From “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity” by Robert P. Jones
With success in Colfax, the White League then set its sights on New Orleans and the newly elected Republican governor. In 1874 more than five thousand armed members of the Crescent City White League, constituted primarily of ex-Confederate soldiers, attacked local New Orleans and state police and drove the governor from office, occupying government buildings for three days before President Grant sent federal troops that finally forced their retreat. This conflict became known as the battle of Liberty Place, and the white citizens of New Orleans memorialized this conflict with a monument installed prominently on Canal Street in 1891. Its inscription declared that the White League’s actions had overthrown the “carpetbag government, ousting the usurpers, Governor Kellogg (white) and Lieutenant-Governor Antoine (colored).” While the inscription noted that the “usurpers” were reinstated by US troops, it ended with this declaration of victory, echoing the Colfax monuments: “But the national election of November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state.” This monument stood in place until it was finally removed in 2017 amid threats of violence by local whites.
As the inscription notes, the period of federal protection for African American rights across the South lasted approximately two presidential election cycles. Employing what can only be called organized acts of white Christian terrorism, whites ruthlessly clawed back power in southern states, and the federal government largely withdrew, abandoning former slaves to fend for themselves.
Southern whites felt vindicated. Mapping the experience of Civil War defeat and the resurgence of white supremacy onto Christian conceptions of crucifixion, resurrection, and salvation, they dubbed this new period “Redemption.” After seizing back control of the formal political institutions, whites focused on reasserting their dominance in the cultural realm. And the means of enforcing racial dominance shifted from paramilitary clashes reminiscent of the war to the new tool of terrorism, using acts of extreme violence against individual victims to evoke, widespread fear among African Americans. Their message was clear: anything but complete deference to whites could result in unspeakable forms of torture and death. For African Americans, the years immediately following the war were first elating and then devastating. W.E.B. DuBois famously described the period as one where “the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”