I am still researching this event, but I have found a few articles that can describe the riot better than I can. I'm disturbed that this happened, but glad that change came from it.
Taken from: La AHGA
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=86852507
13 April 1873 The terrible riot of April 13, 1873 (Easter Sunday), will never be forgotten. It originated in the fact that Gov. Kellogg appointed two sets of officials with the view, it is alleged, of bringing about just such a result. On April 1, a meeting of Caucasians was called to consider their condition. On that morning, 200 armed Negroes came into town, and the Caucasians did not meet. The White officers held the courthouse, but were soon driven off by the Radicals, who installed their set of officials. During the succeeding five days Colfax was filled by Negroes, who threatened to kill the White males and hold the White females for the purpose of creating a new race. The Whites fled and the work of rapine began. In the house of Judge Rutland the Negroes round a coffin containing the remains of his child, which they cast out of the house. On April 5, a body of 200 White men from adjoining parishes encamped within two miles of Colfax, and sent a demand for the surrender of the courthouse and offices, but this demand was refused and the Negroes entered at once on the construction of a line of defenses. Capt. C. C. Nash, the sheriff-elect, and leader of the Whites, repeatedly told them that they should surrender or they would be attacked, and the climax was reached on the 13th, when the Colored women and children were removed and the black warriors manned the works.
At 10 A.M., that Sunday, 125 Whites opened the attack on the fort, then held by 250 Negroes, twenty-five White men held the horses. Skirmishing continued until 3 p. m. when thirty men, led by James A. Daniels, crept up behind the works and opened fire, the main body attacking in front. The Negroes fled, 100 took refuge in the brick stable, then used for courthouse purposes, and kept up a fire on their assailants. The only approach to this was from one end, and even then there was no opening. Five White men were already wounded, Hadnot, Moses, and Harris seriously. The Whites made a torch which they placed in the hands of a Negro prisoner to set fire to the eaves of the roof. The flames spread, the Negroes desired to surrender, and the men named rushed up to make terms of capitulation quickly. They were shot down. The enraged Whites then killed each Negro as he rushed from the burning building, while fugitives were ridden down and killed. Forty Negroes were made prisoners and protected until night, when twenty of them were killed, making a total of Negroes killed, ninety-five.
The battle was over at 4 o'clock P.M. The year 1873 was given up to political warfare and dreadful riots. Two sets of parish officials were deliberately commissioned by Gov. Kellogg with the object of creating the very troubles which disgraced that Easter day of 1873, and gave to Louisiana its darkest historical page. The state officials did not try to mete out justice, but by wholesale arrest essayed to scare the people into subjection, but their plans were faulty, for the first man arrested, Gen. Cosgrove, of Natchitoches, had nothing to do with the riot. In 1874 W. R. Rutland was parish judge with register clerk J. O. Grayson collector, and Layssard recorder. The new judge abandoned the Republican party after the riot and became a Democrat. The seventeen days' trial of the Grant County prisoners (ninety-eight were indicted), Dumas, Lemoine, P. Lemoine, Thomas Hickman, Alfred Lewis, and T. Gibbons, in the United States Court and under the Kuklux law, ended March 20, 1874. The jury disagreed, but the prisoners were refused liberty on bail. A second trial resulted in the conviction of W. J. Cruikshank, John Hadnot, and William Irwin, and even this verdict was set aside by Justice Bradley. This ended the prosecution but not the tribulations of the people, for troops were within calling distance to enforce the mandates of the oppressor and assist in the extortion of exorbitant taxes.
History is a Gift: The Colfax Massacre
Posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
http://blog.oup.com/2008/04/history-is-a-gift-the-colfax-massacre/
This April 13 marked the 135th anniversary of the Colfax Massacre, a pivotal event in the history of Emancipation and civil rights that is only now becoming part of the broader dialogue on race in America. Like April 13, 1873, which was Easter, this year’s anniversary falls on a Sunday. Though the anniversary has been commemorated in the past – most elaborately during the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s – this year’s modest ceremonies will be the first to be racially integrated. Blacks and whites alike will pay respects in the vicinity of the only monuments erected in its honor, an obelisk and historical marker dedicated to the cause of white supremacy. White roses will adorn the unmarked gravesite of 59 of as many as 150 victims of the violence.For years, the historical marker in Colfax has been the most visible claim for the significance of the event. Its text insists that the “Colfax Riot” had resulted in the “end of carpetbag misrule in the South.” Placed alongside the country road that links the tiny town to Central Louisiana’s highways, it is rarely seen by outsiders and mostly ignored in polite company in Colfax today. The rest of the nation remained oblivious to its significance, mesmerized by the cinematic romance of the Old South into thinking of the death of Reconstruction as an acceptable rebuke. People in Colfax cannot be blamed. No one there can be said to be responsible for the fact that this story has not been told. Everyone who hears it and tells it today can say thank you to Colfax for telling this story again and again. Thanks to the scholars and writers – many of them women – who inscribed this history in scrapbooks and newsprint, fine paper and typescript, on library photocopiers and genealogy websites; the old timers and tale-tellers, secret keepers, and firebrands. We owe thanks to them for keeping this history alive. For one hundred and thirty five years, they have held the candle in a dark place and in so doing held onto something rich and important. So much of our history has been lost. The loss of history has been an inexorable hallmark of defeat, especially upon the contested ground of this American continent, the prize of the conquest of the ages. On the site of the Colfax Massacre the Indian tribes had surrendered up their stories and their languages and the handwork and flavors and kings of ancient Africa had disappeared. The priests and caballeros of the old regimes passed through, along with countless thousands destined for the Open West. Their tales were unrecorded and their names forgotten. Not least amid the night, the stifling darkness of enslavement, the impoverishment of memory prevailed. Black history is a gift, a restitution. The force of history’s conquests in the present is diminished when we see the way the stolen generations could adapt and fight. And we may also take heart to learn where acts of kindness and courage by whites transcended custom and came to champion the right. Even shameful acts are worth remembering, insofar as they lay bare the mystery and will of the undying past. The history of Reconstruction shows the nation and its worst and noblest, and no place more terrible or promising than Colfax, Louisiana. Citizens in Colfax and Grant Parish have worn a scarlet letter to commemorate its brush with history even as the nation turned its head and refused to be schooled. It is not their fault that the lessons of the Colfax Massacre remained untold. They have preserved it in marble and specimen drawers: the residue of conquest, the record of resistance, and the heartless calculation of liberty and its price. We have not listened, and professional historians must shoulder the blame. Racism thrived up North, down South, and racists wrote the history that Americans would learn. Those who wrote the first major studies of Reconstruction in the late 1800s and early 20th century made a choice to suppress this history out of conscious solidarity with the white perpetrators of the massacre at Colfax. Indeed, the story of the untold story of the Colfax Massacre illustrates the dynamics of what W. E. B. DuBois called a “field [of study] devastated by passion and belief.”Today Colfax bears the burden for all of us as it seeks to reconcile its past with the passions and beliefs of the 21st century. May the courage of the old timers sustain the present generation in its reckoning with history.| www.ladisasters.com |
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