The Thibodaux Massacre: Racial Violence and the 1887 Sugar Cane Labor Strike

In this concise and vivid study, journalist DeSantis uncovers the long-hidden history of an 1887 bloodbath in which men from some of Louisiana’s most esteemed white families murdered between 30 and 60 African-American men in the small town of Thibodaux. As DeSantis emphasizes, in the region south and east of New Orleans “black slaves boiled and spun sugar into gold for white planters,” producing though their forced labor the wealth that built the magnificent plantation houses that now function as tourist attractions. After the Civil War, ex-slaves, some of whom had served in the Union Army, came into conflict with their former owners, who numbered among the South’s most “unreconstructed rebels.” Tensions increased as many black sugar workers joined the Knights of Labor and organized walkouts from the cane fields in an attempt to negotiate higher wages. Fearing a loss of the sugar workforce in a crucial year following a bad harvest, planters convinced Gov. McEnery to dispatch the state militia to Thibodaux. They stormed the town’s black neighborhood and committed a massacre of which news was immediately suppressed. DeSantis’s work recounts this horrific tale in gripping detail, restoring to public memory an important moment in the entwined histories of race and labor in America. (Nov.)