Colfax, Louisiana
Who does the law protect in the American South?
In 1851, Frederick Law Olmsted, widely considered the father of landscape architecture, traveled the American South as a ‘travel writer’ for the then ‘New York Daily Times’ (now the New York Times). The writings that he later published as The Cotton Kingdom offer a rare glimpse into the daily life on American plantations from the perspective of an outsider. His account of the Calhoun plantation (on the site that is now the town of Colfax, Louisiana) formed the basis for this work.
When Olmsted visited the Calhoun Plantation in 1852, the black population far outnumbered whites in Rapides Parish (later re-districted as Grant Parish). Olmsted described Meredith Calhoun’s four adjacent plantations as “the most profitable estate that I visited.” Olmsted went to great pains to keep Meredith Calhoun’s identity secret in the book.
The Red River Valley was opened to economic extraction in the 1930s after Henry Miller Shreve employed hundreds of laborers to break through what was known as the “Great Raft” at the head of the river, opening it up to travel by steamboat. The Great Raft was a mass of logs and natural debris that had evolved over thousands of years near what is now Shreveport, Louisiana (named in Shreve’s honor in 1838). The Calhoun Plantation shaped the landscape much like other plantations in the valley; a similar spatial logic of oppression was replicated across the South.
In 1852, over 1,000 individuals were enslaved on the four plantations owned by Meredith Calhoun. Almost all of them had travelled by foot in 1836 from Huntsville, Alabama in a forced migration from Calhoun’s family farm. Almost all the people who migrated were between the ages of 15 and 50 - many were between 15 and 25 years old. Roughly half “were old enough to remember their first sale and transport, which had brought them to Alabama from East Coast states” (Keith, 2008).
The history of what is now Colfax, Louisiana is inextricable from its violent past. Today, the town of ~2,000 inhabitants in 63% black and has a 44% poverty rate (Deloitte). It is home to the Grant Parish Detention Center, a 185-bed low-security facility renovated in 2005.
Some historians believe the Colfax Massacre in 1873 in which 60+ black residents were killed by a white mob on an attack on the Colfax Courthouse and the resulting 1875 Supreme Court case, US v. Cruikshank, initiated and legimitized the Jim Crow segregation era in the South. Today, Colfax is one of many local Louisiana Parishes that monetizes inmates, continuing a legacy in which violence and economic freedom are closely tied. The local Sheriff makes $24.75 a day from the state of Louisiana per inmate in the Grant Parish Detention Facility: empty beds mean an economic loss for the Sheriff’s Department (NPR).
REFERENCES
Keith. (2008). The Colfax massacre : the untold story of Black power, White terror, and the death of Reconstruction. Oxford University Press.
Deloitte, DataWheel. DataUSA. Profile on Colfax, LA. https://datausa.io/profile/geo/colfax-la/
Staff, NPR. “How Louisiana Became the World’s Prison Capital” npr.org, 2019, www.npr.org/2012/06/05/154352977/how-louisiana-became-the-worlds-prison-capital.