Elaine massacre

Background

Phillips County, Arkansas, in the Delta region, had a cotton-plantation economy built on the labor of Black sharecroppers, who outnumbered white residents in the area around Elaine by roughly ten to one. White landowners controlled crop sales, plantation stores, and account settlements, often keeping sharecroppers in perpetual debt without itemized statements. Arkansas's 1891 Election Law and 1892 poll-tax amendment had disenfranchised most Black residents and many poor whites. In 1919, Black farmer Robert L. Hill founded the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America (PFHUA) to organize for fairer payment, and the union retained white Little Rock attorney Ulysses S. Bratton to press for accounting of cotton sale proceeds. This organizing occurred during the nationwide "Red Summer" of 1919, marked by anti-Black violence in dozens of U.S. cities.

The violence

On September 29, 1919, about 100 Black farmers met at a church near Hoop Spur, close to Elaine, to discuss union matters. When two deputized white men and a Black trustee arrived at the church, a shooting broke out; a railroad policeman, W.D. Adkins, was killed and another white man wounded. It was never established who fired first. News of the shooting reached Helena, the county seat, and a posse formed; within hours it grew into a mob of 500 to 1,000 armed white men who fanned out across the county attacking Black residents. Arkansas Governor Charles Hillman Brough requested federal troops, and nearly 600 U.S. soldiers, along with a machine-gun battalion, arrived from Camp Pike. Violence continued for about three days before troops suppressed it. Official period records counted eleven Black men and five white men killed, but estimates by historians range from about 100 to 237 or more African Americans killed; some estimates have gone into the hundreds. Federal troops disarmed both sides and arrested 285 Black residents, holding them in stockades. At least two Black victims are documented to have been killed by federal troops.

Cover-up and press coverage

State officials and Arkansas newspapers, including the Arkansas Gazette, promoted a narrative that Black residents had been planning an "insurrection" against whites, a claim later discredited by historians. National papers, including The New York Times, repeated these claims. The NAACP's Walter F. White investigated in Elaine and reported that local estimates of Black deaths ran as high as 100 to 200.

Trials and appeals

In late 1919, an all-white grand jury indicted 122 Black men; 73 were charged with murder. Twelve defendants, known as the "Elaine Twelve," were convicted and sentenced to death after trials lasting under an hour, amid armed white mobs at the courthouse. The NAACP organized an appeals effort led by attorneys Scipio Africanus Jones and George W. Murphy. Six convictions were reversed on procedural grounds by the Arkansas Supreme Court; the other six ("Moore" defendants) had their death sentences upheld by the state court but were ultimately vacated by the U.S. Supreme Court in Moore v. Dempsey (1923), which found the trials had been dominated by mob pressure and coerced testimony, denying due process. The last defendants were released via furlough in 1925.

Legacy

The case is regarded by the Encyclopedia of Arkansas as possibly the deadliest racial conflict in U.S. history. A memorial was unveiled in Elaine in September 2019; a memorial willow tree was later vandalized in an incident local residents wanted investigated as a hate crime, unresolved as of 2021.