Aaron Sheehan-Dean
speaker
924 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 24 Aug
Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, it's Easter Sunday, 1873.
This happens in northern Louisiana in a place called Grant Parish.
And it's a good embodiment of the ways that violence is used.
So in Grant Parish, it's a black majority district and they had elected a handful of black office holders.
And there were white terrorists in neighboring parishes who had driven black office holders from the parish altogether.
In Louisiana, we use parish instead of county, but think county if you're outside Louisiana, I'm listening.
And so locally elected office holders.
And on that Easter morning, the black office holders and their supporters, that is black men and women from that community, came out and forced to defend at the courthouse at Colfax to defend the people who had been legally elected.
And there's a white militia of nearly 400 members that rides into town, attacks these men.
They're woefully outgunned in terms of the kind of resources they need.
The defenders are driven back into the courthouse, which is then set on fire.
People are shot as they are trying to escape.
And then later they execute another close to 40 on the courthouse and bodies are sort of buried or left unexposed.
It's over 100 fatalities.
It's just a horrific episode.
There is eventually a kind of federal attempt to prosecute, although that actually fails in the long run, the ringleaders of the massacre.
What other white Southerners in Mississippi and in South Carolina learned was that violence is, in fact, an effective tool.
Yeah, right.
By 1873, 74, especially by 75, even the Grant administration and Grant, of course, had won the Civil War for the North.
They are unwilling to commit the federal troops that are going to be required because the states themselves don't have the manpower and the resources or in some cases actively resist having state militias enforce the fair use of electoral laws.
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