Eutaw riot

The Eutaw riot was an episode of racial violence in Eutaw, Alabama (in Greene County), on October 25, 1870, during the Reconstruction Era. A white mob attacked a group of black citizens, killing as many as four of them, and swaying the 1870 gubernatorial election for the Democratic Party.

Alabama citizens had been terrorized frequently by the Ku Klux Klan in the run-up to the 1870 gubernatorial election; in Calhoun County, Alabama, four blacks and one white had been lynched in July 1870. In Greene County, Gilford Coleman, a black Republican leader, had been murdered, and his body mutilated, after being taken from his own house, the first of two political assassinations of black men in the county.

On October 25, a political rally at the county courthouse in Eutaw organized by the Republicans, and with 2,000 blacks in attendance, was attacked by Klansmen (supporting Democrats) who verbally harassed the attendees and then started shooting; two, perhaps four blacks were killed, and 54 people injured. While there were Federal troops in the area, they did not intervene. Black voters stayed away from the polls in fear of more violence, contributing to Democratic electoral success. In the 1868 presidential election, Greene County had voted for Republican Ulysses S. Grant by a margin of 2,000 votes; in the 1870 gubernatorial election it voted for Democrat Robert B. Lindsay by a margin of 43.

A legal case was brought during the tenure of United States Attorney General Amos T. Akerman, a former Confederate slaveholder who became one of the Klan's most outspoken enemies. After the riot, a local man named Samuel B. Brown, likely a low-ranking Republican politician, appeared before U.S. Circuit Court Judge William Woods. His testimony resulted in a complaint charging fourteen whites with violating the First Amendment, and white Democrats with violating the Constitutional rights of Brown and six others.

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