Massacre

The power struggle in Colfax had first turned deadly earlier in April, when a band of white supremacists murdered a black man in his front yard. Union veteran William Ward, who served as a black state representative, local Radical leader, and militia captain, ordered his company to muster immediately.

Historian LeeAnna Keith estimates that about three hundred black militiamen, along with their families, flocked to Colfax’s town center, occupying the courthouse (which, in the war-torn rural South, was a “repurposed” plantation stable). Ward, who had grown up enslaved as a carpenter in Virginia, began drilling the men openly in the town’s streets, organizing watches to keep families safe. Armed with guns, they quickly dug entrenchments, erected breastworks, and “posted sentries” around their commandeered area.

Judge William Phillips, a white “scalawag” from Alabama who earned a reputation by openly fathering a child with a black woman and by rallying black voters through promises of land, horses, and tools as part of reparations for slavery, joined forces with the black guards. Under the joint leadership of the white Phillips and the black Ward, local African Americans coalesced around what historian Joel Sipress has deemed “a new type of militant Black politics.”

White supremacists in the Red River Valley used these events to incite as much racial fear as possible. Over the next few days, three hundred white men poured into Colfax from Grant and surrounding parishes, forming an all-white paramilitary counterforce. Under the leadership of C. C. Nash, a former captain of the Confederate Army, they ordered the black militia and their families to leave Colfax under threat of violence. With more manpower and weaponry than the Republicans (they even had a small cannon, a relic from the war), white Democrats began the battle just after noon on Easter.

After hours of skirmishing, the former Confederates found a gap in the levee on the riverbank and positioned their single cannon there. While the weapon fired continuously upon the black freedom fighters, a former plantation overseer led a group of thirty whites in a direct attack against the black militia. One group of black Republicans instantly surrendered and was taken prisoner. Although Nash promised to free the men in the morning, a younger band of white terrorists executed them in cold blood, under the cowardly cover of the night.

Roughly sixty Republicans flooded the courthouse, exchanging fire with the white militia, who finally compelled a black captive to set fire to the courthouse roof. Some of the black Radicals perished in the fire. The men who tried to surrender, numbering between fifty and seventy, were ultimately shot to death. As a steamer pulled into Colfax the night of the massacre, one of the terrorists climbed on board, “armed to the teeth,” offering to give the passengers a tour of “dead n—–s . . . for there were a hundred or so scattered over the village and the adjacent fields.”