Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

by Michael Harriot

On July 30, 1866, angered by newly issued provisions that disenfranchised Black voters, a group of freedmen, including hundreds of Black veterans, gathered on the steps of the Mechanics Institute in New Orleans to protest during the Louisiana state constitutional convention. Expressing their outrage in the Blackest way possible, they paraded to the assembly with a marching band to show their displeasure with the exclusionary laws that would become known as the “Black Codes.” As they marched, a mob of white supremacists, policemen, and ex-Confederates brutally attacked the demonstration, until the marchers sought refuge inside the Mechanics Institute, where, as Ron Chernow explained in Grant, The whites stomped, kicked, and clubbed the black marchers mercilessly. Policemen smashed the institute’s windows and fired into it indiscriminately until the floor grew slick with blood. They emptied their revolvers on the convention delegates, who desperately sought to escape. Some leaped from windows and were shot dead when they landed. Those lying wounded on the ground were stabbed repeatedly, their skulls bashed in with brickbats. The sadism was so wanton that men who kneeled and prayed for mercy were killed instantly, while dead bodies were stabbed and mutilated.23