Thibodaux massacre

Thibodaux massacre
Part of the nadir of American race relations
Louisiana sugar cane laborers c. 1880
Location	Thibodaux, Louisiana
Date	November 22–25, 1887
Target	Sugar Cane Workers (90% Black)
Deaths	35–50
Injured	unknown (possibly hundreds)
Perpetrators	White paramilitaries and State Militia

The Thibodaux massacre was an episode of racial violence that occurred in Thibodaux, Louisiana on November 23, 1887. It followed a three-week strike during the critical harvest season in which an estimated 10,000 workers protested against the living and working conditions which existed on sugar cane plantations in four parishes: Lafourche, Terrebonne, St. Mary, and Assumption.

The strike was the largest strike in the history of the industry and it was also the first strike to be conducted by a formal labor organization, the Knights of Labor. At planters' requests, the state sent the militia to protect strikebreakers from ambush attacks by strikers, and work resumed on some plantations. Black workers and their families were evicted from plantations in Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes and retreated to Thibodaux.

Tensions erupted into violence on November 21, 1887 when white regulators stormed a black-owned barroom and killed one black laborer and wounded another. Violence continued on November 23, 1887, when local white paramilitary forces responded to two town guards being wounded, possibly by white militiamen, by attacking black workers and their families. Although the total number of casualties is unknown, the consensus is that at least 35 black people were killed during the next three days (some historians estimate that 50 black people were killed) and the total tally of killed, wounded, and missing was rumored to number in the hundreds,^[1][2] which makes it one of the most violent labor disputes in U.S. history. Reportedly, the victims included elders, women and children. All of the people who were killed were African American.^[3]

The massacre, and the passage of discriminatory state legislation by white Democrats, including the disenfranchisement of most blacks, ended the organizing of sugar workers for decades, until the 1940s. According to historian John C. Rodrigue, "The defeated sugar workers returned to the plantations on their employers' terms."^[2]