where did the elaine massacre take place

where did the elaine massacre take place

Hundreds of U.S. Army soldiers were sent to Elaine at the governors request. Ferguson, Bessie. 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 . As the farmers met at a local church, police officers interrupted them, leading to a shootout in which one of the officers was killed. On the other hand, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in New York, which had sent Field Secretary Walter White to investigate the events in Elaine, contested such allegations from the outset. Elaine is a small city in Phillips County Arkansas in the Arkansas Delta region of the Mississippi River. The county sheriff organized the posse and whites gathered to put down what was rumored as a "black insurrection". In subsequent articles, he claimed that careful examinationdoes not reveal the dastardly plot which has been charged and that indeed the PFHUA had no designs on an uprising. One of Ms. Browns former students, Edlun Marshall, said that he grew up hearing about the massacre from his extended family. Between the time of planting and selling, the sharecroppers took up food, clothing, and necessities at excessive prices from the plantation store owned by the planter. In 1925, Sharpe Dunaway, an employee of the Arkansas Gazette, alleged that soldiers in Elaine had committed one murder after another with all the calm deliberation in the world, either too heartless to realize the enormity of their crimes, or too drunk on moonshine to give a continental darn.. White was of mixed, majority-European ancestry; blond and blue-eyed, he could pass for white. Cortner, Richard C. A Mob Intent on Death: The NAACP and the Arkansas Riot Cases. The Elaine Race Massacre began on September 30, 1919 and lasted until October 7, 1919. The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 37(3), 264-277. Elaine: A Premeditated Massacre. MA thesis, Southern New Hampshire University, 2022. The following morning, Gov. Aware of the dangers the atmosphere was tense after racially motivated violence in the area some of the farmers were armed with rifles. Nonetheless, the NAACP launched a series of appeals and challenges that would inch their way through Arkansas state courts and then federal courts for the next three years, an arduous series of hard-fought victories and discouraging setbacks that echoed previous attempts at legal redress for black citizens. The Elaine massacre of 1919 is believed to be the deadliest episode of racial violence in Arkansas history. Taylor, Kieran. With labor conflicts escalating throughout the country at the end of World War I, government and business interpreted the demands of labor increasingly as the work of foreign ideologies, such as Bolshevism, that threatened the foundation of the American economy. Brough, who had ridden on the train with the troops and accompanied them on a march to the Hoop Spur area. Many whites believed that these veterans (including Robert Hill, who co-founded PFHUA) posed a threat as they claimed greater recognition for their rights at home. Praying at the dedication of the Elaine Massacre Memorial. They argued that the accused had not been adequately defended and were convicted under the pressure of the mob, with blatant disregard for their constitutional rights. Krug, Teresa. They secured new trials for six of the men, known as the Ware defendants, based on the fact that the trial judge had not required jurors to indicate the degree of murder on their ballot forms.The convictions of the other six men, known as the Moore defendants, were affirmed. As you know, our black history is very limited in some areas. You know, This happened in my community.. [9], The all-white legislature had disenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites in the 1890s by creating barriers to voter registration. [23] This version of events has persisted in many histories of the riot. He reported that local people said that up to 100 blacks had been killed. Seventy-nine-year-old Ed Coleman had remained at home with his wife when people fleeing Hoop Spur came to his house and warned them to leave. Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Massacre of 1919. During the trials, Murphy became ill, and Jones became the principal counsel. One place where this was glaringly apparent was Elaine, Arkansas, where Black people had zero to severely limited options for employment and basic resources for survival. Leaders of the Hoop Spur union had placed armed guards around the church to prevent disruption of their meeting and intelligence gathering by white opponents. Louis L. In Louisiana, the Historic New Orleans Collection published a website this year about Black activists during Reconstruction, the period immediately after the Civil War. Richard Hall asked my father to come to Mississippi to visit him. The conflict started on the night of September 30 th, 1919 when 100 African Americans were gathered at a church, three miles . Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Red Summer was a period in mid-1919 during which white supremacist terrorism and racial riots occurred in more than three dozen cities across the United States, and in one rural county in Arkansas. The cases of the Elaine Twelve were litigated on two separate tracks. In fact, local police were complicit in the killing of untold numbers of African-Americans. I know for a fact my fathers people were involved in the Elaine Riot. Throughout the day at least 1,000 white vigilantes came from all over the state and from Mississippi to join plantation owners, their managers, sheriffs, deputies and the veterans to put down what they called an uprising. Word spread rapidly about the death. There is no danger of any lynching. Brough once again stayed their executions until the Arkansas Supreme Court could again review the cases. [9] Fighting in the area lasted for three days before the troops ended the violence. It used intimidation and attacks to keep blacks suppressed. The trial had occurred in a setting dominated by a mob spirit, violating the prisoners right to due process. Jones began to raise money in the black community in Little Rock for the defense of the Elaine Twelve, as the convicted men came to be known. [29][30], Just hours before Governor McRae left office in 1925, he contacted Scipio Jones to inform him that indefinite furloughs had been issued for the remaining defendants. As racialized violence spread in both Northern and Southern cities during the Red Summer of 1919, Delta planters were paying close attention. Peacock, Leslie Newell. White attorneys from Helena were appointed by Circuit Judge J. M. Jackson to represent the first twelve black men to go to trial. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988. Arkansas Residents Make a Case for Reparations 100 Years After the Elaine Massacre A small Southern town tries to come to terms with its blood-soaked legacy. Little Rock: Parke-Harper Publishing Company, 1925. Workers also had to buy food, clothing, household wares, tools, seed and fertilizer at the plantation commissary, which charged exorbitant interest rates. [8] After a years-long legal battle by the NAACP, the 12 men were acquitted. - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/18/a-rural-town-confronts-its-buried-history-of-m. The class created a searchable index of those records and donated it to the Arkansas State Archive. All-white juries rendered verdicts on the defendants in trials following the Elaine race riot. American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta. The NAACP also pointed out in their publication The Crisis that in the prevailing climate of unchecked lynchings and mob violence against African-Americans, none would be fool enough to do so. He arranged for these men to be quickly escorted out of state to prevent them from being lynched. A mob burned the office of a Black newspaper and sent Black workers fleeing into nearby swamps. For a time, the NAACP tried to conceal its role in the appeals, given the hostile reception to its reports on the rioting and the trials. Stockley, Grif, and Jeannie M. Whayne. Homes were burned with Black families inside, and the victims included men, women and children, according to Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, a professor emerita of African American studies at Pennsylvania State University. Separately, Professor Mitchell helped to create a virtual exhibit around the massacres centennial for the universitys Center for Arkansas History and Culture that includes teaching guides, archival records and interactive maps. They stole Wares cow, two mules, one horse, a farm wagon, his Ford car and various household goods. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. White wrote in the Chicago Daily News on October 19, 1919, that the belief there had been an insurrection was only a figment of the imagination of Arkansas whites and not based on fact. He said, White men in Helena told me that more than one hundred Negroes were killed. Famed journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett secretly interviewed some of the prisoners in Helena, from which she produced the pamphlet The Arkansas Race Riot. This work also challenged allegations of an insurrection and documented the torture and other depredations the prisoners had suffered. The NAACPs legal strategy hinged on the claim that the defendants 14th Amendment right to due process had been violated. The information you have provided is great for families that lost people and is greatly needed. He brought the men and women deemed insurrectionists to the Phillips County jail in Helena. [12] Prominent Little Rock attorney George Rose wrote a letter to outgoing Governor Thomas McRae requesting that he find a way to release the remaining defendants if they agreed to plead guilty to second-degree murder. The Arkansas Race Riot. N.p. Additional support provided by the Arkansas Community Foundation. [9], Although official records of the time count eleven black men and five white men killed,[4][19] there are estimates from 100 to 237 African Americans killed, and more wounded. The union had contracted with lawyer Ulysses S. Bratton, whose son, Ocier, was at this meeting. A. Roberts, Michael. At around 11 p.m. that night, a group of local white men, some of whom may have been affiliated with local law enforcement, fired shots into the church. Its purpose was "to obtain better payments for their cotton crops from the white plantation owners who dominated the area during the Jim Crow era. At 11 p.m., a band of white men shot into the church. "It is documented that five whites, including a soldier died at Elaine, but estimates of African American deaths, made by individuals writing about the Elaine affair between 1919 and 1925, range from 20 to 856; if accurate, these numbers would make it by far the most deadly conflict in the history of the United States. The committees narrative appeared in newspapers all over the country. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. In some American schools, museums and other institutions, events like Elaine are being discussed for the first time. 2023 Encyclopedia of Arkansas. The white leaders put forward their view that black residents had been about to revolt. ", Whayne, Jeannie M. "Low villains and wickedness in high places: Race and class in the Elaine riots. It excluded them from the political system via the more complicated Election Law of 1891 and a poll tax amendment passed in 1892. [6] More recent estimates in the 21st century of the number of black people killed during this violence are higher than estimates provided by the eyewitnesses, and have ranged into the hundreds. Central Arkansas Library System, Little Rock, Arkansas. The Elaine, Arkansas, Race Riots, 1919. Special Issue. found: The Guardian, August 18, 2019: A rural town confronts its buried history of mass killings of black Americans ("The Elaine Massacre marked one of the darkest moments in our state's history," the office of Arkansas's governor, said in an email.) In Little Rock and at the headquarters of the NAACP in New York, efforts began to fight the death sentences handed down in Helena, led in part by Scipio Africanus Jones, the leading black attorney of his era in Arkansas, and Edgar L. McHaney. The Arkansas Historical Quarterly. It referred to a report in The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, Tennessee on October 3 that quoted Bratton's father:[24]. In some areas Elaine at the dedication of the Riot years-long legal by. His wife when people fleeing Hoop Spur came to his house and warned them to.! Occurred in a setting dominated by a mob burned the office of a newspaper. Struggle in the area lasted for three days before the troops ended the violence in 1892 was this... 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