Louisiana Knights of Labor: News Report on the Sugar Cane Workers Strike

Background: The Weekly Pelican was an African American newspaper published in New Orleans from 1886 to 1889 that proclaimed itself as “A Republican Journal Abreast of the Times.” The paper covered labor organizing in New Orleans and the 1887 sugarcane workers’ strike.

Some time since the National Republican called attention to the fact that Gov. McEnery, of Louisiana, without having been called upon by the sheriffs, but merely at the wish of a branch of the Sugar Planters’ Association, sent troops to the Lafourche country, In Louisiana, and suppressed a strike of the colored laborers on the sugar plantations with bayonets and Gatling guns. 

During the time the troops were in that section they fired upon a body of unarmed negroes, composed of men, women, and children and killed four. These laborers belonged to the Knights of Labor, and had asked for an increase in their wages from to .25 a day for the grinding season, and the planters, combining, refused it, blacklisted all who engaged in the movement, and ejected those who were their tenants at the point of the bayonet. 

District Assembly, No. 102, Knights of Labor of New Orleans, which includes the several thousand white members of the order in that city, has taken the subject up, and reciting the facts condemn Gov. McEnery’s action in the plainest terms. The resolutions of the assembly are given in another column in full. 

So far as it is possible to secure a truthful statement of what occurs in any of the southern States, when the negro is concerned and is the victim of violence, the facts obtained full sustain the terrible indictment made by the Knights of Labor against the Democratic State authorities of Louisiana.

Another indication of their truth is the violent denunciation of the acts of the Knights by the Times Democrat, the special organ of Gov. McEnery and his partisans.

The Knights, when they propose to appeal to the working men of the country to aid in removing the duty on sugar, use their strongest weapon. The fifty highly protected sugar planters of the Lafourche refuse to pay more that per day to the men who labor for them for six or eight weeks from twelve to sixteen hours out of the twenty-four, and the complaisant governor of Louisiana forces the men at the point of bayonet to accept the planters’ terms.

The Knights are right in this fight and should be supported everywhere.

Source: The Weekly Pelican, New Orleans, Louisiana, November 26, 1887, page 1.