Editor's Note

By Jim O’Quinn

I grew up just a stone’s throw west of that culturally fertile region that Carl Hancock Rux writes about in this month’s cover essay (“Up from the Mississippi Delta,”), and reading his eloquent evocations of Deep South landscapes and social relations, past and present, conjured up vivid corresponding images from my own childhood.

Our little farm was just outside Colfax, a sleepy, one-stoplight Louisiana town of less than 2,000 people, nestled in a crook of the Red River. My father taught high school in Colfax, and I passed almost daily the cast-iron plaque on the courthouse lawn that commemorated what surely must have been the most momentous event in the town’s history: “On this site occurred the Colfax Riot, in which three white men and 150 negroes were slain. This event on April 13, 1873, marked the end of Carpetbag misrule in the South.” Nobody ever talked about what the sign meant—certainly not our history teachers, who glossed over the Civil War and Reconstruction with grudging dispatch—and I idly wondered for years what manner of excitement could possibly have gripped my seemingly unexceptional hometown all those years ago, resulting in such prodigious (and lopsided) bloodshed.

As an adult, with the Internet to assist me, I dug up a hefty paragraph on the subject in an essay by Henry Louis Gates Jr., who noted that the long-ago trouble in Colfax, an incident of enormous national consequence that had been almost erased from history, should by rights be referred to not as a “riot” but as a “massacre.” And that indeed is the word that appears in the titles of two new books that have appeared just this year, dispelling the mystery I grew up with in gripping detail.

Both books—The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror and the Death of Reconstruction by LeeAnna Keith (Oxford) and The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of Reconstruction by Charles Lane (Henry Holt)—are extraordinary pieces of historical detective work. They traffic in what Rux refers to in these pages of American Theatre as “secret histories,” stories that have been suppressed or falsified because they reveal truths about our nation’s past that contradict the accepted, mainstream narrative. As Rux, an acclaimed playwright as well as an astute cultural analyst, delves deeply into three theatrical projects that deal with America’s struggles over race—including two new plays that focus on the 1955 slaying in rural Mississippi of 14-year-old Emmett Till—he and the artists he talks to shine a revelatory, transformative light on 19th- and 20th-century life in the Deep South, much as historians Keith and Lane do in their books about my hometown’s obscure and bloody past.

The courthouse plaque, with its bias and inaccuracies intact, still stands today in Colfax, anchored in concrete. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that this election year—53 years after the Till tragedy and 135 years after the Colfax Massacre—will be the year that the concrete begins to crack.