Thibodaux massacre

Sugar strike

The sugar cane harvest and processing was a complex series of events that had to be closely coordinated among a large labor force pushed to work to physical extremes. Sugar plantations were described as "factories in the field" and had a high death rate during slavery times. Conditions were little improved after Reconstruction.

A major issue for sugar workers since the early 1880s was being forced by plantation owners to accept scrip for pay, a change the planters had initiated in the early 1880s, when they also cut wages because of a declining international market. These "pasteboard tickets" were redeemable only at company stores, which operated at high profit margins. As the plantation kept the books, often illiterate workers found themselves unable to get out of debt. Required by law to pay off the debt, workers became essentially bound to the plantation in a state similar to slavery. Most of the cane workers were black, but there were also whites. The Knights of Labor used this issue to organize workers, and thousands joined.

In October 1877, Duncan F. Kenner, a millionaire planter, founded the statewide Louisiana Sugar Producer's Association (LSPA), consisting of 200 of the largest planters in the state, and served as president. The powerful LPSA lobbied the federal government for sugar tariffs, funding to support levees to protect their lands, and research to increase crop yields. For the next decade these members also worked to gain control over their labor: they adopted a uniform pay scale and withheld 80 percent of the wages until the end of the harvest season, in order to keep workers on the plantations through the end of the season. They ended the "job" system and the largest planters, who maintained stores, required workers to accept scrip instead of cash, redeemable only at their stores.

The workers resisted, mounting some actions each year contesting some part of the LPSA's program. The state government supported the powerful planters, sending in state militia when they used convict labor from prisons to harvest and process the cane.

In 1887 the Knights of Labor organized a major three-week sugar strike against cane plantations in Lafourche, Terrebonne, St. Mary, and Assumption parishes. Most plantations were idle. The strike was organized by the national Knights of Labor organization, who had established Local Assembly 8404 in Shreveport the preceding year.

In October labor representatives delivered demands to the LPSA that included an increase in wages to $1.25 a day, biweekly payments, and payment in currency instead of the "pasteboard tickets", or scrip, redeemable only at company stores.

As the LPSA ignored the demands, the Knights of Labor called the strike for November 1, timed to coincide with the critical "rolling period" of the crop, when it had to be harvested and processed. The work stoppage threatened the entire sugar cane harvest for the year. The 1887 strike was the largest labor action in the industry, involving an estimated 10,000 workers, a tenth of whom were white. It was the first time a formal labor organization had led a strike in this region.

The planters appealed to Louisiana Governor Samuel Douglas McEnery, who was also a planter. McEnery, declaring, "God Almighty has himself drawn the color line," called out ten infantry companies and an artillery company of the state militia, sending the latter to Thibodaux, the parish seat and "heart of the strike." They were to protect strikebreakers and suppress strikers; they evicted workers from plantation housing. The militia suppressed strikers in St. Mary Parish resulting in "as many as twenty people" killed or wounded on November 5 in the black village of Pattersonville.

The militia protected some 800 contract workers brought in to Terrebone Parish, and helped capture and arrest 50 strikers, most for union activities. The strike collapsed there and workers returned to the plantations.

Many of the black workers in Lafourche Parish retreated after eviction to the crowded African-American section of Thibodaux, and the state militia withdrew. They left it up to local officials to manage from there.

Events in Thibodaux

Parish District Judge Taylor Beattie, who owned Orange Grove Plantation and was a member of the LPSA, announced formation of a "Peace and Order Committee" in Thibodaux. He declared martial law, and recruited 300 white men for his committee to serve as a paramilitary group. He ordered blacks within the city limits to show a pass to enter or leave. Like many top-ranking white state officials, Beattie was an ex-Confederate and an ex-slaveholder. He was a former member of the Knights of the White Camelia, a paramilitary group that had worked to suppress black Republican voting during Reconstruction.

Beattie ordered the paramilitary to close the entrances to the city on the morning of November 22 and stand guard. The strikers resisted being boxed in and fired on two of the pickets, injuring both. The committee and other white vigilantes immediately started to round up and kill black workers and their families, starting three days of violence against mostly unarmed blacks. They targeted known and suspected Knights of Labor organizers. The blacks were murdered in town and where they tried to hide in the surroundings woods and swamps. Bodies were sometimes left in shallow graves.

A black newspaper described the scene:

'Six killed and five wounded' is what the daily papers here say, but from an eye witness to the whole transaction we learn that no less than thirty-five Negroes were killed outright. Lame men and blind women shot; children and hoary-headed grandsires ruthlessly swept down! The Negroes offered no resistance; they could not, as the killing was unexpected. Those of them not killed took to the woods, a majority of them finding refuge in this city.

This account is the source for the casualty figure of 35. According to historian Rebecca Jarvis Scott, "No credible official count of the victims of the Thibodaux massacre was ever made; bodies continued to turn up in shallow graves outside of town for weeks to come." Eric Arnesen wrote that local white residents privately admitted more than 50 workers were murdered in Thibodaux, but the total was uncertain. Along the Bayou Lafourche, black oral history has told of hundreds of casualties, including wounded and missing. James Keith Hogue attributes 50 deaths to the three-day attacks by the paramilitary, saying that in addition, numerous Knights of Labor organizers disappeared over the next year. He likened these actions to the violence and intimidation by the White League in Louisiana in the 1870s, when they suppressed black voting.

Aftermath

After the massacre, labor organizing among sugar workers essentially was suspended; plantation workers returned to work under the owners' terms. White Democrats, who dominated the state legislature, soon passed laws for disenfranchisement of blacks, racial segregation and other Jim Crow rules. There was no more effort to organize sugar workers until the 1940s. It was then initiated in the context of increased civil rights activism after World War II.

In that same period, beginning during the war, many Louisiana blacks joined the Great Migration to the North and West Coast to escape the continuing violence and racial oppression. It was not until the mid-1960s that the civil rights movement achieved the passage of Congressional legislation to enforce civil and voting rights for African Americans and other minorities in the United States.

Representation in other media

"The Thibodaux Massacre: Racial Violence and the 1887 Sugar Cane Labor Strike" a book released in Nov. 2016 by The History Press written by John DeSantis, provides eyewitness accounts obtained from documents in the U.S. National Archives and names eight of the victims. It also provides a detailed history of a U.S. Civil War veteran who was wounded during the incident and whose records provide new information and insight.

Additional reading