After the two sides exchanged words, the White men told the Black men that they had 30 minutes to lay down their guns and return to their homes. When they didn’t, the Whites caused the building to catch on fire. When the Black men inside tried to surrender and exit, many were shot as soon as they emerged. Others who fled were hunted down and killed. Even more were taken prisoner, then marched out into surrounding fields and shot that night.
The massacre was memorialized by many of the area’s white residents as the “Colfax Riot” and viewed as a great victory for southern Whites.
The new monument sits alongside the railroad tracks several blocks several blocks from the Grant Parish Courthouse, where for 70 years a historical marker erected by the state in 1950 hailed the “riot” as the “end of carpetbag misrule in the South.” The marker was taken down in 2021.
Even closer to the new monument, in the town’s cemetery, an obelisk names the three White “heroes” of the battle who, according to the obelisk, “fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy.” That monument, erected in 1921, still stands.
A memorial to the three white men who died during the Colfax Massacre stands in the town cemetery Thursday, April 13, 2023, in Colfax, La.
Speakers at Thursday’s ceremony said the new monument was a good step toward reckoning honestly with history.
“The history that we remember today is painful,” Hamilton said. “it’s important that we confront it head on.”
Edwards sounded a similar note.
“This day has been a long time coming,” Edwards said. “A historical marker should be historical.”
Before the ceremony, two brothers stood off to the side. Douglas and Stephen Cruikshank, both in their 80s, had come to see the ceremony. Their great-grandfather, William J. Cruikshank, was one of the members of the mob who committed the massacre. William Cruikshank was actually convicted of the crime, but his conviction was later overturned in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that essentially robbed the federal government of its ability to enforce civil rights laws at the time.
Leave a Reply