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An Absolute Massacre: The New Orleans Race Riot of July 30, 1866. By James G. Hollandsworth Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Pp. [xviii], 168. $28.95, ISBN 0-8071-2588-1.)
On Monday, July 30, 1866, a large, enthusiastic crowd of "black men, women, and children dressed in their Sunday best" gathered outside the Mechanics' Institute in New Orleans to show their support for black suffrage (p. 92). Inside the hall, white Unionists prepared to amend the 1864 Louisiana constitution to enfranchise black Louisianians. From the Faubourg Marigny at the other end of the city, approximately seventy to a hundred black supporters of the voting rights proposal, many of them U.S. Army veterans, set out on a march through the French Quarter to join the crowd at the institute. In An Absolute Massacre historian James G. Hollandsworth Jr. documents the 1866 race riot that ensued when a white mob attacked the black marchers and over-ran the Mechanics' Institute, and his skillful use...