Lee Street Riot of 1942

On the night of January 10, 1942, Black soldiers on leave from Camp Claiborne were on Lee Street when a white military police officer reportedly fired on a man leaving the Ritz Theater, and shooting spread through a crowd of thousands. The Town Talk printed no deaths and 28 injured. Historian Bill Simpson, whose 1994 essay is the most serious scholarship on the night, estimates ten to fifteen soldiers died, and witnesses said police fired at women and teenagers too. The Army cordoned off the district and put Alexandria off limits to Black troops. No one was held accountable.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — 0.2 mi
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
• Forts Randolph and Buhlow State Historic Site — 1.2 mi
  Two Confederate earthen forts on the Red River at Pineville, built with enslaved labor and never attacked, beside the remains of Bailey's Dam.
• Kent Plantation House — 2.2 mi
  Rapides Parish's oldest known standing building, a Creole house with a February tour and a 2023 memorial that put the enslaved first.
• Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum — 5.1 mi
  A National Guard museum in a replica WWII barracks at Camp Beauregard, built around the huge 1940-41 war games in Central Louisiana. Free.

More markers nearby

• Arna Wendell Bontemps Home — 0.3 mi
• Alexandria — 0.3 mi
• Thomas Courtland Manning — 0.3 mi
• Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback — 0.4 mi