The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction
Author: Charles Lan
America after the Civil War was a land of shattered promises and entrenched hatreds. In the explosive South, danger took many forms: white extremists loyal to a defeated world terrorized former slaves, while in the halls of government, bitter and byzantine political warfare raged between Republicans and Democrats.
In The Day Freedom Died, Charles Lane draws us vividly into this war-torn world with a true story whose larger dimensions have never been fully explored. Here is the epic tale of the Colfax Massacre, the mass murder of more than sixty black men on Easter Sunday 1873 that propelled a small Louisiana town into the center of the nation's consciousness. As the smoke cleared, the perpetrators created a falsified version of events to justify their crimes. But a tenacious Northern-born lawyer rejected the lies. Convinced that the Colfax murderers must be punished lest the suffering of the Civil War be in vain, U.S. Attorney James Beckwith of New Orleans pursued the killers despite death threats and bureaucratic intrigue - until the final showdown at the Supreme Court of the United States. The ruling that decided the case influenced race relations in the United States for decades.
An electrifying piece of historical detective work, The Day Freedom Died brings to life a gallery of memorable characters in addition to Beckwith: Willie Calhoun, the iconoclastic Southerner who dreamed of building a bastion of equal rights on his Louisiana plantation; Christopher Columbus Nash, the white supremacist avenger who organized the Colfax Massacre; William Ward, the black Union Army veteran who took up arms against white terrorists; Ulysses S. Grant, the well-intentionedbut beleaguered president; and Joseph P. Bradley, the brilliant justice of the Supreme Court whose political and legal calculations would shape the drama's troubling final act.
Charles Lane captures every exciting element of this electrifying saga, from the horror at Colfax, to the political battles that threatened the Grant presidency, to the dramatic courtroom battles that changed history. The Day Freedom Died is a gripping account of the events that gave the Civil War a monumental final chapter and an era in which the often brutal struggle for equality moved from battlefields into communities across the nation.
The Washington Post - Eric Foner
…the new books by LeeAnna Keith and Charles Lane are doubly welcome. Not only do they tell the story of the single most egregious act of terrorism during Reconstruction (a piece of "lost history," as Keith puts it), but they do so in vivid, compelling prose. Keith…and Lane, a journalist who covered the Supreme Court for The Washington Post, have immersed themselves in the relevant sources and current historical writing. Both accomplish a goal often aspired to but rarely achieved, producing works of serious scholarship accessible to a non-academic readership…While Keith illuminates the massacre's historical context, Lane offers a far more detailed account of the ensuing court cases. If his story has a hero, it is J. R. Beckwith, the U.S. attorney in New Orleans, who became obsessed with bringing the perpetrators to justice.
The New York Times - Kevin Boyle
A former Supreme Court reporter for The Washington Post, [Lane] is perfectly comfortable with the play of politics and the intricacies of the law. So while he builds an absorbing narrative of events in Colfax—his chapter on the massacre itself is riveting—he's careful to frame them within the political wars then raging in New Orleans and Washington…Lane devotes the second part of The Day Freedom Died to the legal maneuvering that followed the massacre. That's a risky decision, since complex constitutional questions don't lend themselves to sprightly storytelling. But he manages to turn the case, United States v. Cruikshank, into a legal thriller, complete with crusading lawyers, courtroom confrontations and soaring declarations of principle…Colfax will probably never build an obelisk to honor the massacre's victims. But with his gripping book, Charles Lane has given them a memorial every bit as imposing.
Publishers Weekly
The Colfax Massacre, a buried episode in American history, took place on an Easter Sunday afternoon in 1873. Within four hours, at least eighty black American men had been brutally murdered by white vigilantes in Colfax, La. Journalist Lane's groundbreaking and persuasive work illustrates this "pivotal event in the political and constitutional history of post-Civil War America" and its social, political and judicial aftermath. Full of illuminating detail, this well-paced account clarifies the controversial events that surrounded the massacre-the development of a community of freed slaves, politicians' struggles and shenanigans, unchecked white vigilante intimidation and murder, the perpetrators' trials and the Supreme Court decision that, in effect, left it up to individual states to protect the rights of African-American citizens. Lane provides succinct background (biographical, historical and geographical) on persons, politics and places. Lucidly written, thoroughly readable, carefully documented, and impressively coherent, Lane's rendition of this "turning point in the history of American race relations and racial politics" ends a long silence in American history books. Students of American and African-American history will find it particularly valuable; fans of American history will find it a moving and instructive drama. (Mar.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationTheresa McDevitt - Library Journal
In Colfax, LA, in 1873, one of the country's worst incidents of racial violence took place when white supremacists slayed dozens of black men, a tragedy that would effectively signal the U.S. government's abandonment of Reconstruction efforts. The massacre led ultimately to the Supreme Court's 1875 decision in United States v. Cruikshank, in which it was declared that it was not the federal government's province to defend the rights of the murdered blacks. These two well-researched and accessible treatments, each with its own emphasis, shed further light on the massacre and should pave the way for a wider consideration of its significance. Keith's (history, Collegiate Sch., New York; coauthor, with Sandy Fekete, Companies Are People Too) is a fast-moving, sympathetic account focusing on the Louisiana setting, the participants, local reactions, and the lore that grew up around that day. Keith recognizes the significance of the tragedy but argues against exaggerated claims about its national impact. She suggests that "its story must yet be reconciled into the broader narrative of American History."
Lane, who has covered the Supreme Court for the Washington Post, offers a longer study not only of the massacre but also of the national scene and the resulting court proceedings, both local and federal, that produced legal and political aftermaths as tragic as the massacre itself. Lane sees the event as a "turning point in the history of American race relations and racial politics," stating that after the above Supreme Court case "the federal government did not mount another substantial effort to enforce black citizens' right to vote in the South until thecivil rights revolution in the 1950s and 1960s." His maps and provided "cast of characters" are helpful. Public and academic libraries should purchase at least one or the other of these books, both welcome additions to the historiography of the Reconstruction era, and if choosing one, should pick depending on whether they prefer the local historical and personal context (Keith) or the long-term political and constitutional significance (Lane).
Kirkus Reviews
Washington Post writer Lane tackles the horrific Reconstruction era in this well-considered study of a Louisiana massacre and its grim ramifications for civil rights. By 1873, the Southern states were bitterly divided along racial lines. The Ku Klux Klan ran largely unchecked, despite the newly passed Enforcement Act, which made racist terrorism a federal offense, and the Ku Klux Klan Act, which branded the Klan an "insurrection" against the United States and imposed heavy new penalties. The backlash against Radical Republicanism flared especially in Louisiana, where the Republicans and the Fusionists (Republican defectors who joined the white Democrats) were coming to blows over a legitimate government. Colfax was the capital of a newly carved county called Grant Parish, populated largely by freedmen who had grown vehemently Republican and determined to push for Negro suffrage. Events came to a head in March, when the Republican faction sacked the Fusionist-dominated Grant Parish Courthouse. The Fusionists vowed to retake the courthouse, now guarded by a posse of mostly black guards; after an uneasy standoff, it was besieged and set ablaze on Easter Sunday. Sixty-five white-flag-waving blacks were slaughtered as they ran from the burning building, along with 30 prisoners. James Beckwith, U.S. attorney for Louisiana, moved swiftly to dragnet the whites responsible, basing his case on Klan prosecutions and relying on the unprecedented testimony of black witnesses. After a mistrial followed by the acquittal of the defendants in a second trial, the case reached the Supreme Court, which declared in U.S. v. Cruikshank, et al. that Beckwith's indictments were constitutionally flawed-thuseffectively throwing the enforcement of civil rights back to the white-controlled Southern states for another generation. Lane argues eloquently that the Colfax Massacre proved the turning point in America's racial politics. An exciting, swift-moving narrative, replete with characters both dastardly and noble.
Table of Contents:
Cast of Characters xvAuthor's Note xix
Prologue 1
"Wholesale Murder" 9
From Plantation to Parish 23
Power Struggle 44
War 63
Blood on the Red 90
Black-Letter Law 110
Manhunt 127
Louisiana on Trial 154
A Justice's Judgment 186
"If Louisiana Goes..." 215
The Court Speaks 229
Epilogue 251
How Many Died? 265
Notes 267
Selected Bibliography 307
Acknowledgments 313
Index 317
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The Endless City
Author: Ricky Burdett
More and more people are moving into towns and cities to live and work, which is altering the urban/rural balance of countries worldwide. THE ENDLESS CITY is an unparalleled study of the growth of six of the world's international cities (New York, Shanghai, London, Mexico City, Johannesburg, and Berlin), exploring key structural, social, and economic factors. This book was overseen by the London School of Economics, and features extensive research and coherent texts by world-renowned professionals in the field of urban planning and development. The information is presented in a comprehensive and visually compelling sequence, enabling quick and efficient reference as well as offering material that is exciting to study. Each city is examined individually in its own chapter as well as being analyzed comparatively in an observational chapter. THE ENDLESS CITY is authoritatively edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic in collaboration with the London School of Economics and the Urban Age Project, an expanding international organization seeking a new urban agenda for global cities.
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review.
The continuing growth of many major cities worldwide-already very, very big-is an exciting prospect for many reasons but, if left unchecked, is sure to inflict social, economic and environmental trauma. This book focuses on six cities-New York, Shanghai, Mexico City, Berlin, Johannesburg and London-to address, from an urban planning and design perspective, how best they can deal. Loaded with data and vivid images, the authors present essays from a number of sources looking at key social issues in each city (Shanghai's rapid urban transformation, Apartheid's legacy in Johannesburg) and compare the six cities across a number of axes, including areas of relative social disadvantage and subway length. Sudjic's impressive "Governing the Ungovernable" sees in London's building boom "a unique opportunity to see the tensions and fault lines between... a centralized vision and laissez-faire." Some essays are a bit less enlightening, but the tome coheres beautifully around a plethora of photos with extended captions, finding both chaos and potential in a blissfully green park in Shanghai, an endlessly repeating housing project in Mexico City and a busy corner in the Sourth Bronx. This sprawling introduction to the challenges of contemporary urban planning should fascinate students and technically-minded city dwellers. 1,500 color and 400 b/w illustrations.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
David R. Conn - Library Journal
Human society recently reached a historic watershed: more people today are living in cities than outside of them, a trend that is expected to continue. Edited by Burdett (coauthor, Building the BBC: A Return to Form) and Sudjic (John Pawson Works), this hefty book is part of the Urban Age Project, introduced here as "a worldwide series of conferences investigating the future of cities" and organized by the London School of Economics and the Deutsche Bank's nonprofit Alfred Herrhausen Society. Thirty conference participants contributed essays to this collection, mostly examining the host cities: Berlin, Johannesburg, London, Mexico City, New York City, and Shanghai. Some comparative statistical data on these cities are provided, and further essays highlight general urban issues, such as security and environmental sustainability. There is also a section showcasing "interventions," or successful urban initiatives. Among the authors are academics, architects, curators, engineers, politicians, and urban planners from various nations. It's clear that building successful cities is a collaborative art, and these commentators are trying to steer citizens and policymakers in positive directions. With 1900 photos and graphics, most in color; recommended for academic and large public libraries.
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