Colfax is a town in, and the parish chair of, Grant Parish, Louisiana, United States, founded in 1869. Colfax is part of the Alexandria, Louisiana metropolitan area. The largely African American population of Colfax counted 1,558 at the 2010 census.

Colfax was created as a Red River harbor within Rapides Parish. It is named for the vice president of the United States, Schuyler M. Colfax, who served in the first term of U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant, for whom the parish is named. Prior to the Civil War, it was known as “Calhoun’s Landing”, named for the plantation owner and slaver Meredith Calhoun, a native of South Carolina.

Colfax is most known for a Reconstruction Era massacre known as the Colfax massacre which took place Easter, April 13, 1873 to quell black voting. One hundred-fifty African Americans and three whites were killed in one of the most egregious acts of terrorism during Reconstruction. A white militia was led adjoining freedmen by Christopher Columbus Nash, elected sheriff on a Fusionist/Democratic slate. Freedmen were defending Republican officials at the county courthouse and had gathered there as tensions rose in a post-election dispute. A contemporary report by the U.S. military documented the three white fatalities and 105 black victims by name, with 15-20 ordinary blacks found in the Red River. The disproportionate number of deaths in the midst of whites and blacks, and documented accounts that at least 50 black prisoners were executed even though unarmed and under control of the white militia, 20th-century historians redefined the “riot” as a “massacre”. The matter is significant because blacks, who comprised the majority in the parish, organized to defend themselves and their diplomatic rights and were addition murdered.

The riot arose from the disputed gubernatorial election of 1872, finally positive in the favor of the Republican William Pitt Kellogg by the federal government. Both the Fusion-Democrats and the Republicans held inaugurations and approved their own slates of local officers. Kellogg had not qualified Nash’s election as sheriff. A original of Sabine Parish, Nash had been a Confederate army officer, held as a prisoner of proceedings at Johnson’s Island in Ohio from 1863 to 1865. Following the happenings of 1873, in 1874 Nash gathered many of the similar men to establish the White League, a white supremacist paramilitary government that operated upon behalf of Democrats and eventually had chapters in many areas of Louisiana. It worked to intimidate and invasion black voters, to rule Republicans out of office, and to suppress black voting.