The Opelousas Massacre Begins
What Happened
On September 28, 1868, one of the deadliest massacres of the Reconstruction era began in Opelousas, in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana. In the weeks before the 1868 presidential election — the first in which Black men across the South could vote — white vigilantes, including local Klansmen, unleashed a campaign of terror that began with attacks tied to Black political participation, including the beating and expulsion of a white newspaper editor who had encouraged Black residents to register, and swelled into a manhunt that spread through the countryside. By the time it subsided, white Democrats had hunted down and killed an estimated two hundred Black Louisianans — one of the worst outbreaks of racial violence in American history — and Black voter participation in the parish collapsed on election day.
Why It Matters Today
Opelousas shows what Reconstruction's promise cost. Black Louisianans had registered to vote in their thousands; white terrorists answered with a massacre whose purpose was written in the returns — the Black vote of St. Landry Parish was annihilated. The Fifteenth Amendment was ratified the following February, and it would take a century and a second civil rights movement before the federal government stopped tolerating what Opelousas made plain: the ballot would be taken by force wherever it was not defended by law.
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