Elaine massacre

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 illiterate 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. 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. ==Events==

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 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". 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. 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: 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: It referred to a report in The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, Tennessee, on October 3 that quoted Bratton's father: 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." 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. ==Trials==

In October and November 1919, an all-White Arkansas state grand jury returned indictments against 122 Black people. Since most Black folks had been disenfranchised by Arkansas' 1891 Election Law and 1892 poll tax amendment, which created barriers to voter registration, Black folks as non-voters were excluded from juries. All-White juries rendered verdicts on the defendants in trials following the Elaine race riot. The only men prosecuted for these events were 122 African Americans, with 73 charged with murder. Those Black farmers willing to testify against others and to work without shares for terms as determined by their landlords, were set free. Those who refused to comply with those conditions, or were labeled as ringleaders or were judged unreliable, were indicted. According to the affidavits later supplied by the defendants, many of the prisoners had been beaten, whipped or tortured by electric shocks to extract testimony or confessions. They were threatened with death if they recanted their testimony. A total of 73 suspects were charged with murder; other charges included conspiracy and insurrection. The trials were held in 1920 in the county courthouse in Elaine, Phillips County. Mobs of armed Whites milled around the courthouse. Some of the White audience in the courtroom also carried arms. The lawyers for the defense did not subpoena witnesses for the defense and did not allow their clients to testify. Twelve of the defendants (who became known as the "Arkansas Twelve" or "Elaine Twelve") were convicted, most of them as "accomplices", and sentenced to death in the electric chair by all-white juries for the murder of a White deputy at the Adkins church. Others were convicted of lesser charges and sentenced to prison. The lawyer of one defendant did not interview any witnesses, ask for a change of venue, nor challenge any jurors. The trials of these twelve lasted less than an hour in many cases; the juries took fewer than ten minutes to deliberate before pronouncing each man guilty and sentencing them to death. The Arkansas Gazette applauded the trials as the triumph of the "rule of law", because none of the defendants were lynched. These men became known as the "Elaine Twelve". After those convictions, 36 of the remaining defendants chose to plead guilty to second degree murder rather than face trial. Sixty-seven other defendants were convicted of various charges and sentenced to terms up to 21 years. When the cases were remanded to the state court, the six "Moore" defendants settled with the lower court on lesser charges and were sentenced to time already served. ==Appeals==

During appeals, the death penalty cases were separated. The NAACP took on the task of organizing the defendants' appeals. The NAACP assisted the defendants in the appeals process, raising money to hire a defense team, which it helped direct. For a time, the NAACP tried to conceal its role in the appeals, given the hostile reception to its reports on the rioting and the trials. Once it undertook to organize the defense, it went to work vigorously, raising more than $50,000 and hiring Scipio Africanus Jones, a highly respected African-American attorney from Arkansas, and Colonel George W. Murphy, a 79-year-old Confederate veteran and former Attorney General for the State of Arkansas. The defendants next petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus, alleging that the proceedings that took place in the Arkansas state court, while ostensibly complying with trial requirements, in fact complied only in form. They argued that the accused had not been adequately defended and were convicted under the pressure of the mob, with blatant disregard for their constitutional rights. Prominent Little Rock attorney George Rose wrote a letter to outgoing Governor Thomas McRae requesting that he find a way to release the remaining defendants if they agreed to plead guilty to second degree murder. Rose's letter was an attempt to prevent Governor-Elect Thomas Jefferson Terral, a known member of the Ku Klux Klan, from getting involved in the matter. Just hours before Governor McRae left office in 1925, he contacted Scipio Jones to inform him that indefinite furloughs had been issued for the remaining defendants. He freed these six men in 1925 in the closing days of his administration. Jones used the furloughs to obtain release of the prisoners under cover of darkness. He arranged for these men to be quickly escorted out of state to prevent them from being lynched. The NAACP helped them leave the state safely. ==Aftermath==

The Supreme Court's decision marked the beginning of an era in which the Supreme Court gave closer scrutiny to criminal justice cases and reviewed state actions against the Due Process Clause and the Bill of Rights. A decade later, the Supreme Court reviewed the case of the Scottsboro boys. The victory for the Elaine defendants gave the NAACP greater credibility as the champion of African Americans' rights. Walter F. White's risk-taking investigation and report contributed to his advancing in the organization. He later was selected as executive secretary of the NAACP, essentially the chief operating officer, and served in this position for decades, leading the organization in additional legal challenges and civil rights activism. "It is documented that five whites, including a soldier died at Elaine, but estimates of African American deaths, made by individuals writing about the Elaine affair between 1919 and 1925, range from 20 to 856; if accurate, these numbers would make it by far the most deadly conflict in the history of the United States. The Arkansas Encyclopedia of History and Culture notes that estimates of African-American deaths range into the "hundreds". Since the late 20th century, researchers have begun to investigate the Elaine race riot more thoroughly. For decades, the riot and numerous murders were too painful to be discussed openly in the region. The wide-scale violence ended union organizing among Black farmers. White oppression continued, threatening every Black family. Historian Robert Whitaker says, "As with many racial histories of this kind," it was "one of those shameful events best not talked about". This view has been generally discounted by historians publishing since the late 20th century. In early 2000, a conference on the Elaine riot was held at the Delta Cultural Center in the county seat of Helena, Arkansas. It was an effort to review the facts but did not result in "closure" for the people of Phillips County. ==Memorial==

In September 2019, 100 years after the event, an Elaine Massacre Memorial was unveiled. A Memorial Willow Tree planted at the memorial in April 2019 had been cut down in August, and a "memorial tag" stolen.{{cite news ==Representation in other media==

• Wormser, Richard, director. The Elaine Riot: Tragedy & Triumph. VHS Documentary. Little Rock: Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, 2002. • Evans, Josh, composer. Elaine. Jazz Composition. New York: Jazz at Lincoln Center, 2021. ==See also==