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The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction. By LeeAnna Keith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. 219. Cloth $24.95.)
The Colfax Massacre was the deadliest and in several ways the most dismaying outbreak of political and racial violence during the Reconstruction. Although this is not exactly an untold story (a phrase that should be banished from book titles in almost all cases), LeeAnna Keith presents a well -researched and interesting narrative that more clearly than previous accounts places the whole affair in a broad context and assesses its significance.
Keith goes quite deeply into the background of this 1873 event, extending the story both geographically and chronologically to early Alabama, Indian removal, and the opening up of new plantations lands. She spends a great deal of time discussing Meredith Calhoun, his family, and their move to the Red River region of Louisiana. Characters - such as Frederick Law Olmsted - drift into and out of the story, and some readers may grow impatient with what in places becomes a rather meandering approach to the topic. But the establishment of sugar plantations and the emergence of the physically deformed but strong-minded Willie...