After my recent posted LRC blog on the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, a gentleman forwarded me these two powerful articles below concerning a similar, little known, catastrophic event in his home town. He observed:
My grandfather was a general practitioner here during the war and whispered to my father who was a teenager at the time that he was called to the hospital to care for the dying and wounded. He claimed 400 were killed. My father later told my mother about it who told me. They were told it was top secret by the military to protect the war effort. They kept the secret so well my two surviving aunts who were adolescents at the time have no memory of the event at all. I have elderly black patients who tell me that the authorities squashed the riot by marching down Lee street shooting anyone on the street. They told of white shopkeepers opening their locked business doors to grab people huddled in the recesses to escape the gunfire, hiding them in the back until it was over.
“I don’t know how I got to safety after the riot,” a black trainee at Camp Claiborne recalled. “I only know one thing and that is, whenever anybody says, ‘Remember Pearl Harbor,’ I will say, ‘I will remember Lee Street.'”
Search for mass grave linked to 1942 Lee Street incident launched at Pineville cemetery
12:36 pm on June 6, 2021 Email Charles BurrisAn anonymous letter about a violent incident nearly 80 years ago in Alexandria is the impetus for a renewed effort to discover what happened during and after an incident on Lee Street in 1942.
Nearly forgotten in Alexandria’s history is a chapter known to only a few that has been passed down orally for many years. It is the story of a violent incident that at the time was referred to as the Lee Street Riot. According to the oral history of the incident, an unknown number of Black soldiers were killed on Jan. 10, 1942. And according to an anonymous letter, their bodies were buried in a mass grave at Holly Oak Cemetery in Pineville.
“Due to a preponderance of various interviews and testimony from many parties, including an extremely detailed letter from somebody who was there that night, many researchers believe that Holly Oak Cemetery is where African-American soldiers may have been buried in a mass grave,” Wynne said.
The anonymous letter was sent to William M. Simpson, former Louisiana College history professor and author of A Tale Untold? The Alexandria, Louisiana, Lee Street Riot (January 10, 1942).
