vast holdings to their hunchbacked son, Willie,
who in short order took a black woman as his common-law wife and made
himself the region’s foremost radical Republican. When trouble came to
Colfax, Willie stood by the men and women he had once claimed to own.

Admirable as it is, Keith’s local focus undercuts her ability to fully
explore the wider meaning of the massacre. In “The Day Freedom Died,”
Lane finds a better balance. A former Supreme Court reporter for The
Washington Post, he is perfectly comfortable with the play of politics
and the intricacies of the law. So while he builds an absorbing narrative
of events in Colfax — his chapter on the massacre itself is riveting —
he’s careful to frame them within the political wars then raging in New
Orleans and Washington.

The stakes were extremely high. Radical Reconstruction was a
revolutionary experiment, an attempt to create from the ruins of the
Civil War a nation that lived up to its promise of equality. By 1873 the
experiment was coming undone, the great hopes for it frayed by the
South’s enormous resistance and the North’s fading will to stand against
racial oppression. Then, with the news from Colfax, matters came to a
head.

On the surface the issue seemed arcane. The Justice Department charged
nine of the massacre’s ringleaders with conspiring to deprive their
victims of the civil rights guaranteed them by the 14th Amendment. The
defendants’ lawyers countered that the amendment didn’t empower the
federal government to prosecute citizens in such a way; that
responsibility remained with state governments. Behind the technical
constitutional question, though, lay a profoundly important practical
issue. Everyone understood that Southern state governments wouldn’t
prosecute whites who murdered blacks. So if the Supreme Court ruled that
the Colfax prosecution was unconstitutional, white supremacists could
wage war against African-Americans with absolute impunity. When that
happened, Reconstruction was almost sure to collapse.

Lane devotes the second part of “The Day Freedom Died” to the legal
maneuvering that followed the massacre. That’s a risky decision, since
complex constitutional questions don’t lend themselves to sprightly
storytelling. But he manages to turn the case, United States v.
Cruikshank, into a legal thriller, complete with crusading lawyers,
courtroom confrontations and soaring declarations of principle. “I look
forward to the day,” the attorney general told the justices at the close
of oral arguments, “when we can consider ourselves not a nation of
inharmonious and warring sovereigns, but a Union whose broad shield shall
protect … her people from one end to the other.”

That day was long in coming. In March 1876, the court ruled against the
federal government’s position. The Colfax defendants went free, and
racial violence spiked everywhere in the South. Within a year
Reconstruction was dead. And the United States began its descent into a
systematic segregation so powerful it would endure for almost 100 years.

Colfax’s whites dedicated the monument to their dead on a drab day in the
spring of 1921. By then white supremacy was so firmly entrenched it had
become a point of pride, something to celebrate in stone. And the town’s
whites undoubtedly thought it just as well not to mention the bones
buried in unmarked graves around the Colfax courthouse. The time for
silence has long since passed. Colfax will probably never build an
obelisk to honor the massacre’s victims. But with his gripping book,
Charles Lane has given them a memorial every bit as imposing.

Kevin Boyle teaches history at Ohio State University. His most recent
book is “Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the
Jazz Age.”