An Absolute Massacre: The New Orleans Race Riot of July 30, 1866
One of several atrocious riots perpetrated in the South in 1866, the bloody tumult in New Orleans had both immediate and antecedent causes. Hollandsworth weaves both into a narrative of events shocking in themselves and made more so by the author's objective, detached manner. The underlying factor in the riot, as in all similar incidents in the aftermath of the Civil War, was the extent of equality to be accorded freedmen. Under Lincoln's Reconstruction plan, a Louisiana convention agreed to abolish slavery but deferred the decision on suffrage to the state legislature. Under the even more lenient Johnson, ex-Confederates returning from the war gained control of the state and city governments by early 1866, so the prosuffrage conventioneers seized on a legal technicality to reconvene and give black men the vote. The ensuing explosion was almost wholly a police-perpetrated murder of dozens of blacks and pro-Union whites, recounted in Hollandsworth's ghastly blow-by-blow detail. Remarkably, to this day denizens of New Orleans pass by the riot's location without any memorial to detain them.Gilbert TaylorCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved