Elected black officials exercising lawful power were massacred wholesale in Colfax.

Evidence

In Colfax, a group of armed African American Republicans, hearing of an impending attack, barricaded themselves inside the Grant Parish courthouse to defend the results of the elections and their lawful authority to assume office. Soon thereafter, a group of 150 whites surrounded the courthouse and opened fire. Leading the assault was Christopher Columbus Nash, the local sheriff and an ex-Confederate soldier who would go on to found the White League, a paramilitary organization that admonished whites in the South to organize and fight for “the maintenance of our hereditary civilization and Christianity menaced by a stupid Africanization [sic].” … Nash’s followers turned a small cannon on the courthouse and set fire to the roof. Nearly seventy African Americans were killed in the initial battle. When the remaining African Americans inside surrendered, thirty-seven were marched outside and publicly executed in the town square. During the remainder of the day, more African Americans were rounded up and jailed, and approximately fifty more were executed that night. After the massacre, the bodies of the executed African Americans were hastily buried in trenches on the courthouse grounds, both as a terrifying symbol of what fate might await African Americans who attempted to assert political power and as an act of cruelty, since it denied their families the opportunity for proper Christian funerals and burials. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 82

Categorization

• XREF: The massacre’s targeting of lawful black officeholders parallels the Ambedkar/caste material on how violence enforces social hierarchy against groups asserting rights.
• DEEPTHINKING: The detail that burial in trenches functioned simultaneously as terror symbol and denial of proper Christian funerals ties political violence to religious desecration in a way resonant with the book’s overall thesis on white Christianity.