The Birmingham News has an in-depth article by Kyle Whitmire on how Eufaula, Alabama ignores is history. This is a city ostensibly steeped in history, the fake history of gracious antebellum homes and Lost Cause monuments. What it lacks is an honest retelling of the story of the Eufaula Massacre in 1874. Here is how the article describes the city’s reverence for its whitewashed history:
On either side of Eufaula Avenue are rows of antebellum mansions that have their own names, imparted by owners who are long since dead. The director of the state tourism department once said the houses looked like wedding cakes. Most, but not all, are in excellent shape, restored by new owners who are as much curators as they are residents.
…Yes, there is history in Eufaula. But there’s something missing.
But you won’t find mention of it — not here, not now.
The year was 1874, and Alabama was nearing the abrupt end of Reconstruction. Frazer, who was also a Methodist minister, had spent two weeks canvassing support among the sharecroppers around Eufaula, back when cotton farmers still loaded their crops onto boats. The Monday before Election Day, he led about 400 Black men toward town to vote. They camped by the roadside outside of town, and set off on foot at eight o’clock the next morning, marching to drums and fifes.
“I told them that although they might carry sticks, they should not carry any other weapons,” Frazer told investigators “I instructed them to stand in a body until they got a chance to vote.”
Hart wasn’t the only one anticipating a frolic.
…James Williford [a] deputy U.S. Marshal — Williford had grown up across the river in Georgia. But since he’d joined the Marshals service, he’d become an outsider.
Then the frolic started.
Still making his way toward the fight, the marshal Williford first reached the young Black man, who by then had voted. Wiliford asked the young man if he had voted as he pleased. When the man said he had, Williford told him to go about his business and that he’d be protected.
“Didn’t you hear them say?” the man answered. “Fall in, Company A! Fall in, Company B!”
Frazer fled but quickly hid behind some steps on the side of a house. From there, he could see Harrison Hart, the man who’d warned of the “frolic,” firing at the fleeing men.
“Very well — I have writs!” Williford said. He pulled subpoenas from his pockets and asked for soldiers to help serve them. “I have 15 or 20 subpoenas. Are they not writs?”
The casualty counts vary, but most say between seven and ten men died on the street. Others were found later, dead in the woods outside town, after the buzzards found them first.
Five men died in the Boston Massacre and it’s in every American history textbook. About twice as many died that day in Eufaula and Alabama history textbooks neglect any mention of it.
Eufaula has buried it, too.
I grew up in Alabama. In school, I had two years of what I was told was Alabama history. I never heard of any of this. Last year, around the anniversary of the Tulsa Black Wall Street Massacre, I saw a map of similar mass murders around the country.
And there was Eufaula.
Unlike the Black Wall Street Massacre, Eufaula’s secret history wasn’t kept alive only by word of mouth. There were two congressional investigations that produced official reports and included hundreds of pages of sworn testimony from witnesses on all sides. (I’ve now read all of it, which I used to build the narrative above.)
I drove to Eufaula, just to make sure there wasn’t something there to mark the spot. As I suspected, I found nary a thing.
The well where S.N.B. Johnson took shelter is long gone. There’s a fire hydrant in the highway median there now. The buildings the shooters fired from are gone, too, burned in a pair of blazes around the turn of the 20th century. On one end of the block is a Walgreens. At the other end is a tanning salon called Lasting Impressions.
Between 70 and 80 people got shot here for trying to vote. And there’s nothing here to say a thing about them. Around the corner, there’s a memorial to a fish, but nothing for what happened here. Not a monument. Not a marker.
Had not Dr. Richard Bailey told me where to look for the marker, I might have zipped past it on my way to Eufaula. Bailey is a historian and author of “Neither Carpetbaggers nor Scalawags,” an account of Black Republican officeholders during Reconstruction. He lives in Montgomery where he guides tours of that city’s buried history. As he puts it, not everybody cried when Union troops marched up Dexter Avenue toward the capitol.
…Reconstruction was America’s first experiment at nation-building, and it failed for many of the same reasons, and in the same ways, as later attempts elsewhere in the world.
“Emancipation threw the whites and blacks on their own resources, and each race must depend upon its own inherent strength. Freeing the slaves was a declaration of war between the Caucasian and African — a war that is going on now and that will go on silently, ruthlessly, and unceasingly until one or the other is exterminated.
“Let us recognize facts — admit that a war of races is progressing — and then every man will range himself under the banner of his kindred. For ourselves we say, No compromise — no ‘unification’ — but a white man’s rule, a white man’s civilization, and a white man’s government, or ruin and extermination!”
Eufaula is now moving/removing the Confederate monument. The city council quietly voted on this without public knowledge. They’ve made all kinds claims now as to why they’re moving/removing it. The flow and confusion of traffic was one of their excuses. There is that same type flow and confusion at the intersection of Barbour St and Randolph Ave, but no mention of moving/removing it. I am furious, and so are others!!