The Deadliest Massacre in Reconstruction-Era Louisiana Happened 150 Years Ago

In September 1868, Southern white Democrats hunted down around 200 African-Americans in an effort to suppress voter turnout

It is the 150^th anniversary of the most notorious massacre in Afro-American history.  It took place in Opelousas in the St Landry parish of Louisiana.  Following the American Civil War (1861-65) there followed the era of Reconstruction when the 11 Confederate States were integrated with the North.  It was an era in which the Black slaves were freed and in which the Southern White Supremacists attempted to cling on to their power. As Blacks were being enfranchised the old Southern White establishment reacted. It was an era of the KKK and of many bloody massacres and lynchings.

For those who see the Democrats as the left-wing or more progressive party it should be noted that in the 19^th century it was the Republicans who were the integrationists and the Democrats who were the bastion of White supremacy and segregation.  As late as the 1968 Presidential election Democratic segregationism was represented in American politics by George Wallace, the 3^rd party candidate and former Governor of Alabama who won 13.5% of the vote in the Presidential election and 32 electoral college votes. He bears a number of similarities to Donald Trump.

The article below commemorates the 150^th anniversary of the Opelousas massacre. It makes sober reading.  Matthew Christensen writes that:

The St. Landry Massacre is representative of the pervasive violence and intimidation in the South during the 1868 presidential canvass and represented the deadliest incident of racial violence during the Reconstruction Era. Southern conservatives used large scale collective violence in 1868 as a method to gain political control and restore the antebellum racial hierarchy. From 1865-1868, these Southerners struggled against the federal government, carpetbaggers, and Southern black populations to gain this control, but had largely failed in their attempts. After the First Reconstruction Act of March, 1867 forced Southern governments to accept universal male suffrage, Southern conservatives utilized violence and intimidation to achieve their goals, which escalated as the 1868 presidential election neared. Violence was nearly omnipresent in Louisiana during the presidential canvass and was the primary reason behind the Democratic victory in the state.

A cartoon from a U.S. newspaper from 1880 reads: ’Terrorism in the South. Citizens beaten and shot at.”

“E.B. Beware! K.K.K.”

So read the note found on the schoolhouse door by its intended recipient: Emerson Bentley, a white school teacher. He found the message in early September 1868, illustrated with a coffin, a skull and bones, and a dagger dripping with blood. The straightforward message represented a menacing threat to Bentley, who was teaching African-American children in Louisiana at the time. Little could the Ohio-born Republican have predicted just how soon that violence would come about.

Bentley, an 18-year-old who also worked as one of the editors of the Republican paper The St. Landry Progress, was one of the few white Republicans in the Louisiana parish of St. Landry. He and others came to the region to assist recently emancipated African-Americans find jobs, access education and become politically active. With Louisiana passing a new state constitution in April 1868 that included male enfranchisement and access to state schools regardless of color, Bentley had reason to feel optimistic about the state’s future.

But southern, white Democrats were nowhere near willing to concede the power they’d held for decades before the Civil War. And in St. Landry, one of the largest and most populous parishes in the state, thousands of white men were eager to take up arms to defend their political power.

The summer of 1868 was a tumultuous one. With the help of tens of thousands of black citizens who finally had the right to vote, Republicans handily won local and state elections that spring. Henry Clay Warmoth, a Republican, won the race for state governor, but the votes African-Americans cast for those elections cost them. Over the summer, armed white men harassed black families, shot at them outside of Opelousas (the largest city in St. Landry Parish), and killed men, women and children with impunity. Editors of Democratic newspapers repeatedly warned of dire consequences if the Republican party continued winning victories at the polls.

Those editorials spurred Democrats to action and instigated violence everywhere, wrote Warmoth in his book War, Politics, and Reconstruction: Stormy Days in Louisiana. “Secret Democratic organizations were formed, and all armed. We had ‘The Knights of the White Camellia,’ ‘The Ku-Klux Klan,’ and an Italian organization called ‘The Innocents,’ who nightly paraded the streets of New Orleans and the roads in the country parishes, producing terror among the Republicans.”

The vigilante groups were so widespread that they often included nearly every white man in the region. One Democratic newspaper editor estimated that more than 3,000 men belonged to the Knights of the White Camellia of St. Landry Parish—an area that included only 13,776 white people in total, including women and children.

With the approach of the presidential elections in November, the tension only increased. On September 13, the Republicans held a meeting in the town of Washington, not far from Opelousas, and found streets lined with armed Seymour Knights. A misfired rifle nearly caused a riot to break out, but in the end, everyone departed peacefully—though the Democrats threatened Bentley if he failed to publish an “honest” account of the event in the St. Landry Progress. Sure enough, they used Bentley’s account, in which he wrote the men had been intimidating the Republicans, to instigate a wave of violence on September 28, 1868.

Displeased with the way Bentley had portrayed the Democrats, Democrats John Williams, James R. Dickson (who later became a local judge), and constable Sebastian May visited Bentley’s schoolhouse to make good on the anonymous threats of the earlier September note. They forced him to sign a retraction of the article, and then Dickson savagely beat Bentley, sending the children who were sitting for lessons scattering in terror. Rumors spread, and soon many Republicans were convinced Bentley had been killed, though he managed to escape with his life. As a small number of African-Americans prepared to rescue Bentley, word spread around the parish that a black rebellion was imminent. Thousands of white men began arming themselves and raiding houses around the area.

“St. Landrians reacted to armed Negroes and rumors of an uprising in the same manner that Southerners had reacted for generations,” wrote historian Carolyn deLatte in 1976. “If anything, the vengeance visited upon the Negro population was greater, as blacks were no longer protected by any consideration of their monetary value.”

On the first night, only one small group of armed African-Americans assembled to deal with the report they’d heard about Bentley. They were met by an armed group of white men, mounted on horses, outside Opelousas. Of those men, 29 were taken to the local prison, and 27 of them were summarily executed. The bloodshed continued for two weeks, with African-American families killed in their homes, shot in public, and chased down by vigilante groups. C.E. Durand, the other editor of the St. Landry Progress, was murdered in the early days of the massacre and his body displayed outside the Opelousas drug store. By the end of the two weeks, estimates of the number killed were around 250 people, the vast majority of them African-American.

When the Bureau of Freedmen (a governmental organization created to provide emancipated African-Americans with legal, health and educational assistance and help them settle abandoned lands) sent Lieutenant Jesse Lee to investigate, he called it “a quiet reign of terror so far as the freed people were concerned.” Influential Republican Beverly Wilson, an African-American blacksmith in Opelousas, believed black citizens were “in a worse condition now than in slavery.” Another observer was led outside the town of Opelousas and shown the half-buried bodies of more than a dozen African-Americans.

But Democratic papers—the only remaining sources of news in the region, as all Republican presses had been burned—downplayed the horrific violence. “The people generally are well satisfied with the result of the St. Landry riot, only they regret that the Carpet-Baggers escaped,” wrote Daniel Dennet, editor of the Democratic Franklin Planter’s Banner. “The editor escaped; and a hundred dead negroes, and perhaps a hundred more wounded and crippled, a dead white Radical, a dead Democrat, and three or four wounded Democrats are the upshot of the business.”

The groups managed to achieve their ultimate purpose, as was borne out by the results of the November presidential elections. Even though Republican nominee Ulysses Grant won, not a single Republican vote was counted in St. Landry Parish. Those who oversaw the election felt “fully convinced that no man on that day could have voted any other than the democratic ticket and not been killed inside of 24 hours thereafter.”

“St. Landry Parish illustrates the local shift of power after 1868, where an instance of conservative boss rule occurred and the parish Republican Party was unable to fully recover for the remainder of Reconstruction,” writes historian Matthew Christensen. There would be no Republican organization in the parish for the next four years, and no Republican paper until 1876.

The Opelousas massacre also set the stage for future acts of violence and intimidation. “Lynching became routinized in Louisiana, a systematic way by which whites sought to assert white supremacy in response to African-American resistance,” said historian Michael Pfeifer, the author of The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching, by email. “This would be an important precedent for the subsequent wave of lynchings that occurred in Louisiana from the 1890s through the early decades of the twentieth century, in which lynch mobs killed more than 400 persons, most of them African American.”

Yet for all that it was the deadliest instance of racial violence during the Reconstruction period, the Opleousas massacre is little remembered today. Only slightly better known is the 1873 Colfax massacre in which an estimated 60 to 150 people were killed—a massacre largely following the pattern set by Opelousas.

“The United States has done comparatively little until quite recently to memorialize its history of significant racial violence,” Pfeifer said. “Reconstruction remains contested in local memory and efforts to remember the achievements of Reconstruction are cancelled out by the seeming failure of the period to achieve lasting change.”

Lorraine Boissoneault is a contributing writer to SmithsonianMag.com covering history and archaeology. She has previously written for The Atlantic, Salon, Nautilus and others. She is also the author of The Last Voyageurs: Retracing La Salle’s Journey Across America. Website: http://www.lboissoneault.com/

See also White Mob in Opelousas, Louisiana killed nearly 300 Blacks Over The Right To Vote.

Overlooked Ida B. Wells – One of the First Black Journalists

I first intended to publish this article from the New York Times on international women’s day about a largely unknown Black journalist.  However it is as appropriate now as it was then.  I apologise if people find the graphic disturbing however it is important that people understand the nature of racism in the United States until recently.  When we contrast this with the false and fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign in the Labour Party then people should be rightly angry.

Tony Greenstein

She took on racism in the Deep South with powerful reporting on lynchings

By CAITLIN DICKERSON

Ida B. Wells, one of the nation’s most influential investigative reporters, in 1920. Chicago History Museum/Getty Images

It was not all that unusual when, in 1892, a mob dragged Thomas Moss out of a Memphis jail in his pyjamas and shot him to death over a feud that began with a game of marbles. But his lynching changed history because of its effect on one of the nation’s most influential journalists, who was also the godmother of his first child: Ida B. Wells.

“It is with no pleasure that I have dipped my hands in the corruption here exposed,” Wells wrote in 1892 in the introduction to “Southern Horrors,” one of her seminal works about lynching, “Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so.”

Wells is considered by historians to have been the most famous black woman in the United States during her lifetime, even as she was dogged by prejudice, a disease infecting Americans from coast to coast.

She pioneered reporting techniques that remain central tenets of modern journalism. And as a former slave who stood less than five feet tall, she took on structural racism more than half a century before her strategies were repurposed, often without crediting her, during the 1960s civil rights movement.

Wells was already a 30-year-old newspaper editor living in Memphis when she began her anti-lynching campaign, the work for which she is most famous. After Moss was killed, she set out on a reporting mission, crisscrossing the South over several months as she conducted eyewitness interviews and dug up records on dozens of similar cases.

Her goal was to question a stereotype that was often used to justify lynchings — that black men were rapists. Instead, she found that in two-thirds of mob murders, rape was never an accusation. And she often found evidence of what had actually been a consensual interracial relationship.

She published her findings in a series of fiery editorials in the newspaper she co-owned and edited, The Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. The public, it turned out, was starved for her stories and devoured them voraciously. The Journalist, a mainstream trade publication that covered the media, named her “The Princess of the Press.”

Readers of her work were drawn in by her fine-tooth reporting methods and language that, even by today’s standards, was aberrantly bold.

Wells wrote about the victims of racist violence and organized economic boycotts long before the tactic was popularized.

“There has been no word equal to it in convincing power,” 

Frederick Douglass wrote to her in a letter that hatched their friendship. “I have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison,” he added.

He was referring to writing like the kind that she published in The Free Speech in May 1892.

“Nobody in this section of the country believes the threadbare old lie that Negro men rape white women,” Wells wrote.

Instead, Wells saw lynching as a violent form of subjugation — “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘the nigger down,’ ” she wrote in a journal.

Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Miss., in 1862, less than a year before Emancipation. She grew up during Reconstruction, the period when black men, including her father, were able to vote, ushering black representatives into state legislatures across the South. One of eight siblings, she often tagged along to Bible school on her mother’s hip.

In 1878, her parents both died of yellow fever, along with one of her brothers; and at 16, she took on caring for the rest of her siblings. She supported them by working as a teacher after dropping out of high school and lying about her age. She finished her own education at night and on weekends.

Around the same time, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was largely nullified by the Supreme Court, reversing many of the advancements of Reconstruction. The anti-black sentiment that grew around her was ultimately codified into Jim Crow.

“It felt like a dramatic whiplash,” said Troy Duster, Wells’s grandson, who is a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and New York University. “She cuts her teeth politically in this time of justice, justice, justice, and then injustice.”

Observing the changes around her, Wells decided to become a journalist during what was a golden era for black writers and editors. Her goal was to write about black people for black people, in a way that was accessible to those who, like her, were born the property of white owners and had much to defend.

Her articles were often reprinted abroad, as well as in the more than 200 black weeklies then in circulation in the United States.

Whenever possible, Wells named the victims of racist violence and told their stories. In her journals, she lamented that her subjects would have otherwise been forgotten by all “save the night wind, no memorial service to bemoan their sad and horrible fate.”

Wells also organized economic boycotts long before the tactic was popularized by other, mostly male, civil rights activists, who are often credited with its success.

In 1883, she was forced off a train car reserved for white women. She sued the railroad and lost on appeal before the Tennessee Supreme Court, after which she urged African-Americans to avoid the trains, and later, to leave the South entirely. She also travelled to Britain to rally her cause, encouraging the British to stop purchasing American cotton and angering many white Southern business owners.

Wells was as fierce in conversation as she was in her writing, which made it difficult for her to maintain close relationships, according to her family. She criticized people, including friends and allies, whom she saw as weak in their commitment to the causes she cared about.

“She didn’t suffer fools and she saw fools everywhere,” Duster, her grandson, said.

One exception was her husband and closest confidant, Ferdinand L. Barnett, a widower who was a lawyer and civil rights activist in Chicago. After they married in 1895, Barnett’s activism took a back seat to his wife’s career. Theirs was an atypically modern relationship: He cooked dinner for their children most nights, and he cared for them while she traveled to make speeches and organize.

Later in life, Wells fell from prominence as she was replaced by activists like Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, who were more conservative in their tactics, and thus had more support from the white and black establishments. She helped to found prominent civil rights organizations including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Association of Colored Women, only to be edged out of their leadership.

During the final years of her life, living in Chicago, Wells ran for the Illinois State Senate, but lost abysmally. Despite her ebbing influence, she continued to organize around causes such as mass incarceration, working for several years as a probation officer, until she died of kidney disease on March 25, 1931, at 68.

Wells was threatened physically and rhetorically constantly throughout her career; she was called a harlot and a courtesan for her frankness about interracial sex. After her anti-lynching editorials were published in The Free Speech, she was run out of the South — her newspaper ransacked and her life threatened. But her commitment to chronicling the experience of African-Americans in order to demonstrate their humanity remained unflinching.

“If this work can contribute in any way toward proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service,” she wrote after fleeing Memphis, “Other considerations are minor.”

Correction March 9, 2018

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to voting rights during Reconstruction. Black men were able to vote. Women did not get the right to vote until 1920.

Caitlin Dickerson is a national immigration reporter. More than a century later, she still uses the reporting techniques that were pioneered by Ida B. Wells.