"GOING BACK HOME"

“GOING BACK HOME”

            In a couple of weeks, Caroline and I will drive over to my hometown of Helena, Arkansas, to participate in the dedication there of a memorial to the victims of the Elaine Massacre, who were lynched in the last days of September and early October, 1919. It is called the “Elaine” massacre, because it began in the Elaine area but spread throughout Phillips County.  It was a massive massacre – over 235 African-Americans murdered by roving white lynch mobs.  It was finally stopped when U.S. Army troops arrived by train to end the violence.  The exact count will never be known, but it was large enough to be among the biggest mass murders in American history.  The stated motivation for the slaughter was the alleged discovery of a plot by African-Americans to kill white planters and take their land.   The real reason was that the African-American tenant farmers were seeking to organize to get better prices for the cotton that they were growing, seeking to take a step out of the neo-slavery in which they were held. 

            There was an organizing meeting occurring at a black church in Ratio, Arkansas, and white deputies and allies fired on the people.  In self defense, the black workers returned the fire, and the fight was on.  No uprising planned, except for the whites – white mobs poured in from east Arkansas, west Tennessee, and north Mississippi.  Many African-Americans were arrested, and twelve men were eventually tried and convicted of murder and were sentenced to death.  That is where a connection to Ida Wells comes in.  She heard about this case and was an early publicist of it in the Chicago Defender, and she was an early fund-raiser for it.  The NAACP and a black advocacy group in Arkansas and Phillips County became the main legal defenders of these 12 men.

            I heard whispers of this slaughter when I was growing up in Helena, but it was always framed in the idea that it needed to be done to keep Black people in their places.  Being totally captured by the power of race, I believed this version of the story.  I had always thought that only a few African-American people were killed, all men.  If I had known the magnitude of the slaughter, I would hope that I would have questioned it more.  Indeed, I did not learn of its magnitude until 2015, when I heard from my long-time friend David Billings.  He sent me a New York Times article based on a comprehensive study of lynching by the Equal Justice Institute.  David sent me the article and indicated that we were at the top of the list – Phillips County was infamously #1.    

            Ida Wells did the first comprehensive study of lynching in 1892, and her approach was followed by EJI in 2015.  She later visited the men sentenced to death in this case, and she urged them to keep their spirits up and to believe in the God of Paul and Silas, who freed them from their cells.  She came in disguise to Arkansas to see these men, because it was her first trip back to the South since she was exiled in 1892, after her study on lynching was published.  Her study had indicated that the cause for the lynchings was not the alleged sexual promiscuity of black men but rather the desire to re-establish slavery by the white supremacists of the South.  Her offices in Memphis were fire-bombed, and a price was put on her head.  She was in New York when this occurred, and she remained in exile until she returned to visit these men in an Arkansas prison.

            Ida Wells proved to be prophetic in this case.  Thanks to the stellar work of a black attorney, Scipio Jones, born in slavery in Arkansas, and a white attorney, an ex-Confederate officer named George Murphy, and the powerful and persistent support and work of the NAACP, the case of these men made it to the US Supreme Court in Moore v. Dempsey.  In 1923 SCOTUS overturned their convictions, and it was the first time that this assertion of federal authority over state court decisions had been affirmed in relation to the South, since the Civil War.  All twelve were eventually freed.

            I will have many mixed emotions as I return to my home of Helena – in many ways, this will be a surreal event.  I don’t know much about its development.  I was invited into it this summer by my colleague and co-author, Catherine Meeks, who will speak at this mostly Episcopal event.  There is conflict over placing the memorial in Helena rather than in Elaine, and most of the decision makers are white.   So, it will be interesting to witness and experience, and I will report on it later.  For now, I want to lift it up and to lift up the great news that next week, Catherine’s and my book “Passionate for Justice: Ida B. Wells as Prophet for Our Time” will be released.  You can get your copy from the publisher www.churchpublishing.org/passionateforjustice, or from your local bookstore, or from Amazon, or from me (if you want a signed copy!)  More on all of that next week!