Jack Conrad was not on strike in November 1887. He was a Civil War veteran of the 85th United States Colored Troops, and his son Grant had quit his field job. Both were in Thibodaux on the morning of November 23, when armed white men moved through the Black neighborhoods shooting. The National Archives holds his account, because after he died in 1897 his widow, Mary, applied for a death benefit.
The strike and the soldiers
The Knights of Labor reached sugar workers through teachers, ministers, Masons and barbers. Cane hands earned roughly 50 to 65 cents a day, partly in plantation scrip. A Black teacher, Junius Bailey, wrote the demands, and the planters' association refused them. Around the first of November, some 10,000 workers walked off the plantations of Lafourche, Terrebonne and St. Mary. Governor Samuel D. McEnery, himself a planter, sent state troops. They reached Thibodaux on November 2 with a Gatling gun, which was set up in front of the parish courthouse, and they evicted strikers from plantation housing. Many of those families took refuge in Thibodaux, and the troops left about November 18.
The committee
On Sunday night, November 20, some 300 white residents met at the town hall with Judge Taylor Beattie in the chair. They formed a Committee on Peace and Order. Black residents needed a pass to enter or leave town, and sentries sealed the roads. The next night a shooting at Henry Franklin's barroom killed William Watson, 23. Franklin was a Black parish councilman and Knights committee member. The committee jailed two men it was seeking, George and Henry Cox. Mary Pugh, a planter's widow whose sister Fannie was married to Beattie, wrote her son Chuckie that more than two hundred planters and white men had met in Fireman's Hall, all armed.
November 23
Before dawn, shots wounded two white sentries, Gorman and Molaison, at the edge of town. Nobody knows who fired. Armed white men then moved through Black neighborhoods for over two hours. In Conrad's affidavit, a man at his door says to crack down on him. Grant was killed behind a water barrel, Marcelin Weldon was shot as he ran, and Conrad took four wounds and hid under his house. Pugh wrote that the shots at the sentries "opened the Ball."
The inquest, before an all-white jury, named eight dead and blamed "persons unknown." They were Willis Wilson, Felix Pierre, Archy Jones, Frank Patterson, Riley Anderson, Mahala Washington, Weldon and Grant Conrad. Some Louisiana papers reported 25 dead, one reported as many as 300, and the author John DeSantis puts it at 30 to 60. No one was held to account.
What was kept
Workers returned to the cane on the planters' terms, and no serious effort to organize Louisiana's sugar fields followed for more than half a century. A local letter-writer wanted the episode "torn out of our history." Conrad's file, the planters' letters and a New Orleans paper's protest kept it in. In 2017 Thibodaux and Lafourche Parish passed proclamations condemning the violence.
The Lafourche Parish Court House still stands on the square Henry Schuyler Thibodaux gave the parish, and Laurel Valley Village, two miles south, shows where cane workers lived.