About this item

On November 23, 1887, white vigilantes gunned down unarmed black laborers and their families during a spree lasting more than two hours. The violence erupted due to strikes on Louisiana sugar cane plantations. Fear, rumor and white supremacist ideals clashed with an unprecedented labor action to create an epic tragedy. A future member of the U.S. House of Representatives was among the leaders of a mob that routed black men from houses and forced them to a stretch of railroad track, ordering them to run for their lives before gunning them down. According to a witness, the guns firing in the black neighborhoods sounded like a battle. Author and award-winning reporter John DeSantis uses correspondence, interviews and federal records to detail this harrowing true story.



About the Author

John DeSantis

It's a long way from Jackson Heights, NY to the Louisiana bayou country. But that's the path John DeSantis has traveled during a colorful and rewarding career.
John began chasing homicides in New York's meanest streets during the bloody 1970s and 1980s for leading wire services, and then covered Brooklyn courts for United Press International. One of the cases he was most involved with stemmed from the 1989 murder of Yusuf Hawkins in New York City during a period of great turmoil, resulting in his first book, For the Color of His Skin: The Murder of Yusuf Hawkins and the Trial of Bensonhurst. His second book, The New Untouchables: How America Sanctions Police Violence, was published in 1991. Both are available on Amazon, including a 2013 paperback and Kindle update of "For The Color Of His Skin"
John went on to work as a staff reporter at papers in the New York Times regional chain, in Louisiana, Florida and North Carolina, as well as papers in Mississippi and California.
His career has heavily centered on social and criminal justice issues, including exposing the Ku Klux Klan on the Mississippi coast. He provided special coverage of Hurricane Katrina for the NY Times in New Orleans, and for the Houma Courier intensely covered the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and its effects on Louisiana fishing communities.
Currently he is Senior Staff Writer at The Times of Houma-Thibodaux in Louisiana.
His newest book "The Thibodaux Massacre: Racial Violence and the 1887 Sugar Cane Labor Strike," published by The History Press, releases Nov. 14, 2016 and is available here on Amazon. He regards it as one of his most important tasks to date, the product of 10 years of research that didn't take him past discoveries already made by other researchers. In 2015, however, doors began to open. This led to never-before published information on a brutal incident in the nation's labor and racial history, which is shared in the book.
John's current newspaper work can be accessed at www.houmatimes.com. He is available for speaking engagements, radio, television and print interviews.
Areas of expertise include the sociology of American fishing communities, New Orleans and Louisiana culture, hate crimes and race relations in the US.
His personal e-mail address is bayouscribe@hotmail.com



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