Researchers revealed their findings Wednesday in their ongoing efforts to unlock the mystery of an American tragedy more than 130 years in the making and said more work is needed.
On Nov. 23, 1887, at least 30 people lost their lives during a racially motivated attack carried out by a mob of white men against black sugar plantation workers protesting a wage system that effectively kept them tied to the farms where they worked.
Although no one knows for sure how many people lost their lives during what became known as the Thibodaux Massacre, historians estimate 30-60 were murdered during the day-long attack.
Laura Browning, who’s assisting in the research of the historical documents associated with the massacre, read a first-hand account of that infamous day.
“On Wednesday morning of Nov. 23, 1887, about five o’clock, I heard a shot fired,” Browning read. “A moment later I heard two more fired after the other.”
The burial site of the victims wasn’t recorded. But through oral histories, it’s believed the property of the American Legion Post 513 in Thibodaux is possibly the site of the mass burial.
John DeSantis, author of the book “The Thibodaux Massacre: Racial Violence and the 1887 Sugar Cane Labor Strike,” said much of the information we have from that time period was passed down from person to person.
“In situations like this oral history is sometimes all that you have, especially when it comes to a mass burial of people who were killed under extremely spurious circumstances,” DeSantis said.
The aim of the project is to not only locate and identify victims’ remains but hopefully give them a proper burial as well, researchers said.
Although scientists found evidence of something buried deep within the ground, further investigation is warranted to determine what that something actually is.
During a presentation Wednesday at the very site that the researchers believe houses the remains of the victims, forensic anthropologist Davette Gadison shed some light about what scientists learned during the course of their investigation.
Gadison, a Tulane doctoral candidate, worked with a team of scientists in May to brave the extreme heat, relentless mosquitoes and dense soil to use ground radar and other instruments to search the land in hopes to locate 130-year-old human remains.
“We did find a number of disturbances,” Gadison said. “Around 3 meters deep and 15 meters wide, there’s an area of interest.”
The sides around the area of interest are steep, indicating some kind of human-made feature to the west of the building, Gadison said.
“There could be something there,” she said. “We can’t say what’s exactly in there. But we have some recommendations going forward to understand what that is. But it’s definitely an underground disturbance. Something or someone is buried there. We’re just not sure at this point.”
The scientists also found a lot of debris indicating where a dump site may have been, Gadison said.
“We saw a lot of building materials like brick and broken glass,” she said. “That debris was over a meter deep.”
Researchers have indicated the site had once been used as a city landfill, which complicates the project. Also complicating matters are natural elements such as decomposition, Gadison said.
As a result of their findings, the team recommends further archival exploration to help researchers understand more about the land’s history. Gadison also recommended more ethnographic research or talking to members of the community to gather more information since much of it exists in the form of oral history.
“There needs to be more archeological work done to confirm what it is we’re seeing from these methods that we used in the preliminary investigation,” Gadison said. “We also need more geophysical surveys or scanning a larger area to see if there is anything over there. All of this would provide us with a historical context and better understanding of the land use.”
Launched by DeSantis in 2016, the Louisiana 1887 Memorial Committee was established as a multi-racial body whose mission is verification, if possible, of the burial site. The nonprofit committee’s advisory board includes descendants of the few massacre victims who have been historically documented, as well as individuals with close ties to plantation-owning families from that time.
For more information about the project or to learn how to help, visit https://www.la1887.com/.
--Staff Writer Dan Copp can be reached at 857-2202 or at firstname.lastname@example.org. Follow him on Twitter@DanVCopp.