The Thibodaux Massacre was an incident of violent suppression by white paramilitary forces of the unionizing efforts of 10,000 black sugar cane workers that took place on this day in 1887, in Thibodaux, Louisiana.

The sugar cane workers, determined to unionize for a living wage, had chosen to strike during the crucial harvest season, during which there was a narrow window of time to harvest the cane and the planters would be unlikely to find strikebreakers.

Judge Taylor Beattie, an ex-Confederate soldier and slaveowner, declared martial law and gathered up hundreds of white men to form a paramilitary group to suppress the strikers, close the borders to the city, and monitor all movement of black people in the area. Not wanting to be boxed in, black strikers fired on the city border guards. In retaliation, the paramilitary forces initiated three days of violence against mostly unarmed black workers and their families.

Estimates of the total number of dead range from 35-60, making it one of the deadliest strikes in American labor history. Despite the women and children killed, the Southern press heralded the white perpetrators of the violence.

One participant, Andrew Price, went on to be elected to Congress. One participant, Andrew Price, went on to be elected to Congress. Black farmworkers in the region did not make another large effort to unionize until the 1940s.

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      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Milo what's his ass, Blair White, Caitlyn Jenner, the Miller woman who runs "Gays Against Groomers". Plenty of queer fascists trying to speedrun Ernst Rohm.

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Yeah. Rohm was the head of the SA and had like 2 million street fighters he could call up at one time. He was easily the second most powerful man in the Nazi Party after Hitler. And by all accounts he and Hitler were genuinely close friends. But as the Nazis were gaining more political legitimacy there was a lot of pressure both from the existing state organs and other high-ranking Nazis to remove the SA as a power bloc. From what I remember Rohm was more sincere about the revolutionary and populist rhetoric and a lot of people didn't like that. Hitler was reluctant to order the purge and put it off for quite a while but eventually he succumbed to pressure and the Night of the Long Knives was initiated. All the gay Nazis were purged, starting with Rohm. Hitler publicly said that the purge was to remove homosexuals and other morally undesirable elements from the Nazis. I honestly don't know if he actually cared about homosexuality or if it was just a cover to appeal to the conservative German population. At any rate, Rohm was purged, all of his loyalists were purged, and that was the end of openly gay Nazis.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      The only source I've seen is them using "Mx." on some court filings. Consensus is that they're trolling or attempting to get out of the hate crimes charge.