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Reviews
| The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction, by LeeAnna Keith. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 219 pages. $24.95, cloth.
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| On Easter Sunday, 1873, in the village of Colfax, a force of about 150 black Republicans and a somewhat larger group of white supremacists fought a pitched battle for control of the courthouse in Grant Parish, Louisiana. In the battle and massacre of prisoners that followed, between 70 and 100 black men perished. (Three white men also died in the battle.) The Colfax Massacre was, in the words of historian Eric Foner, "the bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era," and it has figured prominently in many accounts of the period. This massacre also gave rise to the U.S. Supreme Court's infamous 1876 Cruikshank decision, which limited the ability of the federal government to enforce the civil rights guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment. |
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Despite its significance, the Colfax Massacre has never been the subject of a book-length study, a state of affairs that LeeAnna Keith sets out to remedy. Though Keith is to be applauded for taking on this important project, her work is marred by a number of serious problems that limit its usefulness from both the perspective of teaching and scholarship. Academic historians will be concerned by the number of factual and interpretative assertions for which neither sourcing nor citation is offered, as well as the author's tendency to treat reminiscences produced decades after the massacre as if they are established fact. Without any basis in evidence, for instance, Keith claims that a group of black army veterans who became prominent local Republican leaders and activists first came to Grant Parish as "imported muscle." Those with a detailed knowledge of the Colfax Massacre will also be aware of numerous factual errors. Biographical accounts of major players in Grant Parish politics are filled with mistakes (including the repeated identification of white Republican parish judge R. C. Register as African American), and the narrative account of the events leading up to and following the massacre contain numerous errors of chronology and detail. While narratives of complex events such as the Colfax Massacre may be expected to contain a few such mistakes, the sheer number of such errors calls into question the reliability of Keith's scholarship and analysis. |
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Aside from errors of basic fact, Keith's work also suffers from the absence of a broader historical perspective. The chief value of detailed case studies such as Keith's is the way they can illuminate, for both scholars and students, broader historical issues and themes. Keith, though, fails to articulate the broader insights and conclusions she wishes us to draw from the Colfax Massacre and its aftermath. She seems satisfied to simply tell the story of a "forgotten" episode in American history. The Colfax Massacre, however, has never been forgotten by historians. On the contrary, generations of scholars have repeatedly cited the massacre to illustrate rival interpretative perspectives on the Reconstruction period. For white supremacist authors, whose work dominated historical scholarship for much of the twentieth century, the "Colfax Riot" (as they termed it) was a tragic but natural consequence of the enfranchisement of a black people who they claimed were unprepared for freedom. By contrast, revisionists (who wrote in the wake of civil rights revolution of the 1960s) saw the massacre as evidence of the depths of southern racism and the lengths to which the defenders of white supremacy would go to preserve the region's racial order. Keith seems utterly unaware of this ongoing conversation regarding Reconstruction and its place in American history, and moreover does not articulate how her account contributes to this discourse. |
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The Colfax Massacre offers a powerful tool for teaching about the relationship between race, class, and power in the construction of modern America as well as the role of political violence in American history. It is certainly worthy of a book-length study that illuminates these themes. Unfortunately, the serious problems that mar Keith's work leave us still waiting for such a book. In the meantime, those who wish to incorporate the Colfax Massacre into their teaching would be better served to use one of a number of shorter previously published accounts of the episode, including those found in Ted Tunnell's Crucible of Reconstruction, Nicolas Lemann's Redemption, or the article-length piece published by this reviewer in the journal Louisiana History. |
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| University of Wisconsin-Superior |
Joel M. Sipress |
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