The Elaine massacre occurred on September 30 – October 2, 1919, at Hoop Spur in the vicinity of Elaine in rural Phillips County, Arkansas, where African Americans were organizing against peonage and abuses in tenant farming. As many as several hundred African Americans were murdered and five White men were killed. The White mobs were aided by federal troops (requested by Arkansas governor Charles Hillman Brough) and local terrorist organizations. Gov. Brough led a contingent of 583 US soldiers from Camp Pike, with a 12-gun machine-gun battalion.
After the massacre, state officials concocted an elaborate cover-up, claiming that Black residents were planning an insurrection. National newspapers repeated the falsehood that Black community members in Arkansas were staging an insurrection. A New York Times headline read, "Planned Massacre of Whites Today", and the Arkansas Gazette (the leading newspaper in Arkansas) wrote that Elaine was "a zone of negro insurrection". Subsequent to this reporting, more than 100 African Americans were indicted, with 12 being sentenced to death by electrocution. After a years-long legal battle by the NAACP, the 12 men were acquitted.
Estimates of deaths made in the immediate aftermath of the Elaine Massacre by eyewitnesses range from 50 to "more than a hundred". Walter Francis White, an NAACP attorney who visited Elaine shortly after the incident, stated "... twenty-five Negroes killed, although some place the Negro fatalities as high as one hundred". More recent estimates in the 21st century of the number of Black people murdered during this violence are higher than estimates provided by the eyewitnesses, and have ranged into the hundreds. According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, "the Elaine Massacre was by far the deadliest racial confrontation in Arkansas history and possibly the bloodiest racial conflict in the history of the United States". Because of the widespread racial violence during the Red Summer of 1919, the Equal Justice Initiative of Montgomery, Alabama, classified the Black murders at Elaine as lynchings in its 2015 report on the lynching of African Americans in the South.
Background
Located in the Arkansas Delta, Phillips County had historically been developed for cotton plantations, and its land was worked by enslaved African-Americans before the Civil War. In the early 20th century the county's population was still predominantly Black because most freedmen and their descendants had stayed on the land as farm workers and sharecroppers.
African Americans outnumbered Whites in the area around Elaine by a ten-to-one ratio, and by three-to-one in the county overall. White landowners controlled the economy, selling cotton on their own schedule, running high-priced plantation stores where farmers had to buy seed and supplies, and settling accounts with sharecroppers in lump sums, without listing items.
The all-White legislature had disenfranchised most blacks and many poor Whites in the 1890s by creating barriers to voter registration. It excluded them from the political system via the more complicated Election Law of 1891 and a poll tax amendment passed in 1892. The white-dominated legislature enacted Jim Crow laws that established racial segregation and institutionalized efforts to impose white supremacy. The decades around the turn of the century were the period of the highest rate of lynchings across the South.
White landowners often underpaid sharecroppers for their crops and paid when they saw fit. Between the prices of goods purchased from the plantation store and the crop underpayments, the white landowners kept many sharecroppers in debt.
At the time of settlement, landowners generally never gave an itemized statement to the Black sharecroppers of accounts owed, nor details of the money received for cotton and seed. The farmers faced discrimination without much recourse as many had been kept illiterate by Jim Crow laws. It was an unwritten law of the cotton country that the sharecroppers could not quit and leave a plantation until their debts were paid. The period of the year around accounts settlement was frequently the time of most lynchings of Black people throughout the South, especially if times were poor economically. As an example, many Black sharecroppers in Phillips County, whose cotton was sold in October 1918, did not get a settlement before July of the following year. They often amassed considerable debt at the plantation store before that time, as they had to buy supplies, including seed, to start the next season.
Black farmers began to organize in 1919 to try to negotiate better conditions, including fair accounting and timely payment of monies due them by White landowners. Robert L. Hill, a Black farmer from Winchester, Arkansas, had founded the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America (PFHUA). He worked with farmers throughout Phillips County. Its purpose was "to obtain better payments for their cotton crops from the White plantation owners who dominated the area during the Jim Crow era. Black sharecroppers were often exploited in their efforts to collect payment for their cotton crops."
Whites tried to disrupt such organizing and threatened farmers. The PFHUA retained a White law firm based in Little Rock to represent the Black farmers in getting fair settlements for their labors during the 1919 cotton harvest. The firm was headed by Ulysses S. Bratton, a native of Searcy County and former assistant federal district attorney.
The postwar summer of 1919, also known as Red Summer, had already been marked by deadly massacres targeting African-Americans in more than three dozen cities across the country, (including Chicago, Knoxville, Washington, D.C., and Omaha, Nebraska) being targeted by White mobs. Competition for jobs and housing in crowded markets following World War I as veterans returned to the work force, stirring racial tensions. Having served their country in the Great War, many African-American veterans were no longer willing to tolerate racial discrimination and were now prepared to use violence in self-defense against White mobs and terrorism. In 1919, African-Americans vigorously fought back when their communities came under attack. Labor unrest and strikes took place in several cities as workers tried to organize. Industries often intentionally hired Black workers as strikebreakers, increasing or creating resentment against them by White workers.
Massacre
The Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America had organized chapters in the Elaine area in 1918–19. On September 29, representatives met with about 100 Black farmers at a church near Elaine to discuss how to obtain fairer settlements from landowners. Whites had resisted union organizing by the farmers and often spied on or disrupted such meetings. Approximately 100 African-American farmers, led by Robert L. Hill, the founder of the union, met at a church in Hoop Spur, near Elaine in Phillips County. Union advocates brought armed guards to protect the meeting. When two deputized white men and a black trustee arrived at the church, shots were exchanged. Railroad Policeman W.D. Adkins, employed by the Missouri Pacific Railroad, was killed and the other white man wounded; it was never determined who shot first.
According to Revolution in the Land: Southern Agriculture in the 20th Century (2002), in a section called "The Changing Face of Sharecropping and Tenancy":
The black trustee raced back to Helena, the county seat of Phillips County, and alerted officials. A posse was dispatched and within a few hours hundreds of white men, many of them the "low down" variety, began to comb the area for blacks they believed were launching an insurrection. In the end, over a hundred African Americans and five white men were killed. Some estimates of the black death toll range in the hundreds. Allegations surfaced that the white posse and even U.S. soldiers who were brought in to put down the so-called "rebellion" had massacred defenseless black men, women and children.
The parish sheriff called for a posse to capture suspects in the killing. The county sheriff organized the posse and Whites gathered to put down what was rumored as a "black insurrection". Additional armed White men entered the county from outside to support the hunt and a mob of 500 to 1,000 armed men formed. They attacked Black people on sight across the county. Local Whites requested help from Arkansas Governor Charles Hillman Brough, citing a "Negro uprising". Sensational newspaper headlines published by the Arkansas Gazette and others reported that an "insurrection" was occurring, and that Black people had planned to murder white leaders.
Governor Brough contacted the War Department and requested Federal troops. After considerable delay, nearly 600 U.S. troops arrived, finding the area in chaos. White men roamed the area randomly attacking and killing Black people. Killings in the area lasted for three days before the troops ended the violence. The federal troops disarmed both parties and arrested 285 Black residents, putting them in stockades for investigation, and according to them, protection, until they were vouched for by their employers.
Although official records of the time count eleven Black men and five White men killed, there are estimates from 100 to 237 African Americans killed, and more wounded. At least two and possibly more victims were killed by Federal troops. The exact number of Black people killed is unknown because of the wide rural area in which they were attacked, and the state hiding the numbers.
Press coverage
A dispatch from Helena, Arkansas, to The New York Times, datelined October 1, said: "Returning members of the posse brought numerous stories and rumors, through all of which ran the belief that the rioting was due to propaganda distributed among the Negroes by white men."
The next day's report added:
Additional evidence has been obtained of the activities of propagandists among the negroes, and it is thought that a plot existed for a general uprising against the whites." A white man had been arrested and was "alleged to have been preaching social equality among the Negroes".
A few days later a Western Newspaper Union dispatch was captioned, "Captive Negro Insurrectionists".
Arkansas Governor Charles Hillman Brough appointed a Committee of Seven to investigate. The group was composed of prominent local White businessmen. Without talking to any of the Black farmers, they concluded that the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America was a socialist enterprise and "established for the purpose of banding Negroes together for the killing of White people". This version of events has persisted in many histories of the riot.
NAACP involvement
The NAACP promptly released a statement from a contact in Arkansas providing another account of the origins of the violence, noting efforts by Ulysses Simpson Bratton to assist African Americans in peonage:
The whole trouble, as I understand it, started because a Mr. Bratton, a white lawyer from Little Rock, Ark., was employed by sixty or seventy colored families to go to Elaine to represent them in a dispute with the white planters relative to the sale price of cotton.
It referred to a report in The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, Tennessee, on October 3 that quoted Bratton's father:
It had been impossible for the Negroes to obtain itemized statements of accounts, or in fact to obtain statements at all, and that the manager was preparing to ship their cotton, they being sharecroppers and having a half interest therein, off without settling with them or allowing them to sell their half of the crop and pay up their accounts.... If it's a crime to represent people in an effort to make honest settlements, then he has committed a crime.
The NAACP sent its Field Secretary, Walter F. White, from New York City to Elaine in October 1919 to investigate events. White was of mixed, majority-European ancestry; blond and blue-eyed, he could pass for white. He was granted credentials from the Chicago Daily News. He gained an interview with Governor Charles Hillman Brough, who gave him a letter of recommendation for other meetings with whites, as well as an autographed photograph.
According to his own account, White had been in Phillips County for a brief time when he learned there were rumors floating about him. He quickly took the first train back to Little Rock. The conductor told the young man that he was leaving "just when the fun is going to start", because they had found out that there was a "damned yellow nigger passing for white and the boys are going to get him." When White asked what the boys would do to the man, the conductor told White that "when they get through with him he won't pass for white no more!" Biographer Kenneth Robert Janken writes of this description: "It is likely that White exaggerated the dramatic manner of his escape, much in the way he did his childhood experiences in the Atlanta riot...surviving documents reveal several inconsistencies between what White wrote at the time and what he later recalled having happened."
White had time to talk with both Black and White residents in Elaine. He reported that local people said that up to 100 Blacks had been killed. White published his findings in the Daily News, the Chicago Defender, and The Nation, as well as the NAACP's magazine The Crisis. He "characterized the violence as an extreme response by White landowners to black unionization".
Governor Brough asked the United States Post Office Department to prohibit the mailing of the Chicago Defender and Crisis to Arkansas, while local officials attempted to enjoin distribution of the Defender. Years later, White said in his memoir that people in Elaine told him that up to 200 Black folks had been killed.