Blood in the Pool: The 1868 Bossier Massacre

As a kid, I remember going to Mike Woods Pool in the Shady Grove neighborhood of Bossier City to swim. I’d climb the huge diving board, stare down into the water, hold my breath, and jump in, sinking towards the bottom before rising back up to the top for air. What I didn’t realize then, and what took me years to realize was that the pool might as well be filled with blood. The blood from a past I knew nothing about. The blood from a past that had been paved over to make room for the parking lot at the pool, the tennis courts at the park, and the houses in the Shady Grove subdivision. The blood from a past that people hoped to scrub clean from the collective memory. They all but succeeded in scouring the blood away into nothingness, but it lingered, detectable underneath the supposedly cleansed earth.

Violent, racist attacks didn’t just occur in Bossier. They occurred across the Red River in Caddo Parish and all throughout the Red River Valley. Gilles Vandal notes that during Reconstruction 45% of the murders in Louisiana were concentrated in the northwestern part of the state. Caddo accounted for 16% of the homicides even though it only accounted for 3% of the state’s entire population. People may have tried to cleanse the soil of the blood, but the blood remains deep within the earth.