Posted on October 22, 2019

Arkansas’ Phillips County Remembers the Racial Massacre the US Forgot

Olivia Paschal, Truthout, October 12, 2019

“If you are from Phillips County, stand up,” Rev. Mary Olson said to the gathering of nearly 100 people, young and old, almost all of them black, at a community center in rural Elaine, Arkansas, on Sept. 28. {snip}

The crowd was gathered to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Elaine Massacre, perhaps the single deadliest instance of racist violence against African Americans to ever take place in the United States. The murder of hundreds of black farmers, sharecroppers, and businesspeople — men, women, and children — took place in the cotton fields of Elaine and the surrounding rural towns of Phillips County in the Arkansas Delta in late September and early October of 1919. The recent gathering was part of Elaine’s eighth annual Healing of the Land ceremony, organized by the Elaine Legacy Center, of which Olson is the president. The event was held not just to remember the massacre’s victims, many of whose descendants and relatives were in the crowd, but to continue the work of healing from the ongoing exploitation, poverty, and trauma that still exist here, the legacies of slavery, sharecropping, and the massacre itself.

“All of these people back around here, it was their people that happened to,” Anthony Davis, whose family has been in Phillips County since before the Civil War, told Facing South, pointing to the crowd gathered for the ceremony. {snip} But the oral history also handed down through the family recalls a time when they owned vastly more land, he says — land that was stolen by white people.

The past is extraordinarily present in Elaine. It’s not only in the stories and the traumas passed down through the generations, but also in the continued segregation and economic inequality on blatant display in Elaine and the surrounding small rural towns. Wealth stratification in the rural parts of the county is almost entirely along racial lines; in Elaine, 65 percent of black people live under the poverty line, compared to just 13 percent of white residents.

With Elaine’s population declining, down now to about 500 people, nearly all of the local institutions have shuttered. The schools closed in 2006. Many of the buildings on Main Street now sit empty; a weekends-only convenience store occupies one storefront, and a community center another. The town remains segregated, too, with both Main Street and neighborhoods separated black from white, persistent vestiges of Jim Crow. And though the populations of Elaine and nearby Marvell are 40 percent white, the public school district serving the two towns is 86 percent black, thanks to white parents still sending their children to a private segregation academy in Marvell.

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Still Mourning the Losses

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The city now known as Helena-West Helena, whose population has grown over the past century from around 9,000 to about 11,000, has always been the center of power in Phillips County. Wealthy white planters leased land to black sharecroppers who farmed it for cotton, which they then had to sell back to those same planters for prices far under market value, a form of debt peonage. Constantly shortchanged by the white planters, black sharecroppers and tenant farmers formed the Progressive Farmers and Household Union, which had chapters in the Phillips County towns of Ratio and Hoop Spur as well as Elaine. As the price of cotton skyrocketed from 1915 to 1919 and black landownership rates increased by 40 percent, the union determined it was time to demand fair prices and hired a white lawyer to take the case against the planters to court.

Outraged, Phillips County’s white elites gathered in the old Opera House on the Helena square and planned to violently break up the union. Two white men drove to a church in Hoop Spur where they knew a union meeting was taking place. Gunfire was exchanged, and at the end of the night one of the white men was dead. Spreading rumors of a “black insurrection,” Helena’s white businessmen gathered posses of white men from Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee and waged a three-day war not only on the county’s black sharecroppers but on any black person who crossed their path.

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Hundreds of black people were killed: the men and women who had unionized, fleeing children, members of Helena’s black business class returning by train from a hunting trip. The names of most of the murdered are unknown and likely unknowable, as are their precise numbers; historians conservatively estimate the dead at 200, while some contemporary counts reach over 800. The killing was done by white mobs, local law enforcement, and, historians believe, the federal troops sent by the governor to quell the violence. Nearly 300 more black people were arrested, imprisoned, and tortured into testifying against each other for the cases brought over the five white people who died in the violence.

No white person was charged with a crime. But the 12 black men to be tried first were all sentenced to death in trials that lasted just minutes. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually overturned six of the Elaine 12’s sentences in Moore v. Dempsey, a precedent-setting 1923 decision which established that the 14th Amendment’s due process clause could be used to appeal state rulings to federal court to determine whether defendants’ constitutional rights had been violated.

The Elaine Massacre is one of the most important yet least remembered incidents of mass racial violence against African Americans in U.S. history. {snip}

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After the massacre, countless black families fled Phillips County. Brian Mitchell, a historian at the University of Arkansas Little Rock who has uncovered new details about the massacre, has traced many of them to Topeka, Kansas, where union organizer Robert Lee Hill also fled. “Two hundred people followed [Hill] with just the shirt on their back,” Mitchell told Facing South. Many people in Phillips County feel that both those who left and those who stayed are owed reparations.

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“You Could Hear Every Scream”

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Helena also has a claim to the history of the massacre: It was there that white posses formed, and it was in the same county courthouse still in use today that hundreds of black people were jailed without cause, and where the Elaine 12 were subjected to sham trials and sentenced to death.

But the divides that existed between Helena and Elaine in 1919 linger today. For those in Elaine and surrounding rural communities, building an expensive monument in Helena that will draw tourism dollars brings up old resentments and tensions. {snip}

“The 30 miles that separated this block and Walnut Street [where black businesses were located] from Hoop Spur might as well have been a million miles,” Miller said. “Because there was nothing holding together the black business class, and the sharecroppers meeting in Hoop Spur that night, except for shared history and black skin.”

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“Have Mercy Upon Us”

Besides commemorating the Elaine Massacre, people and communities are taking steps towards healing its still-painful wounds.

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The reconciliation process is not just for Phillips County’s older residents. It’s also for children from Phillips County and beyond, whose parents, teachers, and mentors brought them to the commemoration events from as far away as Texas to understand a chapter of U.S. history that none of them studied in school.

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The massacre has never been part of the curriculum in Arkansas classrooms. Many people who grew up in Phillips County, black and white, say they were never taught about it by their teachers or family. Even many of those whose ancestors were directly involved, including Miller the judge and Johnson the poet, became conscious about its horrors only as adults. {snip}

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There’s a clear sense among the adults here that the children need to learn this history — of landownership and unionizing and fighting back against exploitative racial and economic forces — so that they too feel empowered to break out of the cycle of poverty and operate the engines of economic success that have been driving white wealth in the Delta for generations.

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Yet the push for black self-determination and success in Phillips County is accompanied by the overwhelming sense that there’s still a need for restitution and reparation. The litany recited at the Legacy Center’s church service emphasizes the debt many still feel they are owed by state and county elites.

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