Thibodaux Massacre (1887)

Wed Nov 23, 1887

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Image: Workers cutting sugar cane in Louisiana, sometime between 1880 and 1897 [Wikipedia]

The Thibodaux Massacre was an incident of violent suppression by white paramilitary forces of the unionizing efforts of 10,000 black sugar cane workers that took place on this day in 1887, in Thibodaux, Louisiana.

The sugar cane workers, determined to unionize for a living wage, had chosen to strike during the crucial harvest season, during which there was a narrow window of time to harvest the cane and the planters would be unlikely to find strikebreakers.

Judge Taylor Beattie, an ex-Confederate soldier and slaveowner, declared martial law and gathered up hundreds of white men to form a paramilitary group to suppress the strikers, close the borders to the city, and monitor all movement of black people in the area. Not wanting to be boxed in, black strikers fired on the city border guards. In retaliation, the paramilitary forces initiated three days of violence against mostly unarmed black workers and their families.

Estimates of the total number of dead range from 35-60, making it one of the deadliest strikes in American labor history. Despite the women and children killed, the Southern press heralded the white perpetrators of the violence.

One participant, Andrew Price, went on to be elected to Congress. Black farmworkers in the region did not make another large effort to unionize until the 1940s.