The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction

After 30 plus years of visiting relatives in Colfax and seeing the monument that still stands to the "Colfax Riot" with what to me was peculiar wording: "April 13, 1873 marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South" I got this book to try to better understand the history of central Louisiana. This book helped me understand a great deal more than local history. It speaks to the tragic days post Civil War as well as the extremely low point of the Supreme Court and Congress which used the literal interpretation of the U.S. Constitution (which purposely avoided the questions of slavery in what was supposed provide freedom to all citizens) and the wording of the 14th amendment to excuse convictions of citizens who committed mass murder and support "states' rights" to develop laws which deny human rights and voting privileges to Americans of color. No one should graduate from high school let alone college without throughly understanding this deplorable history and the many echos in the 21st Century. I did not find the writing or flow to be at all challenging. My children and yours should read this book.

In The Day Freedom Died, Chuck Lane has produced an indispensable, detailed account of the heartbreaking end of Reconstruction, and arguably, the continuation of the Civil War through political means, as several southern states used terror, backed even by the U.S. Supreme Court, to negate many of the laws and ideals that the Union supposedly had secured in vanquishing the Confederacy. Lane has used a cast of dozens of characters and anecdotes to document how a racist backlash terrorized African Americans in the American South after the end of slavery, despite the opposition of President Grant, an ardent supporter of civil rights. A must read for anyone who wants to understand the struggle for civil rights in America and the legacy we must never forget in order to safeguard a fair and civil society for all.

Eric Foner's RECONSTRUCTION is far more informative and understandable in history's relevance to the 21st century, but this book is much more emotionally grabbing and personal. Any one interested in legal reasoning and politics - as it was both then and now - can get a lot from Mr. lane's book.I think the most powerful statement about race in our society (at the end of the book); is President Grant's wish that the confederate states had been held in some form of territorial status after the war FOR A DECADE OR MORE so that government control could have been more helpful during this terrible time in the USA.

The awesome an emotional story that quite possibly touches my family. Mr. Eli Nelson a slave from Colfax LA is one of important figures in the book and could be a ancestor of my Foster Mother who was also a Nelson from Colfax. A must read for anyone trying to understand the brutal nature of racist white after the civil war in Louisiana and other parts of the confederacy.

A must read of an event that has been overlooked. Provides excellent insight into why things in the South went down as they did during Jim Crow, and how even in the North the cause of the freed blacks was pushed aside. This is critical reading if you want to understand our nation, and the long and hard road we're still traveling down.

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Not the usual history read, actually for interesting. An addicting read

Helped me understand a lot about reconstruction and how it ended. This book explained how the foundation was laid for lynching in the south and how Jim Crow became the law of the land.

This book is a discussion, both of the infamous Colfax Massacre itself, and of the legal issues surrounding it. It is a very in depth discussion of the legal issues surrounding various Reconstruction Acts and Amendments and how they relate to the Colfax Massacre. I had a hard time following much of the legal analysis and I would have liked many of these issues to be explained better. In a nutshell, however, the main thrust of this book is the failure of Supreme Court to act and affirm the Enforcement Act, and thereby, the ultimate eventual failure of Reconstruction, in general. Interestingly, the author, Charles Lane, points out, that many of the issues faced in the Cruikshank case have not been overturned even now. It is a sobering thought for Americans to realize that the great country they live in has some serious fundamental flaws in its system.

Being a Colfox (a cousin of the eponymous Colfax after whom the town was named) I was most intrigued by this history of how the emancipation of black slaves in the south of USA was postponed for about 100 years between about 1873 and the Kennedy and Obama eras of the 1960s and 2010s. As a foreigner living 2500 miles away in England I would never have guessed that the American Civil War having been won by those who abolished slavery did not lead to blacks having equal rights in America. America thinks of itself as the land of freedom and equality but it took 100 years or more for that to come about if indeed it has. As I have realised in many other contexts the struggle between good and evil, between freedom and oppression, between justice and injustice is very difficult. It is actually a matter of balance - for good to exist we do need evil: too much of one thing can lead to oppression of a different kind which is what the defeated whites of the South of the United States were more than fearful of when their previous slaves became mayors, judges and sherifs. For them this was too much, too quickly. They needed more balance and they continued their oppressive and murderous ways for many years, first continuing to lynch and murder blacks as at the Colfax massacre the subject of the book and later with support from the US Supreme Court introducing a system of apartheid that denied blacks the vote, the right to be educated together and many other forms of discrimination. The Civil War had been won to give the black man his freedom but the peace was won by the white man who kept the black in his place for another 100 years or more. The book also describes the political compromise, tough and brutal and unfair that it was that enabled there to be peace of sorts and 100 years later further democratic reform without the need for another civil war. This book is the story of the massacre that led to the compromise endorsed by the Supreme Court and it describes the legal process how the Supreme Court agreed to that compromise.