Changes

One of the things that I found so compelling about the case was how quickly it became intertwined with the momentous events of Reconstruction. New Orleans was a city on edge in June 1870 when the papers reported that two African American women abducted 17-month-old Mollie Digby from in front of her family’s home in the working-class “back of town.” It was the height of Radical Reconstruction. African American men could now vote, serve on juries, and hold public office, and black men and women now demanded service in formerly whites-only restaurants and saloons. Reconstruction Governor Henry Clay Warmoth had also just integrated the New Orleans police force and black officers now patrolled the streets. Many white residents, still emotionally wounded by Confederate defeat, seethed as the new order emerged.

After the Voodoo abduction rumors began, the white press seized on the Digby case as an example of a world turned dangerously upside down, and they predicted that the integrated police force would let the crime go unsolved and unpunished. Governor Warmoth responded by getting personally involved the case, offering a state reward of $1,000 for recovery of the child or the arrest and conviction of the abductors, and he ordered New Orleans’s chief of police to put his best African American detectives in charge of the investigation. If black detectives could solve a high-profile, racially explosive case, it could build public confidence in all of the new African American public servants.

In the Digby case, lead Detective John Baptiste Jourdain became the first African American detective ever to make national news. Right there I knew I had a story worth telling, but there was even more to come. When private citizens supplemented Warmoth’s reward and the promised amounts reached $5,000, the case became the “Powerball” of 1870. Everyone who saw an African American woman walking with a white baby wondered if the child was Mollie Digby. Leads poured in from across the South and the detectives even consulted clairvoyants. Eventually, the police arrested and put on trial two strikingly beautiful and stylish Afro-Creole women and a sensational, headline grabbing trial followed.