Voices from Colfax
Chloe Tucker
Many people downwind of Colfax, Louisiana are getting very sick, very fast (Richmond-Bryant et al. 2022). A fenced-off property outside of town receives millions of pounds of toxic and hazardous waste materials from around the country—such as expired fireworks, industrial byproducts, and expired military ordinance—and burns them in the open air. This burn pit remains the only facility holding an EPA permit for open-air incineration of toxic materials in country, and Louisiana laws make it more cost-effective to dispose of them here than anywhere else. After Clean Harbors began routing and burning large quantities of expired military ordinance at the Colfax facility, incidence of skin conditions, lung cancer, asthma and respiratory diseases skyrocketed across Grant Parish (LSU Tumor Registry). To learn more about the environmental damage and hear the voices of Colfax residents yourself, watch this October 2022 documentary produced by VICE Media, in consultation with this Mellon-funded project: “The U.S. Military Contracted Burn Pits No One Is Talking About.”
The slow violence of health disparities and environmental injustice experienced by Colfax residents benefits from the historical context and legacies of racial violence just three miles down the road. Hugo Martinez’ work centers the Black and white voices of Colfax residents who I interviewed and photographed with Mellon support, and places them together in front of the Old Morning Star Church, where they gather and organize.

This work contextualizes the experiences of today’s environmental violence in Colfax within local legacies of white supremacist violence. The Colfax Massacre of 1873 was one of the deadliest terror events in U.S. history: Black militiamen occupied the Colfax courthouse in an attempt to preserve their votes cast in a presidential election (an election characterized by white southerners organizing against Reconstruction policies). Between 50-153 Black Americans were killed by a white supremacist mob comprised of former Confederate soldiers and Ku Klux Klan members. Some time after the massacre, prominent perpetrators were arrested and their fate was decided in United States v. Cruikshank (1876): the decision effectively ended Reconstruction by neutering the president’s ability to use military force to protect African-Americans, previously granted through the Enforcement Acts of 1870.

The Cruikshank decision made the lynching and violence of the Jim Crow era permissible and established legal precedent which permitted law enforcement to look the other way for decades in the face of overtly racist violence and terrorism (Pope, Harvard Law Review 2014). There is still no statue or memorial to the Black dead in Colfax. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s “HateWatch” blog notes that an obelisk commemorating the dead was erected in 1921 to honor the three white men who died in 1873. On the face of the obelisk is a plaque with their names, explaining that they died “Fighting for White Supremacy.”

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