"ELAINE MASSACRE"

 “ELAINE MASSACRE”

I grew up hearing vague stories about the Elaine Race Riot, stories which came from white adults.  They indicated that a few Black folk had been killed in my home county in late September in 1919, because the Black folk did not know their place in a society centered on white supremacy.  Because I was a captive to the idea of white supremacy, I believed them.  As I became a young adult and began to find some freedom from my captivity, I began to doubt the veracity of the stories that I had heard about what was called “the Elaine Race Riot.” It would not be until 2015 that I would learn much more of the full story.  

    Bryan Stevenson and his Equal Justice Institute published a history of lynchings in the USA, especially in the South.  I heard from my longtime friend David Billings about the EJI report:  “It looks like our home county lynched more people than any other county in the country.”  Sure enough, at the top of the list of despicable acts of lynching, there was my home county of Phillips County, Arkansas, where over 230 Black people had been lynched in a white reign of terror over 3 days, from September 30-October 2, 1919.

During the “Red Summer” of 1919, many Black people were lynched because they began to stand up for their human rights.  Black tenant farmers in Phillips County had begun to organize to seek to get higher pay for the cotton that they picked.  They met several times in Black churches that summer, and much of their work was seeking to organize a union to work for better conditions.  On September 29, 1919, they meet in a Black Baptist church in a small community called Hoop Spur, just a few miles north of Elaine, Arkansas.  White deputies came out to break up the meeting, and those deputies fired into the church building.  The Black farmers had expected white violence, so they were somewhat prepared, returning the fire and killing one of the deputies.  The Black farmers drove the deputies away, but the Black farmers were not prepared for what followed.

Mobs of white people gathered in my hometown of Helena, which was the county seat.  They called the return of Black farmers’ fire in response to the white shots fired – they called it an insurrection.  The white people recruited other white people from surrounding towns, and they put out the word to white people in other states.  On that same day, white mobs began killing Black people in unprecedented numbers in Phillips County.  The murdering continued over three days, a reign of terror that killed hundreds of Black people.  Counts of those killed range from 237 (EJI estimate) to 800+, one of the biggest peacetime massacres in American history. 

It was not a “race riot” that killed a few Black people, as I had been told.  It was a “race massacre” that killed hundreds of Black people, carried out 103 years ago in my home county.  Adding great insult to grievous injury, some 120 Black people were arrested for murder and insurrection.  Eventually twelve Black men were convicted of murder and sentenced to death.  Ida B. Wells, the NAACP, and a courageous Black lawyer named Scipio Africanus Jones became advocates for the twelve men wrongly convicted in this case.  Jones became the lead attorney for the men, and it was his vision and endurance and strength that carried the case to the US Supreme Court.  In 1923 in Moore v. Dempsey,  SCOTUS decided to overturn the death verdicts of the black men convicted in the Elaine Massacre.  It was the first time since the Civil War that the Court had overturned a criminal case verdict in a state court decision. 

The Elaine Massacre was horrific and on one level seems far away and long ago.  But, it speaks to contemporary forces.  In 2019 a monument commemorating the victims of the Elaine Massacre was dedicated in Helena across from the Phillips County courthouse, and my friend and colleague Dr. Catherine Meeks was a guest speaker for that dedication.  Caroline and I attended that ceremony, and I wrote about it in my October 7, 2019 blog.  That monument is a reminder of the depth of racism and white supremacy that courses through our arteries and veins as individuals and as communities.  The rise of Trumpism is a stark reminder that this power is vicious and capricious and always dangerous, a stream that flows through American history,  always ready to break out into seditious and deadly violence.  I don’t know if the times in which we live are like the 1850’s, that decade that boiled over into the Civil War, but in these kinds of memories, it sure feels like it.  Find your place and take your stand.