Colfax Massacre Memorial

On Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, a force of 150 or more white men attacked Black men holding the courthouse in Colfax, Grant Parish. The 1872 election had produced two rival state governments, and in Grant Parish members of a disbanded Black militia unit had taken the courthouse. The attackers set it on fire, and after the fighting many surviving men were taken prisoner and executed that evening. 64 Parishes puts the dead at no fewer than sixty and perhaps as many as 150 men, nearly all African American; state officials buried fifty-nine bodies. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls it the bloodiest single-day death toll of the Reconstruction era.

Prosecutors charged the attackers under the federal Enforcement Acts. A jury convicted three men, and in United States v. Cruikshank in 1876 the Supreme Court overturned the convictions, holding that the acts did not reach crimes committed by individuals. For decades the state's own marker in Colfax called the killings a riot, counting three white men and 150 Black men dead. It was taken down on May 15, 2021.

On April 13, 2023, the 150th anniversary, the Colfax Memorial Organization dedicated a granite monument with 57 names, the history of the massacre and a relief by Jazzmen Lee-Johnson. Rev. Avery Hamilton, whose ancestor Jesse McKinney was shot on his farm on April 5, 1873, and Dean Woods, whose great-grandfather took part in the massacre, led the effort. Parish officials did not allow it on the courthouse grounds, so it stands off Eighth Street.