SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – A dark day in Louisiana history had lasting effects on the nation's delicate attempt to integrate newly freed enslaved Blacks into the fabric of the red, white, and blue. That day also served as a bond that would forever connect two strangers.

During Andrew Callahan's Channel 5 interview with Hunter Biden, the former president's son was discussing the nation's history with racism and revolution, and mentioned a little-known massacre in Colfax, Louisiana, and how that event was the first step toward the derailment of the U.S. post-Civil War reconstruction.

A series of internet searches for the massacre led to Dean Woods and The Rev. Avery Hamilton—two men with roots in central Louisiana and family connections to the killings. The two had never met and only learned about the events that unfolded on an Easter Sunday in 1873 through pure coincidence.

What is the Colfax Massacre?

The Colfax Massacre was a deadly conflict motivated by racism and political differences. The massacre, instigated by white residents of the area, resulted in the confirmed deaths of at least 60 Black men, but historians believe at least 150 Black men (many whose names were unknown) were slaughtered. There were only three white men killed as a result of the violence.

The violence was in response to freed Black men's new right to vote through the 15th Amendment, passed in 1870. That constitutional change sent duly elected Black men to govern in state legislatures across former slave states in the South and even the United States Senate. It also kicked off a series of actions used to disenfranchise Black voters, including poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, and acts of violence to prevent and discourage the Black vote and eventually expel them from governance.

Sample of a Louisiana Voter Registration & Literacy Test (Source: Civil Rights Movement Archive)

The ongoing tensions came to a head after a Black farmer was killed on his property without provocation. As the story goes, that farmer was the great, great, great, great-grandfather of Rev. Hamilton, Mr. Jesse McKinney, a former slave turned farmer.

At the same time, a truce of sorts was being negotiated between the opposing factions. The governor of Louisiana at that time was William Pitt Kellogg, and he'd sent a militia of Black union soldiers to Colfax to help keep the peace. Once word of McKinney's death made its way to the courthouse, it halted the attempt to find peace and understanding.

Hamilton explained that Black men started arriving in Colfax at the courthouse from neighboring areas to unite, believing that whites were going around indiscriminately murdering, which led to the deadly conflict.

On April 13, 1973, former Confederate officer and white supremacist Christopher Columbus Nash rode into Colfax with an armed militia. He gave the Black men a brief time window to secure the women and children. And that militia sent to protect the Black citizens had already left. The fighting started soon after.

Hamilton, who was born, raised, and currently lives in Colfax, said that while elders in his family whispered and grumbled about the marker at the site of the massacre, which referenced it as a "race riot." That was the extent of his knowledge, and he had no clue that his ancestor's death was the spark that led to the massacre of more men until he met a cousin who lived in Cincinnati and explained this unknown piece of family history.

"The most I heard as a kid growing up is that it was a lie. But no one went into detail about what happened, because apparently, down through years, the blacks just didn't talk about it," Hamilton said.

The Black families of Colfax were not the only ones who did not speak openly about the events of April 13, 1873.

Dean Woods said his understanding of the Colfax Massacre also came later in life, "I like to read. I've read both fiction and nonfiction, and, probably five or six years ago, picked up a book by Lalita Tademy called Red River."

Reading the book sparked his curiosity because his grandparents were from nearby Montgomery, Louisiana, a mere 16.5 miles north of Colfax. After reading a nonfiction account called The Day Freedom Died by Charles Lane, which was based on the same event, he started researching his family's history.

"I went online to Ancestry.com and did some research for my upline and found my great-grandfather, a guy named Bedford Woods. And he was never mentioned to me or my sister in my life."

Additional research led him to Bedford Woods' obituary, which noted that he was "a proud veteran of the Colfax Race Riot. That just floored me. I mean, I could not believe it," Woods said.

The young Woods would have been in his early 20s at the time of the Colfax Massacre, and more digging turned up more proof that Dean Woods was genetically linked to an incident many historians believe turned Reconstruction on its head and ushered in the Jim Crow era.

"Eventually, my son found the article from 1912 or 1914 in the Colfax Chronicle that said they had a reunion of the veterans of the Colfax Race riot, and they elected him treasurer of the group. So you had to be a true fighting veteran to be in this group. And so I knew he had to be involved in some way. And it just floored me. I was just, you know, embarrassed."

Setting the record straight: What happended in Colfax was not a 'race riot'

The younger Woods' descendant didn't let embarrassment keep him on the wrong side of history. He wanted the history of what happened in Colfax to be accurately depicted, and a marker placed at the site while Jim Crow was alive and well fell short of that.

In 1950, the state of Louisiana issued a historic marker for the town of Colfax commemorating the "Colfax Race Riot," which was placed at the courthouse in Colfax, the site of the racially and politically motivated violence. The marker read: “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.” 

A resident of Houston, Texas, Woods worked tirelessly to identify which state agency was responsible for issuing markers to have them removed and a more accurate marker in their place.

"I talked to a lady down in Baton Rouge who was the assistant secretary of the Department of Economic Development. Who, in that department, is in charge of the historical markers in the state. And she's an African-American woman who is very talented, and she is very connected. She knew the governor. She went to him, and he agreed to get it taken down."

John Bel Edwards was the Governor of Louisiana at that time, and although the state was onboard with reframing the "race riot" as a "massacre," the members of the Grant Parish Police Jury were not. It took some legal wrangling between state and parish entities to determine who owned the marker, but eventually the state prevailed, and the marker was removed. The Grant Parish Police Jury blocked the placement of the new marker on its parish property where the original marker had stood for generations.

The original marker was brought to Lafayette until it makes its way to an African American history museum in South Louisiana, where it will be framed in the proper historical context, according to Woods.

Hamilton and Woods finally met and started a nonprofit organization called the Colfax Memorial, and started fundraising to place a memorial in Colfax honoring the men who died while exercising their rights to vote. The new monument was placed in a park in Colfax in 2023 and lists the names of those killed and wounded on that tragic Easter Sunday.

On the day the new monument was unveiled, then Gov. John Bel Edwards said that while no one alive was responsible for what happened more than 150 years ago, we are responsible for what happens in our time, which includes retelling ugly moments from the past as they happened.

"History is written by the victors"

The newly freed men didn't have a snowball's chance on a hot Louisiana summer day to prevail over the men who believed they were defending the nation from people they viewed as less than. Less than a decade after the civil war ended, the white militia was heavily armed with guns and a cannon, which was fired into the courthouse to force the men out of safety to meet their doom. Those who didn't die in the fire were gunned down or deeply wounded.

"Once the fighting started, they took a cannon, which is still here in Colfax in the front yard of one of the citizens here. It's not a replica, it's the actual cannon that they used to shoot the blacks. It's still here," Hamilton said.

While he can't change what happened, and he can't denounce a relative from generations past that he's never met, Woods does have a theory about why it's taken so long to get the story told as it happened.

"It's often said that the victors write history. And so after it was over, they, in their view, they had done a great thing," Dean said.

Not only did they believe they did a great thing, but the United States Supreme Court agreed. After the massacre, 97 men were indicted, not on state murder charges, but on federal civil rights charges for violating the victims' 14th and 15th Amendment rights. In a federal court in New Orleans, nine people were convicted of civil rights violations. However, the Supreme Court upheld the men's appeal, and they were acquitted, and there was no justice for dozens of newly freed men whose families were forever impacted, but dared not speak a word about it.

In Lane's book The Day Freedom Died, he explained that the ruling in the Colfax case essentially brought the end of Reconstruction in 1877, resulting in the expansion of the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and other white supremacy groups.

The lack of accountability and the commonly held beliefs that white people, specifically white men, were destined to be the ruling class in America opened the floodgates for massacres in Rosewood, Tulsa, New Orleans, and other towns and cities across the nation and, in large part, started Jim Crow.

"And so the small event in Colfax generated this dramatic impact on millions of black people for the next hundred years. And when I realized that, you know, that's why I was embarrassed," Dean said.

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