Blood on Easter Sunday - April 13, 1873

On Easter Sunday, 1873, a Black militia defended a Louisiana courthouse and paid with their lives. The Colfax Massacre was the deadliest act of racial violence in the Reconstruction era, but the story doesn't end with the killing. It ends in the United States Supreme Court, where a ruling called United States v. Cruikshank handed white supremacist organizations across the South a legal roadmap and shaped the next hundred years of American life. This is the story most history books never told you.