Elaine => The Bloodiest of the race riots of 1919

The Elaine Massacre was by far the deadliest racial confrontation in Arkansas history and possibly the bloodiest racial conflict in the history of the United States. The case had both labor and racial aspects. Though exact numbers are unknown, it is estimated that over 200 Blacks were killed, along with five Whites, during the White hysteria of a pending insurrection of Black sharecroppers. The conflict began on the night of September 30, 1919. When approximately 100 Black men attended a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America (PFHUA) at a church in Hoop Spur. Hoop Spur (Phillips County), is located three miles north of Elaine. They were mostly sharecroppers on the plantations of White landowners, organizing to obtain better payments for their cotton crops.

Aware of White fears of Communist influence on African Americans, the Black union posted armed guards around the church to prevent disruption and infiltration. During the evening, a group of White men, including the local sheriff, and a Black trustee from Helena’s jail tried to break up the meeting, fired shots into the church. The shots were reciprocated, and by the end of the night, one White man was killed. Though sharp debate and several conflicting narratives exists as to who fired first, the Black guards killed W.A. Adkins, a security officer from the Missouri-Pacific Railroad, and injured Charles Pratt, the deputy sheriff. “Kidd” Collins, a Black trustee who was with Adkins and Pratt, escaped the shootout unharmed and made his way to Elaine where he reported the shooting. Local telegraph operators contacted law enforcement in neighboring towns and the governor’s office.

At approximately 2 am on October 1st, hours after the initial gunfire outside the Hoop Spur church, Phillips County law enforcement sent a deputized posse from Helena to investigate the shooting. Within a few hours hundreds of White men, many of them the "low down" variety, began to comb the area for Blacks they believed were launching an insurrection. Arkansas newspapers declared a race riot was in motion in the county. Later that day a sheriff deputy reported that Elaine was under attack by a group of armed Blacks. Rumors spread about the sharecroppers and that there would be an uprising. Hundreds of White men rushed in from as far as Mississippi and Tennessee to help suppress the alleged uprising, killing any Black person they could find. Mobs descended on the nearby Black town of Elaine, destroying homes and businesses and attacking any Black people in their path over the coming days. No White casualties occurred in town.

White women and children were put on a train to Helena for safety. As word of the attack spread throughout the Black community, terrified Black residents, including women, children, and the elderly, fled their homes and hid for their lives in nearby woods and fields. Some of the Black residents armed themselves in defense. The mob then turned its attention to disarming those Blacks who fought back. Outside of Elaine two posse members, Clinton Lee and James Tappen, were killed while hunting down Black men. The Johnston brothers, members of a prominent African American family in Helena, were murdered en route to Helena after being forcibly removed from a train by a White posse. Posse member O.R. Lilly was also killed. There were conflicting reports on how everyone in this situation died. Arkansas Governor Charles Brough persuaded the War Department to send troops from nearby Camp Pike to restore order in Elaine.

Four White men were dead at this point. Late that night, the troop train left from Little Rock to Elaine carrying 550 infantrymen to deal with alleged Black insurrectionists. The troops rounded up and placed several hundred Blacks in temporary stockades, where there were reports of torture. The men were not released until their White employers vouched for them. Commanding officer Colonel Jenks led the troops that arrived in Elaine on the morning of October 2nd. Colonel Jenks ordered everyone, Black and White, to be disarmed. With Elaine secured, the Colonel sent a detachment to Helena to guard the jail where Blacks were rounded into to prevent lynchings. He then goes to Hoop Spur with a company of men and two machine guns. One of his men, Corporal Luther D. Earls, was killed but Jenks’ report did not include any mention of his men firing shots. Corporal Earls was the last White casualty from the event, a total of five White men.

Having accepted the rumored Black insurrection as told by a number White men, Jenks’ soldiers aided in interrogating Black prisoners, including torture. Hundreds of blacks were put in stockades, only released after their White employers vouched for them. Military intelligence reports didn’t include the names of African Americans interrogated and tortured but these reports claimed these individuals confessed to planning an insurrection. Blacks were moved from the stockades to the Helena jail where torture continued. The soldiers banded with local vigilantes and, over the next four days, murdered more than 200 Blacks (estimates up to 800), with hundreds more jailed or charged with first-degree murder. The killing was indiscriminate―Black men, women, and children in the area were not spared. Many hid in the swamps and thickets, others were said to have been gunned down in fields as they worked, and throngs of others surrendered themselves to the authorities for arrest. A White journalist for the Memphis Press reported that White mobs shot at dead Black bodies lying in the street.

Held in a makeshift jail, hundreds of Blacks were detained until their participation in the PFHUA could be verified. Those farmers who had not participated in the union were held until their landlords arrived to vouch for and collect them. Those fortunate enough to leave the stockade were given passes they were to show on demand and were ordered to return to the fields for work. During the last days of October 1919, the Phillips County grand jury charged 122 union’s members with assault, murder, and nightriding. At the end of the violence, 65 Black men were brought to trial. Twelve were sentenced to death and the others appealed to higher courts. No White man was ever charged in the massacre. Monitoring these events with alarm, African American activists took action. Journalist and anti-lynching activist who helped bring national attention to the Elaine Massacre and its aftermath, Ida B. Wells-Barnett traveled to Arkansas to interview the condemned men.

The Committee of Seven, a group of local planters and city and county officials, formed on October 2nd. They met with Governor Brough that same day to propose leading an investigation into the riot. In Little Rock, Brough held a press conference where he praised the five White men killed but made no mention of White mob activities. The committee claimed they discovered a plan of Blacks insurrection set for October 6th that was prematurely enacted on the night of the Hoop Spur church shooting. They further claimed White planters in the area were targeted for death, that African Americans expected to seize their land, and that union organizer Robert Hill had knowingly conned African Americans for his own personal gain. The same day the committee released their findings, a circular was passed out advising Blacks to get back to work as if nothing had happened. Editorials from Arkansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi warned African Americans against further involved, adding that it would only result in more Blacks deaths.

By October 7th 1919, the massacre ended. Walter White, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had been sent down to investigate and get a first hand report, passing as a White reporter the "Chicago Daily News". Walter White, mixed-race ancestry and Caucasian appearance allowed him to speak confidentially with White locals. Furious, Brough tried to keep the NAACP magazine the Crisis and the African American newspaper the Chicago Defender from distribution in Arkansas. It was later discovered that there was a "damned yellow nigger down here passing for white, and we're going to get him". Tipped off to the danger, Walter White quickly fled town, not bothering to go back to the hotel to get his bags, he jumped on a train without a ticket, to avoid being attacked himself. Even though Mr. White escaped, he heard rumors that he had been lynched in Arkansas that afternoon.

On November 5th 1919, 12 Black men were convicted of murder and sentenced to die by electrocution. The court-appointed lawyers did little in their defense despite the investigation and involvement of the NAACP. Through grassroots efforts, the NAACP built support for the sharecroppers dubbed the “Elaine Twelve” and raised money for their legal counsel. Scipio Jones, the leading Black attorney of his era in Arkansas, and Edgar L McHaney were hired to fight for justice for the accused at Elaine, who were divided into the Moore v. Dempsey and Ware v. Dempsey cases. He received assistance from the NAACP. The lawyers won new trials for six of the men. However, the convictions of six of the men were upheld. The first six defendants were eventually freed by the Arkansas supreme court.

The case of the Moore defendants went to the United States Supreme Court, which granted a new hearing, in the case of Moore v Dempsey. It took 4 years of appeals before the case finally reached the Supreme Court. On February 19, 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 6–2 decision in favor of the Moore defendants, maintaining the twelve had been denied “due process” and noting the judicial proceedings had been influenced by a mob that had assembled outside of the courthouse before the men were sentenced. The men were released off of death row. The Supreme Court's decision marked the beginning of an era in which the Supreme Court gave closer scrutiny to criminal justice cases and reviewed state actions against the Due Process Clause and the Bill of Rights. Despite the favorable ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, the Moore defendants remained in jail facing a re-trial in district court. On November 3, 1923, new Governor Thomas McRae commuted the death sentences of the sharecroppers to twelve-year terms in prison, making them immediately eligible for parole.

Although peace had returned to Elaine, the White communities in the plantation counties along the Mississippi River continued to fear the possibility of a Black uprising. Such was the case in Desha County, south of Elaine. When Deputy Sheriff Breedlow and two local men attempted to arrest Doc Hays, a Black man accused on January 21st 1920 of stealing hogs, they met unexpected resistance. Ten armed Black men objected to the arrest and freed Hays after a brief struggle with the deputy and his men. Local officials, fearing the clash was a portent of another rebellion, requested help from the governor. Brough responded to the request by making a telephone call to Camp Pike, seeking federal troops to prevent a race riot. The post commander complied by sending a detachment of 130 men under the command of Maj. Austin Preston by special train the next day. Upon arrival Preston quickly discovered that a Black uprising was not in the offing, and two days later the troops returned to Little Rock. On January 13, 1925, the six Moore defendants were granted indefinite furloughs from McRae and were released from jail. Their attorney, Scipio Jones arranged for these men to be quickly escorted out of state to prevent them from being lynched.

Elaine

Throughout the Red Summer of 1919 and beyond, no journalist did more to chronicle the lynchings and other forms of terror inflicted on Black people than Ida B Wells-Barnett. From East St Louis, Illinois, to Elaine, Arkansas, her pen was an instrument for justice. The men, who had come to be called “The Elaine 12”, had been unfairly rounded up, then falsely convicted after a sham six-minute trial in Helena, Arkansas. Now, they sat on death row for crimes they did not commit. They had one last hope. Perhaps, Ida B Wells-Barnett, a Black investigative journalist known for her utter fearlessness in her “crusade for justice” for her people, could save them. Perhaps this woman, who had once written “if it were possible”, she, “would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them,” had that kind of power to fight a “tide of hatred”.

Did Wells, an unflinching woman who had traveled the country to investigate the ruthless barbarity of White mobs in other lynchings and massacres, have that much power to save these Black men on death row in Arkansas? One of the old Black men believed she did.

“Dear Mrs. Wells-Barnett,” he wrote. “This is one of the 12 mens which is sentenced to death speaking to you on this day and thanking you for your grate speech you made throughout the country in the Chicago Defender paper. So I am thanking you to the very highest hope you will do all you can for your collord race. Because we are innercent men, we Negroes. So I thank God that thro you, our Negroes are looking into this truble, and thank the city of Chicago for what it did to start things and hopen to hear from you all soon.”

The letter was dated December 30th 1919 with a date line of Little Rock, Arkansas. It was sent to Wells three months after the Elaine Massacre had started. Wells-Barnett heard the desperation in the letter and, without hesitation, took a train from Chicago, heading into the deep south, which had once threatened her life and warned her never to return. “It was my first return to the South since I had been banished thirty years before,” she later wrote.

In Chicago, when Wells-Barnett heard the news of the “Elaine 12”, Frank Moore, Frank Hicks, Ed Hicks, Joe Knox, Paul Hall, Ed Coleman, Alfred Banks, Ed Ware, William Wordlaw, Albert Giles, Joe Fox, and John Martin, she began immediately raising attention about their case and raising money to save them. “They had been in prison in Helena, Ark, since the first week in October,” Wells wrote. “They had been beaten many times and left for dead while there, given electric shocks, suffocated with drugs, and suffered every cruelty and torment at the hands of their jailers to make them confess to a conspiracy to kill White people. Besides this a mob from the outside tried to lynch them.”

Wells explained that “during all that two months of terrible treatment and farcical trial, no word of help had come from their own people until a copy of the Chicago Defender, December 13th, fell into their hands”. “A letter of mine had already appeared in the Chicago Defender calling attention to the fact that the riot had been precipitated by the refusal of colored men to sell their cotton below the market price because they had an organization which advised them so to do,” Wells wrote in “Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells”. “I appealed to the colored people of the country to use their influence and money for those twelve men, who had been found guilty of murder in the first degree and then sentenced to be electrocuted.”

On January 22nd 1920, Wells-Barnett arrived in Little Rock, Arkansas, and headed immediately for the secret address the man had included in his letter.

“Those men were under sentence of death and there was no time to be lost,” Wells wrote. In Little Rock, she found a group of Black women, the wives and mothers of the 12 Black men who were waiting on death row. She disguised herself as an old woman and slipped into the jail. “The iron bars were wide enough apart to enable us to shake hands,” Wells wrote. “The one guard on duty sat about fifty feet away reading the Sunday paper. When he looked up, he saw only a group of insignificant looking colored women who had been there many times before, so he went on reading his newspaper.” Inside the jail, Wells took precise notes, recording the testimony of the men. Wells asked them “to write down everything they could recollect about the rioting, and what befell each one of them.” She asked them to “tell me the number of acres of land they had tilled during the year, how much cotton and corn they had raised, and how many heads of cattle and hogs they owned, and be sure to say what had become of it all.“

William Wordlow told her that it was about five carloads of white men who drove to the church that night on 30 September 1919.

“I was out in front of the church in the road when these men came up in these cars and started shooting in the church on the other people both women, men and children. When the White men started that work, I broke and ran away. I saw them when they made the first shot. I went in the woods and stayed all night. I stayed until the soldiers came, then I came to them. I had eight women and children with me to hide, keep them from getting killed. The White people sent word all through the country they were coming to kill all the Negroes they could find. The soldiers took me to Elaine and I was put in the school-house and they kept me there seven days. Then they brought me on to Helena jail and we were whipped like dogs to make stories on each other.”

The man pleaded:
“I did not kill no one. I did not have a gun. Then after my trial was over in six minutes, some of the White men came from Elaine to the jail and told me if I would put something on more Negroes they would turn me free, if I would call just two or three men’s names that they did call to me. I would not do so, because it would be a story and I will not lie on no one. I was whipped twice in jail. Near to death. While they were whipping me they put some kind of dope in my nose; also I was put in an electric chair and shocked to make me tell a story on other men.”

Frank Moore told Wells that more than 120 Black men, women and children were in the church that night. When the White men began shooting, he said he ran home. “The next morning the Whites sent us word that they was coming down there and ‘kill every nigger they found.’” Moore told Wells:
“The White people want to say that union was the cause of the trouble. It’s not so; the White people were threatening to run us from our crops before this trouble started. The Phillips County people know they started this trouble and they only got the army there to cover what they had done.”

Before she left, Wells asked the men to “have faith to believe that the great state of Arkansas would undo the wrong that had been done to them. I said they should pray daily that God would give the authorities the wisdom to realize the wrong that had been done, and the courage to right that wrong. I earnestly believe such prayers, will strengthen the hands of the White people of the state who want to do the right thing.” Wells returned to Chicago and wrote a pamphlet on the Elaine Massacre, publishing “the facts I had gathered and helping them to circulate them”, Wells wrote in her, “Crusade for Justice”. “I raised the money to print a thousand copies, and circulated almost the entire edition in Arkansas.”

The NAACP mounted a case to fight for them. “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,” according to the Encyclopedia Arkansas, “the leading Black attorney of his era in Arkansas, and Edgar L McHaney. Jones began to raise money in the Black community”. The lawyers won new trials for six of the men. However, the convictions of six of the men who became known as the Moore defendants were upheld. The first six defendants were eventually freed by the Arkansas supreme court. The case of the Moore defendants went to the US supreme court, which granted a new hearing, in the case of Moore v Dempsey, ruling the men had not been given due process. Attorney Scipio Jones began negotiations to have the men released. On January 14th 1925, Governor Thomas McRae ordered that the Moore defendants be released.

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