Charley Andrew White, the eldest son of Virginia Cathey and Andrew J. White, was born on New Year's Day 1873 in Bienville Parish, Louisiana. The world Charley was born into was full of racial tension. He was just 103 days old when the Colfax Massacre took place that year on Easter Sunday, about 80 miles south of his home. As many as 150 men, all but three of whom were Black, were murdered at the Colfax courthouse in Grant Parish, Louisiana—the deadliest incident of racial and political violence of the Reconstruction Era. When Charley was three years old, white men were still undoing Reconstruction Era policies in spectacular fashion. The Supreme Court decided, in U.S. v. Cruikshank , that the federal government couldn't prosecute individuals for civil rights violations; only states could. As Charley grew up in the 1880s, he witnessed the total collapse of Reconstruction Era protections for Black Americans and the solidified rise of the Jim Crow system in North-Central Louisiana...
Telling the Tales of Tombstones