Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008 - (Page 70)

Colfax courthouse was the first step in a war of conquest to eradicate the white race. “The Negroes at Colfax shouted daily across the river to our people that they intended killing every white man and boy, keeping only the young women to raise from them a new breed,” explained the organizer of an elite Rapides Parish contingent. O.W. Watson later recalled: “We were all startled and terrified at the news by a courier who had just gotten in from our parish site, that the Negroes under the leadership of a few unprincipled white men had captured the Court House The Negro men making their brags that they would clean out the white men and then take their women folks for wifes.” Their sojourn in the woods and swamps of Grant Parish produced both exhilaration and anxiety. For most, the memory of war stirred associations with separation and the threat to families. In light of rumors about black conquest, white communities appointed home guards and prepared household defenses. White women and children made their own contributions to the coming fight, providing food, medical supplies, and even homemade ammunition. A local girl put in charge of preparing “blue whistlers” with buckshot and paper, for example, later recalled how her “young fingers eagerly wrapped these awful messengers of death.” She also remembered the thrill of being guarded by her teenage sweetheart while her father was away: “What is sweeter than romance in the face of death?” Black citizens vacated their own homes with fewer romantic associations. The murder of McKinney — and the abduction of a second black man, Charles Harris, the same day — rocked the confidence of the black community of Grant Parish. With partisans of the courthouse group sounding the alarm, word spread quickly of the threat to peaceable African Americans and their homes. An exodus from outlying households swelled the population of Colfax. Some of the arriving men were tapped to “The Negroes at Colfax shouted daily across the river to our people that they intended killing every white man and boy, keeping only the young women to raise from them a new breed.” serve in Republican Sheriff Dan Shaw’s posse comitatus, charged with apprehending the murderers of Jesse McKinney. In practice, the sheriff’s posse operated as a militia under the command of William Ward. R.C. Register, the black Republican judge, urged the growing force to be courageous and keep possession of the courthouse until United States troops arrived. Seeking strength in numbers in the meantime, Ward and his associates put out a call to black communities for additional men with guns. “We ask you in the name of [our] Liberty and [our] Children’s [Rights],” Ward pleaded in a poorly spelled letter intercepted by his enemies, to “come to our sistence.. .as the whites does [for their own people].” Whites continued to visit and even live in the town of Colfax, where a few families occupied homes. On April 1, —testimony of a white witness at Colfax 70 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Winter 2008-09

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008 Contents Friends Editor's Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Prospect.1 New Orleans The Historic New Orleans Collection The Enduring Performance of Michael P. Smith Jazz Notes Louisiana Foodways Birds of a Feather: Windfowl Carvings in Southeast Louisiana Louisiana Association of Museums Louisiana Architecture O. Winston Link in Louisiana The Ogden Museum of Southern Art The Colfax Massacre Louisiana State Museum Unlocking the History of Greek Key Architecture Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008

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