Memorializing the Colfax Massacre
April 13, 1921, whites in Colfax wrote their own narrative when they unveiled a 12-foot marble obelisk hailing the three white victims "Who fell in the Colfax Riot/fighting for White Supremacy." That same year, Tulsa, Okla., another Southern town two states over, would witness another deadly massacre
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Perhaps aware of this history, some 30 years after Tulsa, in 1951, the Louisiana Department of Commerce and Industry passed up an opportunity to get the history of the Colfax Massacre right. Instead they retreated again into Lost Cause fantasy with the inscription, "On this site occurred the Colfax Riot in which three white men and 150 Negroes were slain. This event on April 13, 1873, marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South." To this day, it stands its ground, which reminds me …
Two weeks ago, many Americans were horrified to learn of the acquittal of Trayvon Martin's killer, George Zimmerman. In the background lurked Florida's "Stand your ground" law, which, while not tested by Zimmerman's lawyers, remains on the books and is a troubling part of our gun culture. As shaken as I was, I found myself revisiting another "set of experiences and a history" as I tried, for this column, to wrap my brain around the fact that less than 10 years after black people were guaranteed equal protection under the Constitution following the deaths of some 750,000 soldiers during the Civil War, the U.S. Supreme Court turned a blind eye to white supremacist groups like the KKK. Groups who, cloaked in their hate for the newly freed black citizens, legislated conditions which, over time, would justify racial targeting and which would help create the conditions that would manifest themselves into the racial profiling so common today. (The court might have called it "Take your ground," and history should call the events at Colfax what they were: a massacre.)
http://www.theroot.com/what-was-the-colfax-massacre-1790897517
Easter or not it is a sad fact in our history. Good question, heaven...why can't we have safety and unity? I know what the answer should be, I just do not know how to make it happen.
Thank you
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