The Opelousas Massacre of 1868

In the fall of eighteen sixty-eight, something happened in and around Opelousas, Louisiana, that was among the bloodiest episodes of the entire Reconstruction era, and it remained largely unknown outside the region for more than a century.

The background was straightforward. Black men in Louisiana now had the right to vote, and in St. Landry Parish, they outnumbered white voters significantly. The presidential election of eighteen sixty-eight was weeks away. A young white Republican schoolteacher and newspaper editor named Emerson Bentley had been helping Black residents register and had been publishing the St. Landry Progress, the local Republican paper.

On September twenty-eighth, members of the Knights of the White Camelia, a white supremacist organization operating throughout Louisiana, dragged Bentley out of his classroom and beat him savagely in front of his students. Bentley escaped and fled, but a false rumor spread that he had been killed. Armed Black men gathered to march on the town in response. That gathering was all the pretext the vigilantes needed.

For two weeks, armed white men patrolled Opelousas and the surrounding countryside, hunting Black residents. People were shot in their fields, pulled from their homes, killed at random. When it was over, somewhere between two hundred and three hundred Black men and women had been murdered. The numbers are uncertain because no one was counting carefully, and no one was ever prosecuted for a single death.

The political outcome was precise. In October of eighteen sixty-eight, Ulysses Grant won the presidency, but he received exactly zero votes from St. Landry Parish. Not because no one voted Republican. Because Republican voters were dead, or hiding, or had been run out of the parish entirely.

The massacre established a pattern that would endure for nearly a century: political violence so thorough that it erased a majority's ability to participate in democracy. The story was rediscovered by historians in the nineteen nineties and has since been recognized as one of the defining atrocities of Reconstruction.