It followed a three-week strike during the critical harvest season in which an estimated 10,000 workers protested against the living and working conditions which existed on sugar cane plantations in four parishes: Lafourche, Terrebonne, St. Mary, and Assumption.

At planters' requests, the state sent the militia to protect strikebreakers from ambush attacks by strikers, and work resumed on some plantations.

Tensions erupted into violence on November 21, 1887 when an unknown white man entered a black-owned barroom and killed one black laborer and wounded another.

[1] Violence continued on November 23, 1887, when five town guards were ambushed and two wounded and local white paramilitary forces responded by attacking black workers and their families.

[4] The massacre, and the passage of discriminatory state legislation by white Democrats, including the disenfranchisement of most blacks, ended the organizing of sugar workers for decades, until the 1940s.

"[3] The harvesting and processing of sugar cane comprised a complex series of steps which needed to be closely coordinated by a large labor force which was pushed to work to the point of physical exhaustion.

The powerful LSPA lobbied the federal government for sugar tariffs, funding to support levees to protect their lands, and research to increase crop yields.

[6]: 190 In 1887 the Knights of Labor organized a major three-week sugar strike against cane plantations in Lafourche, Terrebonne, St. Mary, and Assumption parishes.

[2] As the LSPA ignored the demands, the Knights of Labor called the strike for November 1, timed to coincide with the critical "rolling period" of the crop, when it had to be harvested and processed.

The militia suppressed strikers in St. Mary Parish, resulting in "as many as twenty people" killed or wounded on November 5 in the black village of Pattersonville.

[6]: 191 The militia protected some 800 contract workers brought in to Terrebonne Parish, and helped capture and arrest 50 strikers, most for union activities.

[8] According to newspaper accounts, around November 13, Theodule Baille, a sugar boiler riding on the bayou levee, was fired upon about a mile below Thibodaux.

'"[12] After the event, one Thibodaux newspaper repeated the claim that prior to November 23, "[t]he negroes were in motion [and] [t]heir women boasted that they were ready to fire the town.

"[13] The white editor of the Lafourche Star newspaper (who participated in the killings[4]) also offered this attempt at justification for the severity of the vigilante committee's response: The loud-mouthed "wenches" must bear in mind that though they have a tongue, they are not priviledged [sic] to make use of such threats as "burning the town," ["]slaughtering the whites from the cradle to the grave," etc.

[14]Parish District Judge Taylor Beattie, who owned Orange Grove Plantation and was a member of the LPSA, announced formation of a "Peace and Order Committee" in Thibodaux.

[18]After the two white pickets were shot and wounded, a local volunteer company, the Clay Knobloch Guards, went to the scene and claimed to also have been fired upon from ambush.

[20]In the same account, that newspaper claimed that the two pickets were shot by other white guards from Shreveport, to create a pretext to initiate the wholesale slaughter of the black strikers.

According to historian Rebecca Jarvis Scott, "No credible official count of the victims of the Thibodaux massacre was ever made; bodies continued to turn up in shallow graves outside of town for weeks to come.

"[4] Eric Arnesen wrote that local white residents privately admitted more than 50 workers were murdered in Thibodaux, but the total was uncertain.

[citation needed] Along the Bayou Lafourche, black oral history has told of hundreds of casualties, including wounded and missing.

[3] Modern author James Keith Hogue attributes 50 deaths to the three-day attacks by the paramilitary, saying that in addition, numerous Knights of Labor organizers disappeared over the next year.

He also makes the unsupported claim (discredited by all contemporary accounts, including those cited herein) that "the Thibodaux paramilitaries launched a preemptive dawn attack on November 23.

"[24] The known victims of the fatal violence of November 23, 1887 were Willis Wilson, Felix Pierre, Archy Jones, Frank Patterson, Grant Conrad, Marcellin Walton, Riley Anderson, and Mahala Washington.

[25] John G. Gorman, the first picket shot by the strikers, lost an eye from the lead slug that struck him on the side of the head and exited his mouth through the palate, shattering the bones along its path.

White Democrats, who dominated the state legislature, soon passed laws for disenfranchisement of blacks, racial segregation and other Jim Crow rules.

In that same period, beginning during the war, many Louisiana blacks joined the Great Migration to the North and West Coast to escape the continuing violence and racial oppression.