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Tarfumes.com - The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror and the Death of Reconstruction
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List Price: $24.95
Our Price: $16.47
Your Save: $ 8.48 ( 34% )
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Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 976.367
EAN: 9780195310269
ISBN: 0195310268
Label: Oxford University Press, USA
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 240
Publication Date: 2008-01-28
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Studio: Oxford University Press, USA
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Editorial Reviews:
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On Easter Sunday, 1873, in the tiny hamlet of Colfax, Louisiana, more than 150 members of an all-black Republican militia, defending the town's courthouse, were slain by an armed force of rampaging white supremacists. The most deadly incident of racial violence of the Reconstruction era, the Colfax Massacre unleashed a reign of terror that all but extinguished the campaign for racial equality.
LeeAnna Keith's The Colfax Massacre is the first full-length book to tell the history of this decisive event. Drawing on a huge body of documents, including eyewitness accounts of the massacre, as well as newly discovered evidence from the site itself, Keith explores the racial tensions that led to the fateful encounter, during which surrendering blacks were mercilessly slaughtered, and the reverberations this message of terror sent throughout the South. Keith also recounts the heroic attempts by U.S. Attorney J.R. Beckwith to bring the killers to justice and the many legal issues raised by the massacre. In 1875, disregarding the poignant testimony of 300 witnesses, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in U.S. v. Cruikshank to overturn a lower court conviction of eight conspirators. This decision virtually nullified the Ku Klux Klan Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871--which had made federal offenses of a variety of acts to intimidate voters and officeholders--and cleared the way for the Jim Crow era.
If there was a single historical moment that effectively killed Reconstruction and erased the gains blacks had made since the civil war, it was the day of the Colfax Massacre. LeeAnna Keith gives readers both a gripping narrative account of that portentous day and a nuanced historical analysis of its far-reaching repercussions.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: A Great Book
Comment: This is a well-researched book describing the incident of the Colfax affair that took place after Louisiana had lost its freedom in the War of Northern Aggression. The Federal atrocities committed during the Red River Campaign--and after the war--the fact that Louisiana was, perhaps, more punished than any other former Confederate state helped set the stage for the violence in Colfax under Federal watch that this book covers in depth. I, as a historian, recommend this book to all who are interested in Louisiana history and the behavioral study of man. Charles Stansell
Customer Rating:
Summary: Compelling and Engaging--Top Notch
Comment: The Colfax Massacre is a fabulous book--insightful, colorful, and very thorough. I don't understand what that other reviewer could possible be referencing in regard to this author's so-called "mistakes." The author's sources are impeccably researched, and there is such a variety and depth of materials in all the footnotes, sources and index. Ms. Keith brings these characters to life. I was left with a concrete picture of this horrible event. The storytelling really offers the texture and the experience of those times. For anyone interested in this subject matter, this is a must read. Ms. Keith has created a gem of a masterpiece with this book!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Possibly the worst "history" book I've ever read . . .
Comment: About 2 weeks ago, my review of The Colfax Massacre was posted. I checked today and it had been removed. I'd be interested in finding out why.
I've studied the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction for over 40 years and have a bit of personal involvement in Louisiana Reconstruction. My great-great-grandfather Judge Henry Clay Myers was the Republican run out of Natchitoches by the White League in 1874 - Ms. Keith mentions the incident on p. 69 of her book.
I would like to request that my review once again be posted.
Bill Myers
Customer Rating:
Summary: An excellent book, and all too timely
Comment: LeeAnna Keith's book explores what was surely one of the most tragic moments in the history of Reconstruction -- a moment when the hopes of African-Americans and the anger and fear of Southern whites clashed with particular violence. This alone would make it an important story.
However, the book also represents a recovery effort of sorts, because subsequent historians of the period have not given the massacre the treatment it merits. And so, an event that the white community claimed initially with pride for their own defiance has all but ceased to be part of the larger history of Reconstruction...and the massacre has almost seemed to pass in silence.
The recent events in Jena, Louisiana prove that the tensions and ironies surrounding race, class and identity in the American South remain, and that they draw on an old, old symbolic and dramatic vocabulary -- a vocabulary that our history compels us to see clearly.
Keith's work will help us immeasureably to see history and current events with a deeper, if painful new honesty.
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