[On September 10th,
1897, striking coal miners at the Lattimer mine near Hazleton, PA, were attacked
by a sheriff’s posse, killing at least 19 and wounding many more. So this
week I’ll AmericanStudy historical massacres, leading up to a special weekend
post on contemporary hate crimes.]
I’ve written a
good deal, in this space and elsewhere, about the 1898
Wilmington massacre and the 1921
Tulsa massacre (both too often described as “race riots”), among
other such acts of racial violence. But just as under-remembered, and perhaps
even more historically telling, are the massacres that marred and helped
undermine Reconstruction. Here are three:
1)
New Orleans
(1866): In late July, 1866, a group of African Americans (many of them Civil
War veterans) marching to the Louisiana Constitutional Convention were stopped
and attacked by Mayor John Monroe (a longtime Confederate sympathizer and white
supremacist), New Orleans police forces, and an angry white mob. As happened in
Wilmington, Tulsa, and so many other massacres, this individual starting point
morphed into a
city-wide rampage against African Americans citizens and communities, one
that ended with hundreds of African Americans (both convention delegates and
others) dead and wounded. This massacre took place early enough in
Reconstruction that a federal response was both possible and swift—Monroe and
many other officials were moved from office, and Reconstruction efforts in the
city intensified. Yet at the same time, the New Orleans massacre (along with
another 1866 massacre,
in Memphis) reveals just how fully white supremacists were prepared to use official and political as well as
mob and vigilante violence to oppose both Reconstruction and African
American rights.
2)
Colfax
(1873): By the early 1870s, such white supremacist racial violence had been
codified into organized groups—most famously the Ku Klux Klan, but
also parallel groups such as Louisiana’s White
League (which, as that platform reflects, was not only a paramilitary
terrorist group but also a political appendage of the state’s Democratic
Party). Not coincidentally, the League’s first organized action was the Colfax
Massacre, in which members attacked an African American militia; although at
first shots were exchanged by both sides, the militiamen were outnumbered and
quickly surrendered, only to continue being massacred by the League members.
All told more than 100 African Americans were killed, and only three White
League members convicted of murder—and those convictions were overturned
by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. The Charles Lane book reviewed at
that last hyperlink argues in its subtitle that both Colfax and the Court
decision represented “the betrayal of Reconstruction,” and it’s hard not to
agree that by this time, every level of America’s social and political power
structure seemed allied with the white supremacists.
3)
Hamburg (1876):
The ultimate betrayal and abandonment of Reconstruction are usually associated
with the 1876
Presidential election, but racial violence played a significant part in
that culminating year as well. In many ways, the massacre
in Hamburg (South Carolina) echoes the others I’ve written about here: a
seemingly small incident of racial tension (two white farmers had a difficult
time driving their wagon through a July 4th march by African American
militiamen) exploded into an orgy of racial violence, as a July 8th
attempt to disband the militia was followed by the arrival of a white mob who
first attacked the militia’s armory and then expanded
their massacre to much of the city’s African American population. Yet not
only were there no federal or legal responses to the massacre, but instead it
became part of the Democratic Party’s triumph in the state’s elections, as white
supremacist candidate Wade Hampton uses a mythologized narrative of the
massacre as a “race riot” to help gain the governor’s seat and put an end to
Reconstruction in South Carolina—one more reflection of the central role that
these acts of racial violence played in opposing and undermining Reconstruction
throughout the period.
Last massacre
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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