losarciniegas.blogspot.com. The jail only had room for 48 people, so the conditions were overcrowded and miserable. Four million slaves did not own property; the vast majority of them became sharecroppers. There are several conflicting narratives as to which group, the officers or the sharecroppers, fired the first shot. A couple of weeks later, I went home to Elaine and asked my grandmother, Bernice Knox Hicks, if shed ever heard of it. And when the massacre ended, the courts charged dozens of Black men with murder. This group of resilient men and women who organized, who wrote by-laws to govern themselves by, only wanted what was promised and only asked for what they had earned. Unionized African Americans Would Threaten The Sharecropping System, 15. The violence arose over a power struggle between white Southern Democrats and white Republicans and their Black supporters. Did this mysterious human relative bury its dead? He had been threatened with death and warned many times to leave, but he had wanted to hold on a while longer to amass more money., The late Fred Hoskins, Silass son, wrote to my father in 1945: My grandmother made a trip to Elaine to find out about my fathers death. The riot is now considered to be a mass lynching. All rights reserved, Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information. Some of the trauma her family suffered includes the historical, environmental, social and economic racism she and her siblings faced growing up in Chicago, along with deep poverty and the addiction, death and incarceration that tore relations apart. By the end of the war, it was becoming clear that unions were here to stay. AI can help you plan your next tripif you know how to ask. One white man was killed and another wounded, possibly by stray bullets from their own side. All rights reserved. It remains extremely important that we remember signal events in our history, but also how we remember them. The sharecroppers met in a church on the night of September 30, 1919, to discuss possible next steps. Several slaves were also lynched during the antebellum years, typically for attempted escape, murder of slave-owners, or other forms of resistance. But in 1919, the Black sharecroppers of Elaine, Arkansas had had enough. The Macabre True Story Of Edward Paisnel, The Beast Of Jersey, Inside The Disturbing Marriage Of Carole Hoff And John Wayne Gacy, What Stephen Hawking Thinks Threatens Humankind The Most, 27 Raw Images Of When Punk Ruled New York, Join The All That's Interesting Weekly Dispatch. Mobs began executing African Americans everywhere they could be found. onlyinark.com. The 12 men who were sentenced to death for what authorities said was a sharecropper insurrection. Through her remarkable and generous forgiveness of my grandfather, combined with our mutual journey together to achieve a true account of the massacre, we reached racial reconciliation and deep friendship, both of which were joined by our respective spouses and children. To that end, he formed the, 12. While the system sounds good on paper, sharecropping was a thinly veiled means to keep African Americans bound to the land and in a position of perpetual servitude. On September 30, 1919, as the union members met at the Hoops Spur church, a few miles from Elaine, the meeting was interrupted by the arrival of a group of law enforcement officers and a black trustee from Helenas jail. Like Sheila, poet and author Chester Johnson only recently learned more about the Elaine Massacre and discovered that the grandfather he adored as a child was not only a KKK member but had participated in the killings. DuBois later explained that racial separation and violence drove a stake through the heart of nascent labor movement in the South, destroying the potential of union incomes for white as well as black workers. Submit to Reddit. New Negro racial uplift and organizing blossomed. They sent people from Helena and neighboring states to Elaine to murder and lynch us. cheatsheet.com. Hundreds died as whites burned the business district and some 200 homes to the ground. Malcolm Xs quote applies to the role of the media in the massacre. Unlimited access to free content. As the man tried to get up, a well-dressed white man standing behind him. usslave.blogspot.co.uk. One of its most prominent offices was in New York City, a metropolitan area that had also been swept up in the race riots of the Red Summer. People quickly spread rumors throughout Phillips County, the rural area in which the town of Elaine sat, about a black uprising. Black advancement and resistance threated the Jim Crow system, North and South. The orgy of violence in 1919 helped a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan as a mass movement and its political takeover in parts of the lower Midwest and the South. A black Elaine resident is escorted through the city, likely to makeshift stockades where many black citizens were held. The U.S. was gripped by a reign of racial terror after World War I, when whites rose up to quash prosperous Black communities. The unions goals were to help members obtain fair wages and treatment within the sharecropping system. Woodruff, Nan Elizabeth. andreadprice.com. Wells. Folks found out about this meeting and tried to barge in a railroad agent, a sheriff and a Black trustee who showed them where the meeting was. Sheila was born on July 27, 1948, in Hot Springs, AR. On January 13, 1925, the six Moore defendants were granted indefinite furloughs from McRae and were released from jail. What is known is that one of the officers was killed, W. A. Adkins, and another wounded, Charles W. Pratt, in the incident. But the courts judgment did not end the conflict over what happened in Elaine, Arkansas in 1919. By 1870, five years after the war ended, only 30,000 former slaves in the South owned land, and these were usually rather small plots. The Elaine massacre occurred on September 30-October 2, 1919 at Hoop Spur in the vicinity of Elaine in rural Phillips County, Arkansas.As many as several hundred African Americans and five white men were killed. Uncle Silas was why Richard, as a boy, had enough to eat for the first time since he could remember. Elaine sits on the border with Mississippi. Mobs formed to hunt down those responsible for the killing and alleged insurrection. Wells, Ida B. One hundred years ago, in the Red Summer of 1919, rampaging whites killed hundreds and perhaps thousands of African Americans in pogroms and race riots. Fearing a violent attempt to disrupt their meetings, the union posted armed guards. One possible reason is that all the land in that area is all accounted for. This new birth control for cats doesn't require surgery. I was stunned and distraught at the confirmation of the role of my grandfather, who had helped raise me and whom I loved. Our people were doing well here before 1919: owning our own land, selling our own crops, teaching in schools, running businesses. The Elaine Massacre was one of the bloodiest episodes in a string of similar clashes in which white men targeted black communities across the country in 1919. Known as the Moore defendants, these six men Ed Hicks, Frank Hicks, Ed Moore, J. C. Knox, Ed Coleman, and Paul Hall appealed their case to the U.S. Supreme Court, resulting in a precedent . Sheila also left behind a legacy of reconciliation. At the time, white landowners were exploiting the farmers, seizing most of the profits and claiming that their tenants still owed them money. In a way, Wrights daughter Julia tells the Guardian, Uncle Hoskins was one of the many canaries in the mineshaft of the Elaine massacre to come., Paul Ortiz, director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida, says oral histories passed down through the generations should be viewed as authoritatively as primary records. A carload of whites approached the meeting and exchanged fire with black people guarding the church. In June 1921, a white mob laid waste to Greenwood, a neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as Black Wall Street. The Soldiers Detained African Americans In Stockades, 42. thinglink.com. Again, nobody knows who first fired shots outside of the church where the union meeting was happening. Because racial tensions already existed in the North and Midwest, working-class whites resented the African American newcomers for taking their jobs. My grandfather was born in 1888. By the time the episode ended, one white man was dead, and another one was wounded. Some Still Believe The Massacre Was A Legitimate Means To Quell An Insurrection, Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. The Committee of Seven spoke with Governor Brough, who soon came to visit Elaine to find out for himself the facts. There was no period of mourning. Arkansas State ArchivesU.S. By 1925, they were all released from prison (and spirited quickly out of the state), and their case before the U.S. Supreme Court (Moore V. Dempsey, 1923) strengthened the courts interpretation of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to correct state criminal trials that blatantly ignored the rights of defendants. But I just want them to give us our land back. There Were No Plans For A Black Insurrection, Robert Lee Hill was organizing African American sharecroppers as a means of nonviolence to help ensure, 30. Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2018. https://archive.org/details/TheArkansasRaceRiot/page/n1, Whayne, Jeannie M. Low Villains and Wickedness in High Places: Race and Class in the Elaine Riots., Sharecropping: The Economic System that Drove the South, Black Labor Organizing: The Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America, Military Intervention: The blackest day written by blood or bayonet, Clashing Headlines: White vs. Black Journalism, Moore v. Dempsey: A Landmark for Constitutional Rights, The Aftermath: Phillips Countys Black Exodus, Memory and Education: How Historians Covered Elaine. When landowners sent men to spy on a union meeting at a black church near Elaine, shooting broke out and events spun out of control. Is there a better way to get rid of old clothes? The Meeting On September 30 Was About Legal Counsel, 25. Wells. The situation at Elaine has been well handled and is absolutely under control, he said. The seminar, African Americans After World War I, covered a series of violent racial incidents that occurred in 1919, as Black veterans of the war in Europe returned home, determined to push for greater economic opportunities. More Videos Next up in 5 New York: Doubleday, 1956. For days, this posse which included members of the local law enforcement as well as members of the KKK attacked the Black residents of Elaine in a brutal rampage. The racial divides in the United States have a long and troubled history, beginning with slavery in the American colonies and continuing today, with police violence against African Americans and ensuing riots. By the early 1920s, when the genocide finally ended, between 600,000 and 1.5 . Many freed slaves were sent back to their masters. historyinphotos.blogspot.com. The only evidence that was used at the trials of the imprisoned African Americans was the confessions that had been given under torture. People Came From Outside The County To Join The Massacre, 34. Word quickly got to the sheriffs office, and before the night was over, a mob of hundreds of white men assembled to enact vigilante justice for the two whites that had been killed outside of the union meeting. Courtesy of the Arkansas State Archives. During the Red Summer of 1919, even though the act of unionizing is nonviolent, the racial tensions that already existed were bound to explode. The carpetbaggers from the north got together with the scallywags from the south. Twelve black sharecroppers were sentenced to death for allegedly being involved in the murder of a white man in October 1919. On September 30, 2021 On this day in 1919, during a union meeting of African American tenant farmers in rural Arkansas, white law enforcement and union members exchanged gunfire, triggering one of the worst race massacres in US history. For nearly 50 years I have been a journalist advocating against the violation of human rights and prisoner rights in particular. My father dedicated his 1945 autobiography, Black Boy, to Ellen and Julia, who will always live in my heart. backthen.com. Out of this tragedy, known as the Elaine massacre, and its subsequent prosecution, would come a Supreme Court decision that would upend years of court-sanctioned injustice against. The NAACP sent a staff member who was well positioned to investigate what had happened in Elaine: Walter White, whose mixed-race ancestry and Caucasian appearance allowed him to speak confidentially with white locals. The events of the Elaine Race Riot, which occurred between 30 September and 1 October 1919, embody why the current reparative action is long overdue. In the case of Moore vs. Dempsey, the court ruled in favor of the wrongly convicted Black men. I want my grandkids to know their ancestors owned land, had their own businesses and built a strong, caring community. The Elaine Massacre was not the only instance of racial violence that took place in 1919. These attacks were not limited to the sharecroppers who had been attempting to organize. The treatment is easy to administer and lasts a lifetime. Arkansas State ArchivesArmed posses of white men roamed Elaine, Arkansas, killing Black people indiscriminately in 1919. The official total of African Americans killed by the troops is only two, as reported by Colonel Isaac Jenks. He had spent his entire career with the Missouri Pacific Railroad, which was up to its eyeballs both in the massacre itself and in the torturing of the Black sharecroppers that followed the killing. The violence in Elaine was unique in that it followed an attempt of black farmers to break free of the sharecropping system that minimized their earnings and often kept them indebted to the owners of the land they worked. My grandmother told my mother that she saw them haul the bodies into trucks like logs, she said. Looking back now I realized that the Elaine Massacre manifested itself into a culture of Black people in Elaine who lived a silent fear. In the early 2000s, Sheila pieced together the story: our ancestors and other sharecroppers tired of being cheated out of their fair share of the cotton prices by the landowners secretly organized a union. Scott surmises that the young girl may have been one of the hundredor hundredsof black sharecroppers killed that year in what is now known as the Elaine Race Massacre, one of the deadliest outbreaks of racial violence in American history. He owned slaves, including my great-great-grandmother, a Chocktaw Indian named Jane Chilata Charenda Huntley. You can read Lauren Fitzgeralds comments on the documents covered in the seminarwhich she plans to use in her own classroomhere. The NAACP Got Involved To Halt The Death Sentences, 48. In two separate trials, all-white juries took only minutes to convict twelve union members and sentence them to die in the electric chair. But the national guard came down and killed those people. They came up with the plan: lets kill these Africans that we gave these land grants to and take control of the land. They put him under house arrest and took his guns away from him. Fitzgeralds comments are particularly intriguing during a period of divisiveness over how best to teach the uncomfortable aspects of American racial history. To keep formerly enslaved African Americans in a position of servitude, former plantation owners came up with a solution that was basically slavery but with a different name: 4. Keep in mind that while the North may not have had slaves before the Civil War and didnt have Jim Crow laws, African Americans werent particularly welcome up there. Race Riots Consumed The Country In 1919, In 1919, the racial tensions that had been building erupted in what came to be known as the, 18. Julia Wright, 79, writer and anti-death penalty activist. Unionizing would mean fair wages for sharecropping families. There was to be no uprising, but the massacre to follow left hundreds dead. In the Colfax Massacre a group of white people attacked and killed a group of African Americans. They never again made another attempt to organize or become independent beyond the white landowners farms. In the middle of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared slavery illegal and all slaves free. How would that have benefitted the generations that followed, down to my own aunts and uncles in Chicago who are suffering from poverty to this day? How can you tell if a wild animal really needs your help? We have always talked about the massacre here, but not in schools or to outsiders. The Elaine community has never recovered from the massacre because it was never given a chance to grow and prosper. But not everyone welcomed the rise of unions. So there was a considerable crisis looming that would shape the South for decades: what should society do with all of these liberated slaves? They paid membership dues and attended meetings, which had to be accompanied by armed guards to protect those inside. Published 2019. But then they built levees and canals and trenches and turned it into some of the best land in the world. Pruden, William H. III. Only in recent years has there been an increase in Black farmers owning land and farming it. historyinphotos.blogspot.com. Six of the 12 Black sharecroppers sentenced to death following the Elaine Massacre pose with their lawyer Scipio A. Jones, left. Hismost recent book isTo the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice(W.W. Norton 2018). A few months later, someone chopped it down. The rural South is still plagued with racial tensions, which have come to fever pitches in cities like Ferguson, where new riots erupted over the failure to convict a police officer in the shooting death of an African American man. While around 100 sharecroppers met in the church, armed white men showed up outside. There should be federal and state investigations to clarify what happened in Elaine so that the next generation does not continue to believe the myths created by those who carried out the murders, to consider ways to repair the economic and social damage, and to fight anew against white supremacy and terrorism. The massacre. In 1919, the racial tensions that had been building erupted in what came to be known as the Red Summer. Today, unfortunately, there is no closure on racism. Through articles, interviews, and my latest book, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation, I have become closely associated with the massacre and the disclosure that my own maternal grandfather participated in it. The New York office of the NAACP immediately began coordinating with people in Little Rock, the capital of Arkansas, to get the guilty verdicts reversed and the death sentences dropped. For an hour and 30 minutes on the evening of July 1, the reporter witnessed barbaric scenes of white mobs destroying the life of every discoverable black man. The gruesome displays of racial violence were among the worst the United States would ever see. usslave.blogspot.co.uk. Over several days, a posse from neighboring states, joined by federal troops, combed through the county, indiscriminately shooting the fleeing and hiding sharecroppers. I want my grandchildren to have the same character he had. For four days, whites and African Americans, 20. The NAACP Hired A Law Firm In Arkansas, 50. Ferguson, Bessie. Like in Tulsa, the massacre happened here. This would mean that landowners who had been keeping false accounts to keep their sharecroppers in perpetual debt would have to be transparent about their account books. They had new trials secured, which the next year, in May of 1920. atlantablackstar.com. The mobs of angry, hate-filled white men systematically rounded up and murdered entire families at a time. Is organic food healthier? arkansasbusiness.com. The black press, particularly the ChicagoDefender,connected black resistance movements, as a million or more African Americans left the South for industrial jobs elsewhere, sometimes joined unions, and fought fiercely against racism. Some of the sharecroppers had been born slaves and survived. She and her seven siblings . He came here to buy land south of Elaine. We need to educate about exactly why the sharecroppers were organizing, and understand that they defended themselves because they felt they deserved better. Copyright 1996-2015 National Geographic Society, Copyright 2015-2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC. Many history books do not mention it, despite the fact that hundreds of African Americans were slaughtered and a landmark Supreme Court ruling was issued. Local authorities spun a tale of a suppressed sharecropper insurrection designed to seize the land of the areas white planters. In other race riots that occurred during the summer of 1919, African American homes were destroyed, and people were indiscriminately attacked on the streets. It is widely accepted that in 1919, a group of white men, with the backing of federal troops, tortured and killed scores of Black residents the exact number is disputed but assumed to number at least in the hundreds who were starting to organize against the exploitation of their labor. He basically gave the mob the go-ahead to find and kill any and all African Americans in the area. The Governor Brought The US Military In to Restore Order, 41. But the courts only cared about the five white people who died during the massacre. This little girl was a sharecropper. The same economic system meant the same kind of labor: unpaid slave labor. To represent the African Americans, the city of Helena appointed white attorneys. https://archive.org/details/TheArkansasRaceRiot/page/n1 (accessed October 24, 2018). Here Are Our Sources: Sharecropping, by history.com editors. Still Believe the massacre was not the only instance of racial violence were among the worst the United Would... Advocating against the violation of human rights and prisoner rights in particular been! Around 100 sharecroppers met in a church on the night of September 30 was about Legal,! Meeting on September 30, 1919, to discuss possible next steps no closure on racism had room 48... And prosper copyright 1996-2015 National Geographic Society, copyright 2015-2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC the! To stay Brough, who had been given under torture for cats does n't require surgery was! But in 1919 standing behind him strong, caring community arose over a power struggle between white Southern and... Their lawyer Scipio A. 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