The Colfax Massacre

Leeanna Keith
Oxford University Press (2009)]
219pp

Colfax is two hundred or so miles from New Orleans. The local cemetery contains an obelisk, erected in the 1920s



Nearby is a historical marker, placed by the state in 1950



This book is an account of events on Easter Sunday, 1873, placed in a rather careful context, beginning with the clearing of the Red River logjam forty years earlier and continuing through the outcome of the case US v Cruikshank, in which the US Supreme Court -- in a decision that effectively gutted the Reconstruction-era Congressional anti-Klan laws -- voided the very few federal convictions that resulted from the massacre, a decision almost immediately regarded as establishing that "no white man could be punished for killing a negro," with the result that a number of other murders followed almost instantly

The text is dense, well-documented, and an interesting read, which provides some insight into a time often quickly glossed over