Goldstone - Unpunished murder: massacre at Colfax and the quest for justice

Contents

TO NANCY AND LEE

AT THE END OF the prologue in Unpunished Murder , historian Lawrence Goldstone writes, The story of Colfax, then, is the story of America. No truer words could be written. Yet very few Americans know the story of the Colfax Massacre, in which more than one hundred African-American men were slaughtered by white supremacists on Easter Sunday 1873.

For more than two centuries, our students have learned only partial truths about the racial hatred and denigration underlying much of our nations historyfor example, the false claim that slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War was widely taught for many years. It is important, perhaps now more than ever, to move past such myths, and to confront this nations true racial history.

My own experiences as a student illustrate precisely why Unpunished Murder is such a vital contribution to young readers literature. Too many of the history lessons I received during my primary and secondary school days in Texas public schools erased the impact that African-Americans, including slaves, made on the building and development of our nation, and sanitized the abominations of slavery and other racist systems and practices. As a young black student in the South, I not only felt alienated by the incomplete and, in some instances, inaccurate history that I was learning in the classroom, I also felt cheated by the fact that, in order to learn about African-American history, Mexican-American history, and Native American history, I had to seek out such knowledge for myself. I wish books like Unpunished Murder had been available to me then.

In this fine work, Lawrence Goldstone not only traces the complex and often inspiring experiment in self-government that was the United States, he also compellingly describes how its political system, and especially the United States Supreme Court, repeatedly failed to protect the rights of African-Americans. In fact, Goldstone details how, during and after Reconstruction, the Court went still further and actively opposed any effort to guarantee equal rights for black citizens. During this period, few Supreme Court decisions were more infamous than that which freed the Colfax Massacre defendants, a travesty that led directly to the horrors of Jim Crow.

Goldstones retelling of the founding of Colfax, a town led by freedmen; the Colfax Massacre; two ensuing trials; and other events leading up to and following the tragic massacre is not only an honest and shrewd collection of many narratives of and about America, but it is also an American treasure in that he provides a solid foundation upon which readers can better understand the inequities and racial tensions that still exist in our society.

Unpunished Murder tells the story of a conflicted America that has long been ignored by manya story about an America that impressively charted a path toward becoming the most powerful country in the world, while never living up to its promise of genuine equality for African-Americans. It is a tale of unparalleled opportunity for whites through the Homestead Act, which provided many white settlers each with 160 acres of public land in the West, alongside the unfulfilled promise of 40 acres and a mule for each newly freed slave who had toiled on plantation soil.

In the end, after describing the events and lives that have undergirded the great battles that determined not only the laws of a new nation, but also its soul, Goldstone proclaims that [t]hose battles continue today. Indeed they do, but I for one am hopeful that, with the guidance of books such as Unpunished Murder , our soulsthe nations soulwill one day be healed.

Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Chancellors Professor of Law

University of California, Berkeley School of Law

IN 1873, EIGHT YEARS after the end of the Civil War, Levi Nelson was finally free to toil as a blacksmith for his own sake rather than for the white man who had owned him. He lived in Grant Parish, Louisiana, an isolated area on the Red River in the northcentral part of the state. There were many other freedmenas emancipated slaves were calledin Grant Parish, more black residents than white.

Three years before, in 1870, the United States Constitution had been amended to guarantee adult African-American males the right to vote, a privilege unthinkable just a decade before. And so, for the first time in his life, Levi Nelson could choose to be governed by men whose skin color was the same as his own. In another radical change, Colfax, the parish seat, was home to a unit of the Louisiana militia commanded by William Ward, a black Union army veteran, and many of Wards recruits were freedmen as well, although few of them had any military training.

If Levi Nelsons freedoms were new, so was the district in which he lived. Grant Parish had been created only in 1869, carved out of adjacent Winn and Rapides Parishes, both of which remained largely white. (A parish is the same as a county.) Almost the entire area had been part of the Calhoun plantation, owned by Willie Calhoun, one of those rare Southern white men who believed that black people deserved the same rights as every other American. At Calhouns urging, Louisianas Republican legislature had created the new parish to give freedmen a base of political power. They had named it after President Ulysses S. Grant, and named the town after Vice President Schuyler Colfax. Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln and almost all African-Americans, had become a force in Southern politics since the United States Army had been sent into the conquered Confederacy to guarantee the very rights that Levi Nelson now enjoyed.

Democrats, virtually all of whom were white, loathed these changesmost considered freed slaves little more than beasts. The most ferocious of the white supremacists, who called themselves Redeemers, had banded together across the South in groups such as the Ku Klux Klan to fight any attempt to raise the political and economic status of freedmen. Their weapons were terror and murder. In one period, between April and November 1868, more than one thousand freedmen were murdered by whites.

In Grant Parish, the freedmen fought back. Colfax was the scene of a number of skirmishes, and in the first week of April 1873, whites attempting to take over the town government had been repeatedly beaten back by black defenders. On April 13, 1873, Easter Sunday, Redeemers decided once and for all to take Grant Parish back.

The invaders arrived at dawnperhaps two hundred armed white men, some on horseback, others dragging a four-pound cannon. Many were Confederate war veterans and came armed with modern rifles, pistols, and shotguns. Some had journeyed from up to four hundred miles away to participate in the assault. Fearing this very sort of attack, William Ward had earlier ordered trenches to be dug around the courthouse. Ward himself had traveled to New Orleans to explain how desperate the situation was and to attempt to persuade the governor to send reinforcements.

Word had arrived days earlier of the impending Redeemer attack and many local black men, including Levi Nelson, along with women and children, perhaps four hundred in all, had gathered in and around the courthouse for protection. More than one hundred freedmen, about half of them armed, but only with antiquated shotguns, had taken up positions either in the courthouse or in the surrounding trenches.