| Thibodaux Massacre | |
|---|---|
| Part of the nadir of American race relations | |
 Louisiana sugar cane laborers c. 1880 | |
| Location | Thibodaux, Louisiana |
| Date | November 22–25, 1887 |
| Target | Sugar Cane Workers (90% black) |
| Deaths | 35–50 (all black) |
| Injured | unknown (possibly hundreds) |
| Perpetrators | White paramilitaries and State Militia |
The Thibodaux Massacre was an episode of white supremacist violence that occurred in Thibodaux, Louisiana on November 23, 1887. It followed a three-week strike during the critical harvest season in which an estimated 10,000 workers protested against the living and working conditions which existed on sugar cane plantations in four parishes: Lafourche, Terrebonne, St. Mary, and Assumption.
The strike was the largest strike in the history of the industry and it was also the first strike to be conducted and coordinated by a formal labor organization, the Knights of Labor. At planters' requests, the state sent the militia to protect strikebreakers from ambush attacks by strikers, and work resumed on some plantations. Black workers and their families were evicted from plantations in Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes and retreated to Thibodaux.
Tensions erupted into violence on November 21, 1887 when an unknown white man entered a black-owned barroom and killed one black laborer and wounded another.[1] Violence continued on November 23, 1887, when five town guards were ambushed and two wounded and local white paramilitary forces responded by attacking black workers and their families. Although the total number of casualties is unknown, the consensus is that at least 35 black people were killed during the next three days (some historians estimate that 50 black people were killed) and the total tally of killed, wounded, and missing was rumored to number in the hundreds,[2][3] which makes it one of the most violent labor disputes in U.S. history. Reportedly, the victims included elders, women and children. All of the people who were killed were African American.[4]
The massacre, and the passage of discriminatory state legislation by white Democrats, including the disenfranchisement of most blacks, ended the organizing of sugar workers for decades, until the 1940s. According to historian John C. Rodrigue, "The defeated sugar workers returned to the plantations on their employers' terms."[3]
- ^ New York Herald (Triple Sheet), November 24, 1887; Pineville (Mo.) News, December 2, 1887.
- ^ Bell, Ellen Baker, "Thibodaux Massacre (1887)", KnowLA Encyclopedia of Louisiana, 15 September 2011, access date 23 April 2017
- ^ a b Cite error: The named reference
Eric Arnesen page 826was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Rebecca Jarvis Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery, p. 85