The killings of African-Americans in and around Elaine, Arkansas in 1919 is possibly the bloodiest racial incident in American History. On Sept. 30, 1919, black sharecroppers gathered in a church to discuss actions to improve their situation. These men were fed up with getting low prices for their cotton and then having to pay a large percentage of their sales to their landowner. They also had to pay high prices at the owner’s store and quickly fell into debt. This prevented them from leaving Elaine for a better life. Basically, after the Civil War, the planters crafted the system of sharecropping to keep the now freed slaves picking cotton. The recently formed Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America was organizing blacks to demand their rights. Another factor was the return of black veterans from WWI. These men, who had fought for their country, were not willing to just go back to the good old days of inferior status. Whites in the South were afraid of this new attitude and the idea of blacks organizing. That summer has been called the Red Summer because numerous cities experienced white mobs attacking black neighborhoods.
The white community of Elaine had a hair-trigger for this meeting. Sure enough, shots were exchanged at the church and a white man was killed. Word spread rapidly and whites from the county and surrounding counties rushed to avenge his death. Many were Ku Klux Klan members. The word was that there was an insurrection in Elaine and it needed to be snuffed out. Governor Charles Brough called out the National Guard and 500 soldiers (some of whom were armed with machine guns) joined the hundreds of “posse” members. The area became like a free fire zone. Any black was liable to be shot, even women and children. Homes were burned, sometimes with families inside. When the bloodlust was sated, dozens of men were arrested. All of them were black. 12 “agitators”, known as the “Elaine 12”, were put on trial for murder. It was an all-white jury and of the defendants were tortured to get confessions. They were all sentenced to death. Most Americans considered the punishment just because the nationwide narrative was that there had been an insurrection and it was put down by the authorities. Few journalists refuted this. Ida Wells-Barnett, the famous muckraker who tackled lynchings, interviewed numerous eyewitnesses and wrote the truth of what had happened. The tide turned when the NAACP got involved in appealing the verdicts. The case reached the Supreme Court (Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes) as Moore v. Dempsey. In a 6-2 decision the court overruled the decision because the defendants’ 14th Amendment protection of due process had been violated. The court cited the all-white jury, the lack of witnesses for the defendants, the torture, and the intimidation of white mobs. The case was largely forgotten because the South swept it under the rug, but it moved the Supreme Court on the road to Brown v. Board of Education and other civil rights friendly decisions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaine_massacre
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/opinion/elaine-massacre-1919-arkansas.html
The Elaine 12
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