On November 22, 1887, white vigilantes crushed a strike of black sugar workers in the fields around Thibodaux, Louisiana. Fighting against the largest black social movement in the state since the end of Reconstruction, dozens, and perhaps hundreds of black workers were murdered. This is a story conveniently lost from 99% of the history books. (Image: Louisiana sugar cane workers and Grinding sugar cane) Slaves had made up the sugar workforce before 1865 and with the failure of Reconstruction to give blacks meaningful rights, white plantation owners reinstituted conditions as close to slavery as possible. Workers made 60 to 65 cents a day, paid in company scrip that kept them dependent upon the white economic structure. In 1886, the struggle attracted the Knights of Labor. In a world where the American Federation of Labor, founded in 1886, explicitly excluded black workers, the Knights support is notable. A planter wrote in 1886 that employees “are becoming more and more unmanageable. By degrees they are bringing the planter to their way of thinking in regard to how they should work and no telling at what moment there will be a serious move to compel the planter to comply with any request.” As the 1887 harvest season approached, whites became increasingly fearful of mass action. On October 19, the Knights local in Morgan City fashioned a list of demands for regional sugar workers that included a raise to $1.25 a day, biweekly payments, and cash pay instead of company store scrip. Junius Bailey, a former slave and now president of the Knights’ joint local executive board, sent a letter to the sugar planters that read, “should this demand be considered exorbitant by the sugar planters…we ask them to submit such information with reason therewith to this board not later than Saturday, Oct. 29 inst. or appoint a special committee to confer with this board on said date.” As thousands of workers walked off the job Thibodaux whites organized the ‘Peace and Order Committee’. Led by Judge Taylor Beattie, an ex-Confederate, planter, and former member of the Knights of the White Camelia (a white supremacist paramilitary organization similar to the KKK), the Committee declared martial law over Thibodaux’s black population. On November 22, the Peace and Order Committee closed the roads into Thibodaux and decided to end the labor uprising. Mary Pugh, owner of the Live Oak plantation said that unless this strike was repressed, “white people could live in this country no longer.” On the 22nd, the militia went house to house, pulling out black people and executing them in cold blood. Black workers fled out of the city and the strike effectively ended. The numbers of dead remain unknown. Some have estimated the number could be as high as 300. The editor of the Thibodaux Star, a member of the militia, wrote of “negroes jumping over fences and making for the swamps at double quick time. We’ll bet five cents that our people never before saw so large a black-burying as they have seen this week.” Mary Pugh wrote, “I think this will settle the question of who is to rule, the nigger or the white man? For the next 50 years but it has been well done & I hope all trouble is ended.” An African-American newspaper in Louisiana offered this account of events in Thibodaux: “Murder, foul murder has been committed and the victims were inoffensive and law-abiding Negroes. Assassins more cruel, more desperate, more wanton than any who had hitherto practiced their nefarious business in Louisiana have been shooting down, like so many cattle, the Negroes in and around Thibodaux… .” For more: Rebecca Scott’s Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery; Red-Handed Murder: Negroes Wantonly Killed at Thibodaux, La. (November 26, 1887). In The Weekly Pelican (New Orleans, Louisiana), vol. 1, no. 52 (November 26,1887), p. 2. More at: lawyersgunsmoneyblog/2012/11/this-day-in-labor-history-november-22-1887; historyisaweapon/defcon1/redhandedmurder.html; knowla.org/entry/740/
Posted on: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 14:18:03 +0000
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