We have all heard about most of the early 19th and 20th century massacres of African Americans. Names like Rosewood and Tulsa come to mind. We are not going to delve deeply into the events that started these two massacre’s, only to say that more than 150 were killed in the Rosewood incident, which was precipitated by a claim of rape against a black man by a white woman and as for the Tulsa carnage and butchery, estimates of up to 300 African Americans were killed by a similar allegation of a young white woman being assaulted by a black man. For more on these two massacres, click here for the Tulsa Massacre and here for the Rosewood Massacre.
The Thibodaux Massacre
“I think this will settle the question of who is to rule the nigger or the white man for the next fifty years.”
Mary Pugh, November 1887
In one of the most contemptible and vile acts in American labor history, on November 23,1887, 60 African American farmers were killed because they dared to organize a labor strike against the southern sugar plutocracy in a small Louisiana town called Thibodaux. The bodies were then thrown into unmarked graves and Mary Pugh made the racist statement above, which would forever echo thru time. Well what happened? As we all know, right after Lincoln death and a few years after Reconstruction, the Ole South went back to its slavery roots. African Americans were being systematically removed from office and local legislatures. During Reconstruction, African Americans were making great strides. There were black senators, congressman, sheriff’s and mayors. Almost any political post you could think of blacks were being elected to fulfill those positions. Afterwards African Americans although free faced the same racism and injustice like their ancestors had for nearly a century. They toiled in the fields like beast and lived on the meager wages the “Massa,” paid them. Often instead of money the plantation owners paid the workers in script which could only be used at the plantation store. There they paid outrageous prices and would usually end up asking for additional food or supplies until the next payday. Of course this plan of action left them in perpetual debt.
In 1873 the southern sugar market was rocked by a not so bountiful harvest. What was worst was that sugar brought in from the international markets was far cheaper and begin to eat into the southern plantation owners profits. By 1874 the African American workers saw their chance. They began organizing. All told, workers from several parishes including the parish in which Thibodaux was located banded together and demanded they be paid a living wage. According to John DeSantis, author of “The Thibodaux Massacre: Racial Violence and the 1887 Sugar Cane Labor Strike,” the workers demanded a pay raise to $1.25 hr. They were making $.42 hr. This was unthinkable to the southern former slave owners and they refuse to give in to the workers demands. Planters wanted to cut wages after the lean harvest of 1873-74 which coincided with an economic recession. Well those former slaves weren’t going for it and an African-American leader named Hamp Keys, a former Terrebonne Parish legislator, called a strike. It was on.
Keys led a march from Houma to Southdown Plantation in Terrebonne, rallying workers with a fiery speech. The sight of black protesters riled growers, and acting with their interests in mind, the parish’s African-American sheriff formed a posse of whites to face down strikers. Surprised at the opposition, Keys’s marchers retreated. You read that right… a black sheriff lead a group of racist white men to put down a strike by poor sharecroppers. Times had changed folks. America was retreating from Republican-led Reconstruction and abandoning civil rights. African-Americans in sugar regions kept the right to vote, but their influence in state elections was waning. As W. E. B. Du Bois put it in Black Reconstruction in America, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again into slavery.” Okay so you got a bunch of racist white men with guns down in the deep Louisiana woods telling black folks to stand down because we are going to get our coins and we ain’t racist cause we being lead by a black man. Now I don’t want to see somebody research this and drop the “F” word… thats “Fake News” for those dirty minded folks..:>) In general blacks were not leading racist white men… just in a few instances and just until the racist southerners cemented the Jim Crow laws of the late 19th and early 20th century.
With few options available by 1887, Terrebonne sugar workers reached out to the Knights of Labor (KOB). Yep, I feel you. Whenever I see the word “Knights,” in the title and I’m not reading about Lancelot, I’m gonna to be a little suspicious. I guess things were a little different back then, because these Knights were union organizers. What is it with our white brothers and the word “Knights.” We will look into that some other time. Anyway, the Knights was the biggest and most powerful union in America. It began organizing African-American workers in 1883 in separate locals, a local is a bargaining unit of a broader union. Despite segregation, the Knights organized women and farm workers, plus it made strides against Jim Crow. At the Knights’ 1886 national convention in Richmond, Virginia, leaders risked violence by insisting that a black delegate introduce Virginia’s segregationist governor. That’s like Louis Farrakhan introducing President Trump at the Republican National Convention, these folks for the most part were helping former slaves.
Across the states of the former Confederacy, whites viewed organized labor as agitation that threatened the emerging Jim Crow order. Even in the North and Midwest, the Knights fought an uphill battle against authorities who sided with railroad and mine owners. Several states called out militias to break strikes during the late nineteenth century, but the Knights was at its peak of popularity in the 1880s. In Louisiana, the Knights organized sugar workers into seven locals of 100 to 150 members each. Hamp Keys joined former black leaders like ex-sheriff William Kennedy. In August of 1887, the Knights met with the St. Mary branch of the Louisiana Sugar Planters Association, (LSPA) asking for improved wages. The LSAP declined and like the 21st century conglomerates that we all know, told the workers to “KMA,…” ya’ll so dirty minded… “Keep Moving Ahead,” but we not going to support you. So the Knights raised the stakes in October of 1887 as the rolling season approached. The rolling season was when they had to get the sugar cane in before it rotted in the fields. Junius Bailey, a 29-year-old schoolteacher, served as local president in Terrebonne. His office sent a communique all over the region asking for $1.25 a day cash wages, and local workers’ committees followed up, going directly to growers with the same demand.
But instead of bargaining, growers fired union members. Planters like future Supreme Court Chief Justice Edward Douglass White kicked workers off the land, ordering any who stayed arrested. Siding with growers, Democratic newspapers circulated false reports of black-on-white violence. “The most vicious and unruly set of negroes,” were at the Rienzi Plantation near Thibodaux, the New Orleans Daily Picayune reported. “The leader of them said today that no power on earth could remove them unless they were moved as corpses.” In those days Democrats were the racist. Blacks had historically voted Republican, because of Lincoln, who was Republican and had freed the slaves. It wasn’t until the early 30s in the last century that blacks started voting for Democrats under FDR. He introduced the “New Deal,” under which African Americans made their greatest strides in almost 50 years. I’m going to tell you right now, as far as racist were concerned, FDR should have been on the other side of the penny.
As the cane ripened, growers called on the governor to use muscle against the strikers. And Samuel D. McEnery, Democratic governor and former planter, obliged, calling for the assistance of several all-white Louisiana militias under the command of ex-Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard. One group toted a .45 caliber Gatling gun–a hand-cranked machine gun–around two parishes before parking it in front of the Thibodaux courthouse. An army cannon was set up in front of the jail. LOL.. I’m laughing right here. Anyone who read my article, “Fifteen Years an Inmate,” would underestand :>). Anyway, Then the killings started. In neighboring Terrebonne, some small growers came to the bargaining table, but larger planters hired strike-breakers from Vicksburg, Mississippi, 200 miles to the north, promising high wages and bringing them down on trains. Now earlier I said the plantation owners started firing the workers who went on strike, but the replacement workers who were also African Americans, lacked experience in the canebrakes. Basically, when you put those negro’s in the field, the got lost and was cutting cane all over the place, instead of in a manor which was organized and efficient.
Thibodaux, in Lafourche Parish, was becoming a refuge for displaced strike workers. Some moved into vacant houses in town, while others camped along bayous and roadsides. Reports circulated of African-American women gossiping about a planned riot. Violence broke out in nearby Lockport on Bayou Lafourche when Moses Pugh, a black worker, shot and wounded Richard Foret, a planter, in self-defense. A militia unit arrived and mounted a bayonet charge on gathered workers, firing a volley in the air. In Thibodaux, Lafourche Parish District Judge Taylor Beattie declared martial law. Despite being a Republican, Beattie was an ex-Confederate and White League member. He authorized local white vigilantes to barricade the town, identifying strikers and demanding passes from any African-American coming or going. And before dawn on Wednesday, the 23rd of November, pistol shots coming from a cornfield injured two white guards. During Reconstruction, African Americans could own firearms. After Jim Crow, while it was legal for African Americans to own firearms, shooting at a white man was a no.. no. Hitting one meant somebody was getting hanged. If they hanged the wrong person, they just kept hanging people till they ran out or they hanged the right one…. seriously. After Lincoln was killed by the racist John Wilkes Booth, they felt emboldened, sorta like they do during our time, with President Trump in office.
The response was a massacre. “There were several companies of white men and they went around night and day shooting colored men who took part in the strike,” said Reverend T. Jefferson Rhodes of the Moses Baptist Church in Thibodaux. Going from house to house, gunmen ordered Jack Conrad (a Union Civil War Veteran), his son Grant, and his brother-in-law Marcelin out of their house. Marcelin protested he was not a striker but was shot and killed anyway. As recounted in John DeSantis’ book, Clarisse Conrad watched as her brother Grant “got behind a barrel and the white men got behind the house and shot him dead.” Jack Conrad was shot several times in the arms and chest. He lived and later identified one of the attackers as his employer. One strike leader found in an attic was taken to the town common, told to run, and shot to pieces by a firing squad. An eyewitness told a newspaper that “no less than thirty-five negroes were killed outright,” including old and young, men and women. “The negroes offered no resistance; they could not, as the killing was unexpected.” Survivors took to the woods and swamps. Killings continued on plantations, and bodies were dumped in a site that became a landfill.
Workers returned to the fields on growers’ terms while whites cheered a Jim Crow victory. The Daily Picayune blamed black unionizers for the violence, saying that they provoked white citizens, suggesting the strikers “would burn the town and end the lives of the white women and children with their cane knives.” Flipping the narrative, the paper argued, “It was no longer a question of against labor, but one of law-abiding citizens against assassins.” The union died with the strikers, and the assassins went unpunished. There was no federal inquiry, and even the coroner’s inquest refused to point a finger at the murderers. Sugar planter Andrew Price was among the attackers that morning. He won a seat in Congress the next year.
Southern black farm workers would not attempt to unionize again, until the 1930s when the Southern Tenant Farmers Union attracted both white and African American members. But it too was met by a violent racist backlash. The struggle for southern unions continued into the Civil Rights era. On the night before he was assassinated in Memphis, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech supporting striking sanitation workers. He urged his audience “to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. …You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together.”
So there you have it readers, the Thibodaux Massacre. I want to thank the Smithsonian for their assistance. Most of this article is based on the work of Calvin Schermerhorn, whom I owe a debt of gratitude.
There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know. – Harry Truman
Insightful