On November 3, 1874, Election Day in the small city of Eufaula, Alabama, turned from a moment of civic participation into a bloody act of racial terror.
In the years after the Civil War, Eufaula’s majority-Black population had become an electoral force. Freedmen, many of them newly literate and politically emboldened through Republican clubs and the Union League, exercised their right to vote. White Democrats were afraid that the 1874 election for the Alabama legislature would further empower Black voters, and, outraged by their dwindling authority, schemed to take that power back by any means necessary.
On Election Day, hundreds of Black men marched peacefully toward the polls in Eufaula. Before they could cast their ballots, armed white men ambushed them on Broad Street and at least seven Black men were killed, dozens more were injured and the white mob chased survivors through the town.
Simultaneously, armed white men seized ballot boxes in nearby Barbour County precincts, ensuring that the Democratic candidates, those aligned with the old Confederate order, “won” the election.
Black residents who fled into the woods were hunted and killed in the days that followed.
The Eufaula massacre was part of a wave of white supremacist violence across the South in the 1870s designed to end Reconstruction and reassert white rule through coercion, deception and violence, seeking to overturn Republican victories and disassemble local Black political alliances.
No one was ever held accountable for the murders in Eufaula, yet the blood spilled that day marked the near end of Black political representation in Alabama for nearly a century.
