Elaine Massacre

Phillips County, in the Arkansas Delta, counted 33,535 people in 1910, of whom 26,354 - more than three-quarters - were Black, and Black farmers raised 25,000 of the county's 30,000 bales of cotton. Of those farmers, 587 owned their land and 1,598 were tenants. The tenants bought food, clothing and supplies from the planter's commissary at twenty-five to fifty per cent interest, were given no running statement of what they owed, and were settled with once a year: the planter ginned the crop and sold it at the top of the market, then paid the tenant's share at the bottom of it. Cotton went from about nine cents a pound in 1904 to forty cents by 1919, which made the debts harder to maintain and the debtors harder to keep quiet.

In 1918 Robert L. Hill and V. E. Powell founded the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America at Winchester, in Drew County, and through the spring of 1919 its lodges spread among the tenants and sharecroppers around Elaine. Sixty-eight men pooled money - fifty dollars each, plus a share of whatever was recovered - to retain Bratton and Bratton, a white Little Rock firm, to demand itemised accounts and sue for their share of the 1919 crop. Ulysses Bratton had already won peonage convictions against half a dozen planters on the federal government's behalf. Some of the men meant to put peonage charges before a federal grand jury. The meetings were held in secret, because they had to be.

On the evening of 30 September 1919 about a hundred people met at a church at Hoop Spur, three miles north of Elaine, with armed guards posted outside. A car pulled up, shots were exchanged, and W. A. Adkins, a white railway security officer, was killed; Deputy Sheriff Charles Pratt was wounded. The second edition of Blood in Their Eyes, built on records recovered a century later, concludes that the white men came to the church deliberately - planters had informers inside the union - and that the story of a Black insurrection was manufactured afterwards to account for the scale of what followed.

By the next morning the sheriff's posse had been joined by an estimated 500 to 1,000 armed white men from the surrounding Arkansas counties and from across the river in Mississippi. On 2 October more than 500 federal troops arrived from Camp Pike on the authority of Governor Charles Brough. For days they swept the countryside, burning houses and shooting Black men, women and children. Colonel Isaac Jenks reported that his soldiers had killed two people; newspaper correspondents on the ground reported many more. Five white men died. No count of the Black dead was ever made - estimates run from about 100 to 240 and higher, while the Crisis, reporting that December, put it at twenty-five to fifty.

More than a thousand Black people were held in stockades under guard. Being found innocent did not get a person out: release required a white man, usually the planter or employer, to come and vouch for him, and the planters withheld that until the men gave guarantees about work and wages. Those who owned their own farms, or were otherwise independent, were generally kept inside, because no white man would vouch for them. The stockade was where the next season's labour terms were settled.

Two hundred and eighty-five people were moved from the stockades to the jail at Helena, which held forty-eight. On 31 October a grand jury charged 122. The trials began the following week; juries deliberated for minutes, and the defence lawyer, Jacob Fink, told the court he had not interviewed a single witness and accepted the first twelve jurors without challenge. By 5 November twelve men - Frank Moore, Frank Hicks, Ed Hicks, Joe Knox, Paul Hall, Ed Coleman, Alfred Banks, Ed Ware, William Wordlaw, Albert Giles, Joe Fox and John Martin - had been sentenced to the electric chair. Sixty-five others took plea bargains of up to twenty-one years.

Scipio Africanus Jones, a Black lawyer in Little Rock, worked the cases apart over five years with Edgar McHaney and George Murphy. Six of the men won new trials from the Arkansas Supreme Court and walked free when the state declined to retry them. For the other six the NAACP went into federal court on habeas corpus, and on 19 February 1923 the US Supreme Court decided Moore v. Dempsey by six votes to two: Justice Holmes held that the Helena proceedings had been a mask, and that a federal judge may look behind a state conviction to ask whether there had been any due process at all. It is the hinge of modern federal habeas review. Jones then negotiated pleas for the remaining men, and Governor Thomas McRae furloughed them on 13 January 1925. Not one white participant was prosecuted.

The union dissolved at once, and white landowners put down any further attempt at Black union organising with intimidation and violence. Phillips County said almost nothing about the massacre for most of a century. In September 2019 a privately funded cenotaph weighing 14,000 pounds, 'dedicated to those known and unknown who lost their lives in the Elaine Massacre', was placed in Court Square Park in Helena, across the street from the courthouse where the trials were held - over objections that it belonged in Elaine itself, and that it was going up instead of anything that would help the living. Descendants have pressed the state for posthumous exonerations of the Elaine Twelve. One claim often repeated about the massacre - that it was a scheme to take land from Black landowners - has not held up: Brian Mitchell, the historian who has recovered most of the surviving records, found no evidence for it. The land was not the prize. The crop was.