‘They Killed Our People’

In the spring of 2008, at a small desk piled with papers and notebooks, Lisa Hicks-Gilbert sat spellbound in front of a laptop. After a lifetime of zigzagging around Arkansas, raising two children on her own while cleaning houses and working in restaurant kitchens, she had settled into the first job that left her time for herself, as a home nurse for an old man in a wealthy white family in Little Rock. She had decided to go back to school, secured a grant from the Single Parent Scholarship Fund, and enrolled in a paralegal training course. That day, doing research online for her class in legal history, she discovered a book titled Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919.

The summary on the back cover described a white mob that, with the help of federal troops, killed hundreds of black sharecroppers in the town of Elaine, on the eastern edge of Arkansas. Hicks-Gilbert grew up in and around Elaine. “I was like, ‘What is this?’” she told me. At first she assumed the book, written by an Arkansas lawyer named Grif Stockley, was a work of fiction. “There is no way that something like that would happen, and nobody would know about it, nobody would mention it,” she remembered thinking. She decided to ask her grandmother, who still lived in Elaine. But for some reason, Hicks-Gilbert said, “I knew not to call her on the phone.”

Two weeks later she drove east from Little Rock into the Mississippi Delta: a flat expanse of agricultural land stretching to the horizon, dotted by huge granaries and giant farm equipment resting under sheets of corrugated iron. In spring wind sweeps the crops of rice, wheat, soybean, and cotton. The two-lane road snakes far ahead, the tarmac shimmers before meeting the sky. Except for occasional muddy pickup trucks that whoosh by and recede in the the rear-view mirror, the landscape is deserted. Driving past ancient pecan trees, swamps of cypress, and towns that are nothing more than a smattering of shotgun houses around a gas station, Hicks-Gilbert was tense. “I mean, I already knew it was true,” she told me. “I just didn’t know how I was gonna react.”

Since 2006, when the local elementary school was shut down, the population of Elaine has been halved to fewer than five hundred. Its black residents are six times likelier to be living below the poverty line than their white neighbors. On the south side of Main Street, the white side, the houses are small and often dilapidated, but some have manicured lawns and convertibles in their garages. Going north, potholes become frequent, stop signs disappear, and every third house seems abandoned. There, on Pecan Street, Hicks-Gilbert parked her car at Christopher Homes, an NGO-run housing facility for elderly people, where her grandmother lived.

The neighbors were visiting for lunch. When everyone else had left, Lisa sat alone at the dining table with a slice of cake she couldn’t eat. “Mama was up, cleaning and wiping around in the kitchen,” she recalled. Finally, Lisa asked her: “Mama, do you know anything about white people and black people fighting each other and killing each other here in Elaine?”

The old woman was standing over the sink. “She just got still,” Lisa recalled. “Very still.” Turning around halfway, stumbling over the words, she said, “Baby! Where you learn that? How you know about that?” Lisa braced herself. “Mama! Did that happen for real?” Speaking in a low voice, Lisa’s grandmother asked her first to shut the door.

Even in 2008 the old woman was reticent. After checking the windows to be sure no one was around, she slumped into a chair. “Yeah, baby,” she said. “It happened.” “What happened?” “Baby, it was a bad time. They killed our people. They just killed them.” She raised her hand and looked away, as if to say she couldn’t bear to talk about it.

“I should have stopped,” Hicks-Gilbert told me. She wished she had never looked into the massacre at all. “I always say to myself, ’cause I feel bad, I should have stopped. But it was like I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop. I could not stop.”

*

The Elaine massacre, as the weeklong carnage in Phillips County is now known, was among the many mass killings of black people carried out by whites across the country in the decades after the Civil War. Some of these events are only now resurfacing in public consciousness: the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, has been extensively commemorated in recent years; the Wilmington, North Carolina, massacre of 1898, also known as the Wilmington insurrection, was much discussed in the weeks after the storming of the Capitol. Besides Elaine, Tulsa, and Wilmington, among the worst were Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873; Atlanta, Georgia, in 1906; Springfield, Illinois, in 1908; and Rosewood, Florida, in 1923.

The death tolls were highest in the Elaine and Tulsa massacres, which happened two years apart, each with approximately 250 victims. The two places were very different. Tulsa had become a boom town in the fifteen years before the massacre, and its segregation opened a space for businesses run and patronized exclusively by black residents. Greenwood, Tulsa’s black district, wasn’t exactly the “Black Wall Street” that it has sometimes been called. Richmond, Virginia, and Raleigh, North Carolina, had bigger black-owned financial institutions, like Maggie Walker’s St. Jude Penny Savings Bank; most of Greenwood’s residents, as the historian John Hope Franklin noted, worked as maids and cooks in white households. But the district did have a thriving middle class and a rhythm of its own, before it was destroyed over the course of two days by white mobs. In contrast, a large majority of the people killed in southern Phillips County were sharecroppers. One wonders if this is why the Elaine massacre remains much less widely known—and why its memory remains a point of contention, over a hundred years later.

1.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, America’s westward expansion had run into the sea. Speculators now turned to patches of land that had previously been deemed unsuitable for farming. Forests were cleared; swamplands drained; rivers taken to places they had never gone. One such spot was the southern part of Phillips County, an area of hardwood forest forming a V on the map. From the west descends the White River, from the east the Mississippi. The rivers constantly flooded, turning the forest into a swamp, but the White brought lime to the rich silt deposited by the Mississippi, making the soil exceptionally fertile. This geological fortuity created, as a planter patriarch boasts in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, “the richest land this side of the valley Nile.”

The land around Elaine was bought in the 1890s by a white banker from Fort Smith, Arkansas, after he had traveled in a boat through the swamp—full of trees with trunks several feet wide—with a geologist. A levee was built along the Mississippi soon after the purchase, and in 1903 the Missouri Pacific Railroad laid an extension line through the area. Lumbermen from the Northeast and the Midwest headed south. “They brought to the countryside an industrial revolution,” Nan Elizabeth Woodruff writes in her history of the Delta, American Congo.¹ “They cleared the lands of timber, and drained the vast swamplands, paving the way for the emergence of large-scale capitalist agriculture that in the twentieth-century United States was matched only by California.”

When plots of land began to be sold in Elaine in 1911, the region had “a frontier quality about it, like that of western boom towns with their dirt streets and newly built houses and stores,” Woodruff writes. Over thirty carloads of wood traveled daily by train to Chicago. Wide stumps were blasted out of the ground, and once evened the land was ready for cotton plantations. In 1913 Gerard Lambert, a Virginian who had studied law at New York University and owned Lambert Pharmaceuticals, the producer of Listerine, purchased 21,000 acres west of Elaine. He built a private extension of the rail line to his estate, and soon he employed over six hundred black sharecroppers.

Sharecropping was a blanket term that covered a variety of labor relationships. There were black people in Phillips County, as elsewhere in the South, who were renting hundreds of acres and cultivating it with their own hired hands. But mainly it was the continuation of slavery by other means. After the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, planters in the South lured black people who had few other options into working on their land with the false promise of a share of the proceeds from the crop. White landlords provided the land, the seeds, the equipment, and accomodations (generally uninsulated cabins); black people provided the labor. Every year at Christmastime, when the crop was sold, landlords informed the sharecroppers that their earnings had been just enough—if that—to cover unexplained “plantation expenses” and the bill at the local store, where black families bought grocery items on an account kept in the name of their landlord. So successful were the plantation owners in perpetuating this pernicious cycle that in 1965 Martin Luther King Jr. was amazed to meet sharecroppers in Alabama who had not seen US currency in their entire lives.

Sharecroppers frequently fled their cabins in the dark of night, looking for a better landlord. Families were always moving, perpetually chasing a decent life. In most towns, given the endless need for labor, black residents outnumbered white ones by an order of magnitude. The fear of an insurrection was ever-present in the white imagination, serving as the pretext for recurrent lynchings.

It was in Elaine that a young Richard Wright had what in his memoir Black Boy he called “my first baptism of racial emotion.” Wright came to Elaine at the age of eight in 1916 with his mother to live with her sister, Maggie. Maggie’s husband, Silas Hoskins, whom Wright called Uncle Hoskins, ran a popular black saloon in Elaine. One day Wright woke up to find out that Uncle Hoskins had not returned home—then, hours later, that he had been shot dead by a white man:

Fear drowned out grief and that night we packed clothes and dishes and loaded them into a farmer’s wagon. Before dawn we were rolling away, fleeing for our lives. I learned afterwards that Uncle Hoskins had been killed by whites who had long coveted his flourishing liquor business…. There was no funeral. There was no music. There was no period of mourning. There were no flowers. There were only silence, quiet weeping, whispers, and fear…. Uncle Hoskins had simply been plucked from our midst and we, figuratively, had fallen on our faces to avoid looking into that white-hot face of terror that we knew loomed somewhere above us. This was as close as white terror had ever come to me and my mind reeled. Why had we not fought back, I asked my mother, and the fear that was in her made her slap me into silence.

*

By the end of World War I, the soaring price of cotton had opened a crack in this peonage system. In 1914 cotton had cost seven cents a pound; in 1918 it was over thirty. The sharecroppers may not have been educated, but they knew how many bales their land had produced, and they knew the going price of a bale. They could count on their hands what they should have made.

They knew, too, that they were not making it. Creative bookkeeping and the inflated commissary bills were not nearly enough to cover what was owed them. Most landlords in the Delta refused to settle the expenses for 1918. The price of cotton rose even higher in 1919, and the sharecroppers, who had never imagined such rates possible, did not want to be swindled like they had been the year before. As one would later tell Ida B. Wells, they believed that if they were paid fairly, they could “get out from under the white landlord’s thumb.”

Robert Lee Hill, a self-styled follower of Booker T. Washington, arrived in Elaine that spring. In 1918 Hill had set up the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America with three other friends and incorporated it with the help of white lawyers. Now he was roaming the Delta on a horse, encouraging sharecroppers to unionize. In September 1919 he formed a chapter in Hoop Spur, a small town a few miles from Elaine, and on September 25 he called an open meeting in Elaine itself. Many sharecroppers showed up. Hill told them to ask their landlords for itemized expenses for 1918 and not to pick the cotton until they got them.

Rumors had been reaching whites in Helena, the county seat twenty miles to the northeast. Someone eavesdropped on the meeting and heard something about getting “rid of the boss man.” This soon ballooned into a story about black sharecroppers planning to kill white landlords. There had already been brutal labor clashes, resulting in white-on-black violence, in dozens of American cities that year. Black homes on the south side of Chicago burned for weeks as police stood idly by. Uniformed federal troops ran riot against the black community for four days in Washington, D.C. The Red Summer, as it would later be called by James Weldon Johnson, swept across South Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and Nebraska.

Many of the black sharecroppers had just returned from World War I. Each segregated unit of black soldiers went to Europe, as a columnist in the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, noted, to “fight for a freedom which it does not itself possess.” They came back with a new sense of themselves. It was these veterans who took the radical step of forming a black sharecroppers’ union in the Delta.

*

Hill had already taken some Arkansas sharecroppers to a white lawyer to help them sue their landlords. He promised the same help to the Hoop Spur union, which held a meeting on September 30 at a Baptist church next to a cotton field. It was filled with men, women, and children. Sharecroppers lined up and placed the coins of their initiation fees on a wooden table, where Ed Ware, the secretary, noted their names in a register. “He had difficulty gripping the pencil,” Robert Whitaker writes in On the Laps of Gods (2008), a deeply researched and evocative account of the massacre; years of picking cotton had left him with arthritis.² He was making, essentially, a list of people who were about to take their white landlords to court. The group was expecting trouble; armed guards kept watch outside the door, smoking.

On the unpaved Route 44 that passed by the church, a Ford Model T was driving south from Helena. In it were two white railroad policemen, who were on their way to arrest a white bootlegger, and a black prisoner who was serving a sentence for murder. For some reason, a few yards before reaching the church, they pulled over and cut the lights. For minutes the car sat in darkness. Slowly the guards outside the church walked toward it. An exchange of words was followed by gunshots—it’s not clear who fired first. Then a hail of bullets came through the church’s windows and a commotion erupted inside. Outside, one of the white policemen was killed. Another car arrived, with more white men who started shooting. “I don’t know how many shots were fired,” one of the guards later recalled, according to Whitaker. It sounded, he said, “like popcorn popping.”

The prisoner ran to a nearby train station and called the sheriff. Early in the morning, a posse of over a hundred white men gathered in front of the courthouse in Helena. Most had come from the local post of the American Legion. The sheriff handed them shotguns and ammunition, then they drove down Route 44. As the day wore on, this posse was joined by bands of other white men who had flooded into Phillips County after getting news of the shootout. A particularly bloodthirsty contingent came across the river from western Mississippi with guns and axes.

The killings started before noon, at Govan Slough, a narrow swamp of bush and trees, where the mob shot black men, women, and children who had run away from their cabins. Firing from both sides of the Slough, they likely killed one of their own, which increased their rage. For hours they hunted any black person who could be spotted in patches of corn and fields of cotton. “Dead bodies were lying in the road,” the Memphis Press reported. “Enraged citizens fired at the bodies of the dead negros as they rode out of Helena toward Elaine.” By the evening dozens were dead. The church was burned to the ground.

One of the fleeing sharecroppers was Frank Moore. He was known to be a leader of the union, and the mobs were looking for him. During the war he had been stationed at Camp Pike, in Little Rock, Arkansas. Now, as night fell over the Delta, he found himself with his family in a marsh of dense rivercane, over ten feet tall, where hundreds of black sharecroppers had come to hide from the white mob.

Whites cordoned off the town against a supposed insurrection from the woods. “Every white growing up in the Delta harbored fears about the brutish Negro, and on this night, the darkness was filled with such ghosts,” Whitaker writes. “At dawn,” a front-page report in The Arkansas Gazette told its readers on October 2, “the posses are expected to begin a hunt for the disaffected negros…who are said to be waiting for them in the canebrakes.”

At 6:00 AM the Mississippi men dragged an old woman named Lula Black out of her cabin. When asked if she belonged to the union, Black replied that she did. “Why?” they asked her. “It will better the condition of the colored people,” she responded. They knocked her down and hit her repeatedly on the head with pistol butts. At the next cabin, they dragged another old woman outside. When she started screaming, they tied her clothes over her head and shot her in the throat.

*

Governor Charles Hillman Brough, a man who believed Robert E. Lee to be “the only person in human history without a perceptible flaw,” had received the first call from Helena at half past noon the previous day. Within minutes he wired the US Secretary of War: “Four whites said to be killed; negros said to be massing for attacks. Request authorization…to send such US troops as may be necessary and called for by me.” Approval came quickly. “Shortly after midnight,” Whitaker writes, “583 white officers and troops from Camp Pike” were on a train to Elaine. Each one, according to a Gazette reporter who accompanied them, “appeared anxious to get into battle with the blacks.”

Colonel Isaac Jenks set up a field headquarters in Elaine’s telephone office and installed a machine gun on a tall building on Main Street. He left some troops to guard the town and headed east with Governor Brough and the rest to join the posse already gathered at the canebreaks. Most of the sharecroppers who had hidden there through the night did not have guns, but some did. A couple shots came from the dense cane. One sergeant was wounded on the side of his chest. To the hundreds of troops standing with their fingers on their triggers, it was as good as an order.

For the next three hours the troops cleared the woods, firing at anything that moved. “There was little resistance,” Whitaker writes. “The soldiers fired and then the Negroes who were hiding fell or jumped to their feet and ran deeper into the woods, and then this was repeated over and over.” One soldier was later heard boasting that they “were shooting them down like rabbits.” By noon more than a hundred sharecroppers and family members had been killed. “We captured several prisoners,” Jenks wrote in his report that day. “All the rest of the colored outlaws had disappeared.”

After lunch, which was provided by the thankful whites of Elaine, Jenks dispatched soldiers to comb other parts of the county. One group went to Lambrook, to the west, where over seven hundred black sharecroppers worked on the land of Gerard Lambert. He was out of town, and a posse had taken over a freight car on the extension line to his estate. Since morning they had been moving up and down the track in the open trolley, shooting at any sharecropper they could spot in the fields. When the troops arrived, they picked up one sharecropper for interrogation. In his autobiography Lambert described what his plantation superintendent told him upon his return:

Troopers brought him to our company store and tied him with stout cord to one of the wooden columns on the other porch. He had been extremely insolent, and the troopers, enraged by the loss of two of their men that day in the woods, had pressed him with questions. He continued his arrogance, and one white man, hoping to make him speak up, poured a can of kerosene over him. As he was clearly unwilling to talk, a man suddenly tossed a lighted match at him. The coloured man went up like a torch and, in a moment of supreme agony, burst his bounds. Before he could get but a few feet he was riddled with bullets. The superintendent told me with some pleasure that they had to use our fire hose to put him out.

Earlier in the day four brothers from a prosperous Helena-based black family that had no connection to the union were caught by a posse while returning from a hunting trip. All four were killed, and their bodies were left on the road. There were also reports of stray killings in West Helena, Post Elle, and Snow Lake. Whitaker mapped out twenty-two sites of killing in south Phillips County, stretching over fifty miles. The list is not comprehensive; it does not, for instance, include unconfirmed reports of sixteen black sharecroppers being lynched and hung from a bridge south of Helena. Decades later the prosecutor in the trial that ensued after the killings recalled being told that at one point a group of sharecroppers rode up to the train ferrying soldiers. Thinking that the troops had come to save them, they fired shots in the air. But the troops, the prosecutor said, “fired on them and they must have killed 100 n[—]rs right there.”

*

On Friday morning, October 3, the newspapers reported that the troops had put an end to an armed insurrection. The shots fired from the canebrakes were reported by the Gazette to have been “an attempt to assassinate Governor Brough,” who “narrowly escaped death.” The reports said that the sharecroppers were war veterans and had battled against the federal troops, though the casualty count could not back this up: the troops had suffered one death and one injury. Scattered killings went on for three more days. In one instance, a soldier spotted four black men walking toward the river. He asked them to stop. They didn’t, and he opened fire with a machine gun. “One negro’s body was almost cut in two,” the Gazette reported. The paper added, Whitaker notes, that two of those killed were veterans, dressed in “their khaki.”

By then more than two hundred sharecroppers had been detained in the basement of a school. Around five hundred more would join them. Colonel Jenks invited the local plantation owners to his interrogations. “In a bare large room, an examination of suspects was going on,” Lambert wrote. “One by one colored men were brought in from an adjoining room, questioned, and either held or released. It was cotton-picking time, and everyone was anxious to get the men back to work.”

National newspapers, including The New York Times, reported that a “Planned Massacre of Whites” had been averted and offered no details about the actions of the white mobs and the troops. Initial estimates downplayed the death toll to about two dozen, though black reporters insisted it was over a hundred. A strange account by an Arkansas white supremacist, included in a book he published about the state in 1925, put the number at 856. The estimate now accepted most widely is over two hundred people. “There are limits to the narrative of these events that can be constructed today,” Whitaker writes. The best we can do, he notes, is “a mapping of the killing fields.”

The union was crushed. “About three hundred black men and a handful of black women were sent to Helena for criminal prosecution,” Whitaker writes. Eventually twelve were convicted for the murder of the five white men who had died. They were sentenced to death by electrocution after six minutes of deliberation by an all-white jury, as a white mob surrounded the courthouse. Three of the twelve were related to Lisa Hicks-Gilbert’s grandmother.

Governor Brough reported to the Department of War that the insurrection in Phillips County had been “nipped in the bud.” On October 7 a committee of white landlords issued fliers addressed “To the Negros of Phillips County.” They insisted that “no innocent negro has been arrested…and all you have to do is to remain at work just as if nothing had happened…STOP TALKING!” October was picking season.

*

Walter White was a field secretary of the NAACP in 1919 when he heard about the killings in Elaine. After wiring the NAACP offices in the South for more information and receiving little, he decided to go to Arkansas himself with a press pass from the Chicago Daily News. “I am a Negro,” he wrote in his autobiography, A Man Called White. “My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.” These features proved useful for his work as an undercover investigator and reporter for The Crisis: he could talk to both black and white witnesses about what they had seen.

On October 13 he met Governor Brough, who blamed the violence on “agitators” from the north like the NAACP. “White people of the county,” White recalled him saying, “had shown remarkable restraint and human kindness in putting down the insurrection.” In Hoop Spur, White spoke to a black woman who told him that the sheriffs had “fired into the church without provocation.” But talking to the sharecroppers wasn’t easy. “Negroes here live in fear and terror,” White wrote, “afraid to even discuss the subject except in whispers and to well-known friends.”

Several whites told him that “more than one hundred Negroes were killed,” and he struck up conversations with plantation owners who admitted to willfully keeping the sharecroppers in debt over the years. “If n[—]rs had gotten all they earned,” one said to White, laughing, “they would own the Delta by now.” After a black resident warned him that the white townspeople had caught onto his identity and were planning to “get” him, White hurriedly jumped on a train out of town. The conductor, he remembered in his memoir, was bemused that he hadn’t stayed for the promised lynching: “You’re leaving, mister, just as the fun is going to start.”

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who had pioneered the sort of investigative journalism that White was doing, went to Helena a few months later. Posing as a member of a prisoner’s family, she went with the wives of the twelve men on death row to meet them. She took a statement from each, transcribed the songs they sang in the jail, counted the acres they had once farmed and the bales each had produced, and named their landlords. One of the condemned was Ed Ware, who gave her an itemized list of his possessions: “121 acres of cotton and corn, two mules, one horse, one Jersey cow and one farm wagon and all farming tools and harness and eight head of hogs, 135 chicken and a Ford car.” She also recorded the names and farming acres of thirty-four of the seventy-five other black men in the jail, who were sentenced to up to twenty-one years. “The white lynchers of Phillips County made a cool million dollars last year” from the crop of the sharecroppers who were jailed, killed, or had fled to save their lives, she estimated in the pamphlet she published, The Arkansas Race Riot.

The NAACP raised funds and hired lawyers to argue the prisoners’ cases. The Arkansas Supreme Court overturned the convictions of six of the twelve men on death row, including Ware, because the Helena jury had forgotten to mention whether they were charged with first- or second-degree murder, making the verdict defective. The convictions of Frank Moore and five others were upheld, but when the case went to the Supreme Court it ruled 6–2 in favor of the defendants. In an opinion delivered by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the Court said that mob-dominated trials had deprived all twelve men of their constitutional rights.  

Until then the NAACP had not considered litigation to be a serious option in its efforts to dismantle the Jim Crow system. For fifty years after its passage, the Fourteenth Amendment, which stated that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” was mostly used by corporations to bat away state regulations.³ The Court’s judgment in the Elaine case, Moore v. Dempsey, was the first time the due process clause was invoked to review claims of racial discrimination in state trials.

As Megan Ming Francis, a law professor at the University of Chicago, writes in her book Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State (2014), the aftermath of the Elaine massacre was “the beginning of the crumbling of the constitutional legal structure upholding Jim Crow.” In Powell v. Alabama (1932) and Norris v. Alabama (1935), the Supreme Court invoked the Fourteenth Amendment as interpreted in Moore to overturn decisions by state courts, first because the defendants had been denied the right to counsel, and then because of racial discrimination in jury selection. In Brown v. Mississippi (1936) the Court extended the reach of the due process clause even further, ruling that confessions extracted under torture could not be used as evidence. In the 1930s Charles Hamilton Houston started a separate legal department under the NAACP’s umbrella; at the end of the decade, Thurgood Marshall founded the Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Elaine, for its part, was gradually depleted, like many small farming towns in the South, first as cotton lost its economic prominence after World War I and then as the rapid mechanization of agriculture after World War II reduced the demand for manual labor. Left to their fates by the landlords and the state alike, black people headed north looking for jobs. A common theme in my conversations with black residents of Phillips County was an account of their families moving, at some point in their lives, to cities like Little Rock, Memphis, Jackson, and Chicago.

Today Elaine has no school, no playground, no shops, no ATM, no grocery store, and no pharmacy. The water tower, covered in rust, sends a brownish liquid to the taps; everyone must buy bottled water to drink and use for cooking. One resident told me he drives across the river into Mississippi to buy water in bulk, along with other supplies: it is cheaper to do that than to shop at the solitary Dollar Store on Main Street. When I last visited several years ago the sewage system was so bad on the black side of town that people couldn’t flush their toilets when it rained. Donald Knapp, a prominent lawyer in the county, told me that half the land in Phillips County today is owned by investment funds, which are holding it to sell when the prices go up.

2.

The legal history of Elaine remains better known than that of the killings: it is an almost unavoidable point of reference for any scholar looking at the Jim Crow judiciary. In recent years, though, the massacre itself has generated some coverage in the national press, due to its hundredth anniversary in 2019—about which Jerome Karabel wrote in these pages—and a recent run of books. Whitaker and Stockley both stumbled upon the story from a legal trail. Guy Lancaster, an Arkansas-based historian, compiled a book of academic essays in 2018.⁴ In Damaged Heritage (2020), J. Chester Johnson somewhat histrionically confronts the past of his maternal grandfather, a Klansman in south Phillips County who likely participated in the massacre.

But most Americans still haven’t heard of it, and many whites in Phillips County still deny it happened or refuse to discuss it. Whitaker told me that while he was doing research for his book he got shouted out of the police station in Elaine for asking questions. In a bar in Helena, he said, a white man pointed at him and said loudly to two others drinking, “You know he’s from Boston and he’s come here to write about your grandfather killing all those n[—]rs.” A month before the centenary, a willow tree that had been planted as a memorial was found hacked to the ground.

In October 2019 about a hundred people, nearly all of them black, gathered in Elaine to commemorate the centenary. No state representatives attended. “All of these people back around here, it was their people that happened to,” Anthony Davis, whose family has lived in Phillips County since the Civil War, told the journalist Olivia Paschal in one of several pieces on the massacre’s legacy she reported for the regional outlet Facing South. “No new people come here.”

Even among those in the town promoting recognition of the massacre, there is little agreement about the basic facts. While there is a major museum in Tulsa commemorating the massacre there, the Elaine Legacy Center is more of a community space, run by volunteers out of a squat, rectangular building—formerly Elaine’s elementary school—on the south side of town. Its codirectors are a black Elaine native in his mid-sixties named James White and an eighty-six-year-old white pastor named Mary Olson, the only person who, when I visited years ago, seemed to have an office at the center, a small, windowless back room painted hospital green. In Olson’s account, the center’s work takes up a range of goals that the descendants of the massacre’s victims “set for themselves and their community,” from memorializing the massacre to assembling food packages for locals in need to hosting a “visual and performing arts program, youth programming…senior gatherings, [and] a wide variety of community activities.”

Olson, who moved from Little Rock to Helena more than two decades ago, has been commemorating the massacre for nearly fifteen years. When she spoke with me in her office in 2022, wearing a black cowboy shirt, black pants, and black loafers, she stressed that she was hardly the only one doing so. “There’s a huge amount written” about the killings, she said. “But none of it matches the oral histories.” For years, she told me, she and others at the center had been talking with descendants of the massacre’s victims and directing researchers, including from the oral history program at the University of Florida, to conduct further interviews: “I’m here to do whatever I can to see that the oral stories of the people here are heard.”

What the oral histories bear out, for Olson, is a counternarrative of the massacre. The refrain throughout Elaine, she told me, is that black people “weren’t poor before 1919.” Before the massacre, she said, “people were farmers, landowners, doing well.” Listen to enough of the oral testimonies and “they begin to emerge into a narrative,” she elaborated later in our conversation. “One of those themes is this used to be all black-owned.”  

That claim is difficult to square with the county’s history. A few historians who have been working for years in the archives have found nothing to indicate substantial black landownership. Story Matkin-Rawn, an associate professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas, to whom Olson had pointed me, told me that she has not found any evidence of large-scale black landownership in Phillips County. Recently, asked over email whether she still believed that all the land in Elaine prior to the massacre was black-owned, Olson herself gave a more equivocal response. “Descendants of the 1919 Massacre indicate there was Black landownership, leadership, and business ownership in and around Elaine prior to the massacre,” she wrote. “How and even when they lost land, businesses, and wealth remains a subject for scholarly inquiry.”

Claims about significant black landownership in the area continue to circulate. In 2023 Olson and White were among the coproducers on a documentary made by two Arkansas-based filmmakers called We Have Just Begun—a mixture of talking heads, drone shots of the Delta, and black-and-white images of the cotton fields with bayoneted shadows moving across them—in which interviewees allege that after the massacre whites altered the records to make it appear as if they had always owned the land. The film also cites the records of a large purchase of land after the massacre by the Solomons, a Jewish family who sailed to the Delta from Europe before the Civil War and prospered in business, buying a number of plantations.

Writing about the film in the Arkansas Times, Guy Lancaster pointed out that those claims are inconsistent. He also noted that although the Solomons did buy a large tract of land right after the massacre in October 1919, that land was previously owned not by black sharecroppers but by a timber baron. Yet it is true that the Solomons were, and continue to be, a prominent family and large landholder in the area, where they owned cotton plantations and profited off the labor of sharecroppers.

Many of the oral histories themselves remain publicly inaccessible, making it all the more difficult to know how to interpret Olson’s account of them. Olson told me that neither she nor the center has yet collected them in a single repository; the “oral narrative” the center was hoping to compile, she said, was still in progress. In 2021 the Elaine Legacy Center secured $150,000 from the National African American Reparations Commission for the purpose of building a museum on Main Street, which would feature, among other things, the oral histories, but by last year the work remained unfinished.

Some black sharecroppers did own small patches of land. In 2021 White began his oral history interview in the Guardian with this line: “My grandfather was born in 1888. He came here to buy land south of Elaine. He owned twenty acres in Ferguson when the white people in 1919 destroyed everything and took the land.” The “best description” of Elaine before the massacre, Olson told me, is Wright’s in Black Boy, where he describes his aunt’s welcoming, fenced-in home and well-stocked table: he “gets used,” as Olson summarized it, “to having an abundance of food, a bungalow with a picket fence around it, and everybody in the neighborhood had nice homes.”

Still, it is far from clear how White’s story of ancestral ownership of a few acres—and a few more like his—substantiate the claim that all the land in Elaine was owned by black people before 1919. Some farmers, like Ed Ware, rented considerable plots, but the difference between renting and owning was enormous. State law mandated that the landlord alone could sell produce in the market, and it was there, more than in “the settle” or the commissary, that sharecroppers were cheated.

When I talked with White in 2022 he reiterated his account of his family’s landownership. But he seemed more concerned about the present of Elaine than its past. We spoke about the lack of facilities, drinkable water, stop signs, or a pharmacy, and his regular trips to Mississippi to buy groceries. He told me that families on the white side of town will not sell their properties to black people when they move out and instead let them wither away and rot. When we drove around Elaine he pointed out the abandoned houses that remain off-limits for him even as ruins. He learned about the massacre as a teenager, and it has come to symbolize how everything around him came to be.

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Lisa Hicks-Gilbert worked with Olson for years at the Elaine Legacy Center, but eventually their disagreements became insurmountable. As Hicks-Gilbert told me in 2022, “[Olson’s] narrative is that the sharecroppers were not sharecroppers, that they were all businessmen, doctors, lawyers. And that is not the case. That is not true. They were not rich, most of them did not own their land. They were poor sharecroppers, who were asking for a fair price for the sale of their crops. I’m trying to reclaim the narrative.”

We were sitting in the building on Main Street that now serves as both Hicks-Gilbert’s office and her home. It had been a white medical clinic in the 1950s, when there were still shops in Elaine. Tall panes of glass framed the town’s vacant central avenue—a row of crumbling brick facades with no signs. The roofs had fallen in; windows were open to the sky. Hicks-Gilbert was dressed in a white T-shirt printed with the name of her organization: Descendants of the Elaine Massacre of 1919.

During the pandemic she gave up her job as a home nurse in Little Rock and moved to Elaine. Now she was living on her savings and working to bring the massacre to public attention and improve the conditions of black residents. In 2022 she was elected mayor. On a whiteboard in her office she had written down a list of suggestions by black kids about what they want in their town. The third read “something to do.”

As Hicks-Gilbert tried to learn more about the massacre from her grandmother over the years, she often found her unwilling to talk, afraid that someone might overhear her breaking the “hush mouth.” But the public attention the massacre received upon its centennial—and the surge of attention to racial justice in the summer of 2020—created more space to discuss it. “It was like a wound had been opened,” another descendent told Paschal in the fall of that year. Hicks-Gilbert started compiling the stories of the town’s elderly residents in a book. Working with the Arkansas Peace and Justice Memorial Movement and other regional organizers, she also started urging state and local politicians to acknowledge the massacre, initiate a restorative-justice process, and invest in Elaine’s long-term economic development.

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More work is in progress. Historians are digging up archival material—census records, death certificates, tax returns, military files, personnel files of the officials involved, newspaper reports, and so on—to establish the death count and the actions of the mobs and the federal troops. Among the most devoted researchers is Brian Mitchell, formerly a history professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Building on existing research, with the help of his colleagues and students he has found death records in the county register, internment records of people arrested after the massacre, files from the Department of Corrections, and the handwritten minutebook of the American Legion Post 41, which sent the posse to Helena on the first morning of the massacre. All of Mitchell’s research has led him to conclude that the victims were overwhelmingly poor sharecroppers.

Mitchell also found a scrapbook in Governor Brough’s personal files. From October 1919 to January 1920, Brough had carefully pasted in newspaper clippings that reported on how he had put down a “Negro insurrection.” Here you find the eight-column headlines about him escaping death in the supposed riot. Arkansas Democrat: “Gov. Brough Fired Upon by Negros at Elaine”; Fort Smith Times Record: “TRY TO KILL GOVERNOR.” It goes on for dozens of pages; Brough seems to have found reports of his bravery published in almost every newspaper in Arkansas. There are even clippings from the days when the massacre was still ongoing. Looking at the pages, I thought back to James Baldwin’s 1965 essay “The White Man’s Guilt,” in which he wrote that white people “are dimly, or vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, but they do not know how to release themselves from it, and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence.”

Mitchell encounters this incoherence often. White people sometimes reach out to him when they find, while clearing the attic or shifting a wall, an artifact of their heritage—a picture or a diary. Mitchell pleads with them to donate the material for archival purposes. They often say they don’t want their names attached to it, and he tells them they can donate anonymously. Sometimes they do, but most can’t bring themselves to. Mitchell offers them money; still they refuse.

“I remember with this one particular picture,” Mitchell told me. “There’s a black man lying on the ground. And he’s been decapitated. His head is lying next to his body.” Standing over him are men “wearing white robes with zippers.” After the initial exchange, the woman who had found this photograph backtracked. She told Mitchell that it was a mistake. “It is actually from Saudi Arabia,” Mitchell remembered her telling him over the phone. “She’s like, ‘Well, I talked to the people in the family who owned the house before us, and they said that they had a great uncle who spent a lot of time in the Middle East.’” But the men in the picture, he said, “have on loafers, not sandals! Loafers!”

Mitchell has no personal connection to the Elaine massacre. He finished his Ph.D. at the University of New Orleans, but Hurricane Katrina displaced him to Little Rock, and he became an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas. “If you’re going to be [somewhere] for an extended period of time,” he told me, “you have to learn something about the place.” After moving to Arkansas, he started reading books about the state’s history, and before long he found Stockley’s. “I had a great history professor,” he told me. “He used to say that when you read a book, you should walk away with a list of questions.” Mitchell made one about the Elaine massacre: “Can I find the primary sources, like cemetary records and death certificates?” “Where were the dead buried?” “Who took the known photos?”

As the centennial approached, he went back to that list of questions. Following the trail of the sharecroppers who fled Phillips County after the massacre, Mitchell has taken several trips, using his own money, to peruse state and national archives in St. Louis, police documents and cemetery records in Topeka, biographical records at the New Orleans Historical Association, and the National Archives in Washington, D.C. He has found the graves of six of the twelve men who were sentenced to death by the white jury. With public donations, he put up plaques at these sites.

In 2022 Mitchell resigned from his professorship and filed a lawsuit against the university, alleging discrimination on the basis of his race and comparing the administrators to the white landlords of Phillips County, which was dismissed by the federal court. When I asked him if the discrimination had to do with his research, he simply said it was a deeply entrenched structural problem. He now lives in Illinois and works as a research professor at the University of Illinois Springfield, where he is digging into the Springfield massacre of 1908.

*

Olson told me that Mitchell was “tied to the sharecropper story.” But his conclusions hardly lack for evidence. His digital database is possibly the most extensive record of documents related to the massacre. It includes not just his own discoveries but almost all the records that informed the previous literature: testimonies, court records, FBI reports, death certificates, military files, newspaper clippings, telegrams.

Why, then, does the idea persist that the massacre’s victims were killed for their land? The descendants of sharecroppers who were murdered while attempting to organize are, after all, no less deserving of reparations than those of dispossessed landowners, and recognizing their economic position matters for how we understand the massacre’s implications. The union the town’s sharecroppers were working to organize posed a challenge, as Karabel notes, not just to white power but to “the economic domination of the planter class.” The killings, he continued, took place both against the background of the Red Summer and “amid the combustible atmosphere of the Red Scare—the post-World War I panic provoked by the Bolshevik Revolution, anarchist bombings, [and] a huge wave of labor unrest including a general strike in Seattle.” They belong, in this sense, both to the history of the country’s racist violence and to its history of labor suppression.

Perhaps the attachment to a Tulsa-like narrative of prosperous black families suddenly pauperized by white mobs expresses a certain desire for narrative clarity, for a way to ascribe Elaine’s present misery—empty streets, fallen roofs—to a single terrible event in the past. But nearby towns untouched by race massacres look much the same—decaying, abandoned, ghostly. The landscape of the Delta has been shaped by a century of plantation slavery, followed by decades of Jim Crow, and then by decades more of neglect. The events of October 1919 don’t on their own explain the state of the Delta today. They do, however, represent a pivotal episode of American history, consigned inexplicably to the margins. Its memory still haunts this area, still animates the lives of the people who live here.

In 2019 the Solomons inaugurated a memorial for the victims of the massacre in front of the courthouse in Helena. A smooth arch of dark concrete frames a plinth etched with a dedication “to those known and unknown who lost their lives in the Elaine massacre.” On the floor is a 1919 map of Phillips County.

The letters are smudged with a white mouldy growth. The plinth is cracking, something that happens with concrete, the architect told me later. A small plaque notes the names of the people who helped conceive and build the memorial, which is, it reads at the top, “inspired by the example of David Solomon.”

Over dinner at the town’s country club one evening several years ago, David’s son Rayman, the dean emeritus of Rutgers Law School, defended that choice to me: his father, he pointed out, was only three years old in 1919 and could have done nothing to stop the massacre; only someone with his father’s means, moreover, could have gotten such a memorial built in Helena. He stressed that his family cares about this history and wants to preserve it. But it was jarring all the same to see a memorial to the massacre of black sharecroppers dedicated to a white landlord.

No other restaurant was open that night in the county capital, but the club was almost full. It sits on a high mound of loess called Walden Ridge. The Solomon house, a grand bungalow that at the time was going empty for long periods, is on the same hill. Since flooding was frequent, rich whites built their houses on these mounds, accumulated over centuries by windswept sediment. Most black people still live on the outskirts, on lower ground. The only black person I saw in the club was an old man behind the bar.