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The Colfax Massacre (1873)

The Colfax Massacre occurred on April 13, 1873. The battle-turned-massacre took place in the small town of Colfax, Louisiana as a clash between blacks and whites. Three whites and an estimated 150 blacks died in the conflict. The massacre took place against the backdrop of racial tensions following the hotly contested Louisiana governor's race of 1872.  While the Republicans narrowly won the contest and retained control of the state, white Democrats, angry over the defeat, vowed revenge.  In Colfax Parish (county) as in other areas of the state, they organized a white militia to directly challenge the mostly black state militia under the control of the governor.   Colfax Parish reflected the political and racial divide in Louisiana.  Its 4,600 voters in the 1872 election were split between approximately 2,400 hundred mostly black Republican voters and 2,200 white Democratic voters.  One incident however, touched off the Colfax massacre.  On...

Black power is in your pocket...

Martin Luther King’s said in his mission statement for ‘Operation Breadbasket’: “Negroes need not patronize a business which denies them jobs, advancement [or] plain courtesy’’. He also advised African-Americans to support their own businesses. That they’d failed to take heed of this advice is now devastatingly apparent from New York to New Orleans and from Califo rnia to Chicago. The ‘Negro’ had dropped the collective ball in pursuit of individual goals. They had failed to realize that the most important battle against white supremacy is economic. Indeed, everything the Devil has done has been for monetary reasons…every African enslaved; every Native-American scalped; every foreign land stolen; every foodstuff poisoned; every tree felled; every school closed; every prison built; every bomb dropped; every oil well drained; every human killed; every animal slaughtered; every politician bought…the list goes on and on. ‘Money is the root of all evil’. And money best represents ...