To Those Known and Unknown: The Elaine Massacre Memorial

September 2019 will be the 100th anniversary of what has come to be known as the Elaine massacre in Eastern Arkansas’s Phillips County. A century ago, white posses and U.S. soldiers shot and killed what may have been hundreds of African Americans, most of them tenant farmers, over a period of four days. The black farmers’ crime: They were unionizing to obtain fair prices for their cotton, and in some cases trying to buy their own farms. Some were just returned veterans of World War I and expected to be treated equitably and with respect after combat abroad.

It’s a complicated story from a time when white supremacy was the rule and the fear of communism and hatred of unions was pervasive. During the Red Summer of 1919, deadly clashes between racist white mobs and blacks, including veterans, erupted all over the nation. It’s a story that’s been told in rich detail in books by Little Rock lawyer Grif Stockley and American journalist Robert Whitaker. Here’s a bare-bones telling of the event:

Members of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union and others had been talking with a white Little Rock lawyer who had an office in Helena about suing the landowners for whom they planted. Cotton prices were at an all-time high, but black farmers were making pennies on the dollar from Arkansas landlords and could not get ahead. White eavesdroppers and a black spy hired by fearful residents of Helena claimed in reports to the elite of that city that there would be an uprising. Whites believed union organizers were stirring the tenant farmers to kill their landlords.

On the evening of Sept. 30, 1919, black families gathered in a church at Hoop Spur, a southern Phillips County community just north of Elaine, along the Missouri Pacific Railroad line, to talk about taking legal action. A deputy sheriff from Helena, a Missouri Pacific agent and a black prisoner drove to the church, stopped and turned out their lights. Someone opened the car door; armed black guards around the church approached. Shots rang out. It’s unknown who fired first; each side blamed the other. The deputy sheriff was killed. Blacks fled the shooting, some jumping out of the church windows with children. By the light of morning, a posse sent by the sheriff could see the church and a nearby shed had been shot at, though they would later lie about that (and even later admit to the lie).

Snip

https://arktimes.com/news/cover-stories/2019/08/02/to-those-known-and-unknown