The last word came to me from no less an authority than the then mayor of Colfax, a white septuagenarian and lifelong resident named Connie Youngblood. "I don't talk about it in speeches or public or anything like that," she told me. "It just makes the blacks upset, and I don't see the point of doing that. But I will tell you two things about the riot: First is that the story about the blacks starting the whole thing by throwing out that baby in the coffin is just pure nonsense. That never happened. The second is that the next day the whites went to the blacks and said that if they had participated in the riot and if they stepped forward now, they would be granted pardons. So a bunch of the blacks came forward—I don't know how many, maybe a hundred—and the whites shot them instead."
Toward the end of my visit to Colfax, I took a walk through the town cemetery, which lies across Main Street from the library and the courthouse. Like many small-town southern cemeteries, it is one of the nicest spots in town—granite stones, chiseled and polished, interspersed with solid, proud slate markers more than a century old, all of them widely and evenly spaced apart. And, as in many small-town southern cemeteries, every last person buried there is white. There is not, I've been told, a racially integrated burial ground in all of Grant Parish.
I strolled slowly through the cemetery, perusing names and epitaphs, pausing for a moment to inspect a new grave that had been dug that very morning. Glancing up, I spotted—across all the neat rows of neat headstones, and standing near a stately old tree—a marble obelisk, a dozen feet high, towering over every other marker. I made my way over to it, picked some lichen off the weathered inscription, and squinted in the afternoon sun to read it.
IN LOVING REMEMBRANCE
ERECTED TO THE MEMORY OF
THE HEROES
STEPHEN DECATUR PARISH
JAMES WEST HADNOT
SIDNEY HARRIS
WHO FELL IN THE COLFAX
RIOT FIGHTING FOR
WHITE SUPREMACY
APRIL 13, 1873
It is the frankest monument I have ever seen.