Book Alert / The Day Freedom Died

The Day Freedom Died -- The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction by Charles Lane, Holt '08, $27, 326 pages, ISBN: 0805083421. Index, bibliography, source notes, grouping of b&w glossy images.

Don't you find it fascinating that some historical phenomena lie unexamined for a century or more, only to win the interest of two scholars independently around the same time? Inevitably, they bump into one another in musty library stacks, frantically e-mail their publishers, and the race to publication is on.

Such is the case with the 1873 Colfax Massacre, dubbed by some the last battle of the Civil War, in which Confederate troops located and slaughtered five dozen former slaves in the Colfax, LA courthouse. Earlier this year, LeeAnna Keith weighed in with The Colfax Massacre -- The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror and the Death of Reconstruction, examined a while back in these pages.

Now, author Charles Lane of The Washington Post supplies his own take on the bloody battle that cut the underpinnings from the hopefulness of Reconstruction. As a former Supreme Court staff writer, his work hones in more than Keith's on the "very retrograde (court) decisions" that set the stage for the Massacre by countermanding the civil rights won by newly-freed slaves. Together with the Massacre, they helped make possible the "separate but equal" Plessy v. Ferguson court ruling in 1896 and the state by state adoption of Jim Crow laws thereafter.