Colfax Massacre
13 April 1873Grant Parish courthouse, Colfax, Grant Parish, LA
A white paramilitary force attacked the Grant Parish courthouse on Easter Sunday and killed an estimated 62 to 150 Black men, most of them after they had surrendered. The prosecution that followed was overturned, gutting federal protection against racial violence.
Louisiana's 1872 election was disputed by both parties, and in Grant Parish, Black Republicans and members of the state militia occupied the courthouse at Colfax to hold the office they had been certified to win. For three weeks they dug earthworks around it.
On Easter Sunday, 13 April 1873, a white force of former Confederates and White League members attacked with rifles and a small cannon. The defenders surrendered. Most of the killing happened afterwards: men shot as prisoners through the evening and into the night, bodies left in the field and the river. Estimates of the Black dead run from 62 to about 150. Three white men died.
Federal prosecutors charged 97 men under the Enforcement Act of 1870; three were convicted. In United States v. Cruikshank (1876) the Supreme Court threw out those convictions, holding that the Fourteenth Amendment constrained states, not private individuals - leaving the federal government without a usable tool against organised racial violence and clearing the way for the overthrow of Reconstruction.
Sources
- Colfax Massacre64 Parishes, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities64parishes.org
- Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (3rd edition)Equal Justice Initiative (2017)eji.org