Labor Day, 2025: Forgotten Flames — The Fireburn, the Thibodaux Massacre, and the Meaning of Labor Day
Freedom is not given—it is practiced. Labor’s history reminds us what it costs to demand dignity.
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The streets of Frederiksted were alive with heat and murmurs. It was October 1, 1878—Contract Day—when every field worker on St. Croix was expected to sign away another year of their lives to the plantations. The men and women who had once been enslaved gathered outside the town hall, dressed in their Sunday best, waiting to hear the governor’s words.
But there was no freedom in his message. The contracts were the same as before: pitiful wages, heavy fines for disobedience, no chance to leave the estates. What had changed since emancipation, except the name?
Among the crowd were four women whose voices carried above the rest. They were known to their neighbors as queens, not because they ruled but because they refused to bow. When the governor’s decree was read, they did not sign their names. They lifted their fists. They called for fire.
By nightfall, cane fields blazed. Warehouses toppled in flame. The red sky above Frederiksted could be seen for miles. The Fireburn had begun.
Queens of the Uprising
The Fireburn was not a sudden spark. It was the eruption of years of pent-up frustration, betrayal, and endurance. Emancipation in the Danish West Indies had promised freedom, but the fine print bound workers into near-slavery. Plantation owners clung to their wealth; governors enforced the contracts.
But the Queens—as the women came to be known—refused compliance. Mary “Queen Mary” Thomas, Axeline “Queen Agnes” Salomon, Mathilda “Queen Mathilda” McBean, and Susanna “Bottom Belly” Abramsen rallied their neighbors. They turned anger into action.
Over the following days, nearly a thousand acres of plantation land went up in smoke. Homes of wealthy planters were reduced to ash. The island’s economy—built on sugar and the blood of its workers—lay in ruins.
“Burn, burn the cane!” witnesses recalled hearing shouted through the night. The fires were not only destruction—they were a declaration.
The Reckoning
The rebellion could not last. Danish soldiers, backed by planters’ militias, opened fire on crowds. Dozens of laborers were killed, and many more were arrested. Some oral accounts recall that fourteen women died in an accidental explosion when a gunpowder store ignited. While this detail does not appear consistently in official records, it remains part of the community’s memory of the Fireburn.
The colonial government responded with trials and sentences meant to terrify the survivors. The Queens were captured, tried, and convicted. Mary Thomas and two others were shipped across the Atlantic to Copenhagen, paraded before the Danish public as criminals. The Illustreret Tidende, a Copenhagen weekly, portrayed them in racist colonial terms as “ferocious negresses, whose insolence matched their violence”—a description that reveals more about European anxieties and prejudice than about the women themselves.
Yet in St. Croix, their names became legend. Workers whispered their stories in cane fields. Children heard their courage recalled at night. The memory of the Fireburn, even in defeat, refused to die.
The Fireburn was not an outlier. Across the hemisphere in the late 19th century, emancipation had ended slavery but not exploitation. Freed people were bound again through contracts, debt, and violence. Sugar, in particular, carried this contradiction everywhere it grew.
From the Caribbean to the cane fields of the American South, the crop demanded relentless labor. Its profits flowed upward to planters and empires, while its workers remained trapped in poverty. And whenever those workers organized—whether in Frederiksted or in Louisiana—they were met with the same response: promises broken, contracts enforced, and violence unleashed.
Nine years after the Fireburn, another uprising came. This time not on an island colony, but on U.S. soil. The place was Thibodaux, Louisiana. The story began in the harvest season of 1887.
The Thibodaux Massacre
The cane stood tall that autumn, heavy and ready for harvest. By late November of 1887, wagons should have been creaking down the dirt roads of southern Louisiana, piled with stalks bound for the mills. Instead, the fields lay still. Knives hung idle. The people who cut the cane—mostly Black, many only a generation removed from slavery—had set them down in defiance.
Nearly 10,000 workers across Lafourche, Terrebonne, and St. Mary parishes walked off the fields, one of the largest strikes the South had ever seen. Their demands were simple. They wanted to be paid in cash, not in scrip redeemable only at overpriced plantation stores. They wanted higher wages to meet the cost of living. They wanted dignity in a system that still treated them as if emancipation had never come.
The strike drew strength from the Knights of Labor, one of the few national organizations at the time to admit Black workers. In parish halls and churchyards, the Knights’ motto—“An injury to one is the concern of all”—echoed among men and women weary of debt and poverty.
Planters called on Governor Samuel McEnery, who declared the strike a threat to public order and dispatched the state militia. Soldiers patrolled the parishes with bayonets fixed, their presence meant to intimidate. Local newspapers fanned fear. The Daily Picayune warned of “negro domination,” insisting the strikers were on the verge of riot.
It began without warning.
On the morning of November 23, white militias and vigilantes swept through Thibodaux, opening fire on striking workers and their families. Witnesses later described the chaos: men running through cane fields as shots cracked behind them, women pulling children into ditches for cover, houses riddled with bullets.
By the time it ended, at least thirty-five workers were dead—the lowest number reported in official accounts. Many historians argue the toll was far higher, perhaps sixty, even over a hundred. The true figure will never be known, as bodies were buried in unmarked graves and records deliberately suppressed.
The massacre crushed the strike. Survivors returned to the fields under tighter control than ever. Organizing collapsed, and for decades sugar workers labored under the same exploitative conditions, their courage erased by fear.
Unlike the Fireburn, which is remembered in St. Croix with statues of Queen Mary and her sisters, the Thibodaux Massacre slipped into silence. For generations, the town did not speak of it. Local histories omitted it. The dead were buried not only in the ground but in forgetfulness.
John DeSantis, a modern journalist who helped bring the story back to light, called it a “conspiracy of silence.” Descendants carried fragments of memory—stories whispered in families, names of relatives who never came home. Only in recent decades has the story resurfaced, through historical research, community remembrance, and the determination of families who refused to let silence prevail.
Forgotten Flames, Shared Lessons
The Fireburn and the Thibodaux Massacre unfolded in different worlds: one in a Danish colony in the Caribbean, the other in the U.S. South. Yet their similarities are striking.
Both were rooted in sugar, that crop so sweet for consumers and so bitter for workers. Both were led or sustained by Black laborers, whose demands for dignity were answered with bullets and chains. Both were met with overwhelming violence designed not only to kill but to terrify—to teach workers that resistance would bring ruin.
And both reveal the same truth: freedom is not granted, it is practiced. Resistance is not a single act but an ecosystem of courage that can be burned down, buried, and still rise again in memory. Culture—story, song, whispered remembrance—is what carries it forward when official histories fall silent.
Taken together, the Fireburn and the Thibodaux Massacre remind us that labor struggle was never confined to one place, one nation, or one people. St. Croix and Louisiana were worlds apart, yet bound by sugar, exploitation, and resistance. One story ended in flames, the other in gunfire. One is remembered with statues, the other only now emerging from silence. But both are part of the same inheritance. To honor one without the other is to leave the story incomplete.
Labor Day, as it is commonly observed in the United States, has drifted far from its origins. What began as a recognition of workers’ struggles has become a long weekend, a sale, a cookout. The story of labor has been softened, tamed, and stripped of the blood that once defined it.
To remember the Fireburn and Thibodaux is to reclaim the holiday from amnesia. It is to remember that labor resistance was not confined to northern factories or white union halls. It stretched into Caribbean colonies and southern cane fields, where Black workers—often led by women—dared to demand dignity.
The Fireburn lit the night sky with flames. The Thibodaux Massacre darkened the day with gunfire. One shouted through fire, the other was buried in silence. But both belong to the same story: the story of labor as resistance, freedom as practice, and memory as the ember that outlives the ash.
The cane fields may be gone, but the patterns remain familiar. Contracts that bind workers in debt. Wages that fall short of survival. Violence—sometimes overt, sometimes hidden—that disciplines those who dare to demand better.
Gig workers today sign agreements that declare them “independent” yet deny them independence. Migrant workers labor under visas that tie them to abusive employers. Families live under debts that feel as binding as chains. When workers attempt to organize, they face retaliation, surveillance, and—in some corners of the world—open violence.
The echoes of Fireburn and Thibodaux are not distant. They are here.
When the fires of the Fireburn died down, the fields of St. Croix lay blackened. When the guns of Thibodaux fell silent, the sugarcane strike was broken. Both seemed like endings.
Yet both left embers. In St. Croix, statues of Queen Mary and her sisters rise today, telling every passerby that women once lit the sky in defiance. In Thibodaux, descendants gather at the sites where their relatives were buried in silence, refusing to let memory die.
Every Labor Day, when we rest from our work, we can remember that others burned fields for the chance at dignity. Others bled in cane rows for the demand to be paid in cash. Freedom is not given, but practiced. Resistance is not a relic, but a living ecosystem we choose to join.
The Fireburn and Thibodaux remind us: the past is not past. It is an ember still glowing, waiting for us to breathe it alive.
Learn More
If you’d like to dive deeper into the history behind these stories:
On the Fireburn (St. Croix, 1878):
Isaac Dookhan, A History of the Virgin Islands of the United States — a foundational history of the islands.
N. A. T. Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies: The Fireburn and Labor Riots of 1878 — detailed archival study.
Lomarsh Roopnarine, “The St. Croix Labor Riot of 1878” (Journal of Caribbean History, 2010) — analysis of the uprising’s causes and consequences.
On the Thibodaux Massacre (Louisiana, 1887):
John DeSantis, The Thibodaux Massacre: Racial Violence and the 1887 Sugar Cane Labor Strike — narrative history that helped break local silence.
Philip S. Foner, History of Black Workers in the United States, Vol. 2 — includes accounts of the strike and massacre.
Michael Pierce & Carey White, Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta (2022) — situates Thibodaux within the wider story of labor violence.
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