The Arrest of Isaac Williams and his Men

The Union League, or Loyal League, began in the North in 1863 as a patriotic club and spread across the South after the war, drawing mostly formerly enslaved people. It pressed for land, schools and the right to testify in court, and has been called the first African American Radical Republican organization in the South. White terror groups, including the Ku Klux Klan and Louisiana's Knights of the White Camellia, targeted it, above all around the 1868 election, when Black men first voted. Members often met in secret. The Jefferson and Williams families sponsored this marker in 2018.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Bistineau State Park — 4.1 mi
  A 903-acre state park on a lake the Great Raft made, opened in 1946 with a separate section for Black visitors from 1956, and now known for cypress water and a lake that is drawn down.
• R. W. Norton Art Gallery — 16 mi
  A free art museum and 40 acres of azalea gardens in Shreveport, founded in 1946 on Rodessa oil money, with Remington and Russell, an Audubon folio and no photography allowed.
• Spring Street Museum — 17 mi
  An 1866 bank building downtown that also held a Freedman's Savings and Trust branch in 1870, now a free LSUS-run museum with a Victorian parlor and the original vault.
• Shreveport Municipal Auditorium — 17 mi
  The Art Deco hall of 1929 where the Louisiana Hayride went out over KWKH from 1948 to 1960 and where Elvis Presley first played Shreveport on October 16, 1954.

More markers nearby

• Oakland Plantation — 3.5 mi
• Ashpoint Plantation — 8.1 mi
• "Hell's Angels" — 14 mi
• Linebacker II (The Christmas Bombings) — 14 mi