Still mourning the losses
As they were 100 years ago, the fields surrounding the highway from Elaine to Helena-West Helena are planted with cotton. It's puffy and ready to harvest, as it would have been when the white elites whose power was threatened by the unionization of black farmers and sharecroppers convened in the county seat of Helena in 1919.
The city now known as Helena-West Helena, whose population has grown over the past century from around 9,000 to about 11,000, has always been the center of power in Phillips County. Wealthy white planters leased land to black sharecroppers who farmed it for cotton, which they then had to sell back to those same planters for prices far under market value, a form of debt peonage. Constantly shortchanged by the white planters, black sharecroppers and tenant farmers formed the Progressive Farmers and Household Union, which had chapters in the Phillips County towns of Ratio and Hoop Spur as well as Elaine. As the price of cotton skyrocketed from 1915 to 1919 and black landownership rates increased by 40 percent, the union determined it was time to demand fair prices and hired a white lawyer to take the case against the planters to court.
Outraged, Phillips County's white elites gathered in the old Opera House on the Helena square and planned to violently break up the union. Two white men drove to a church in Hoop Spur where they knew a union meeting was taking place. Gunfire was exchanged, and at the end of the night one of the white men was dead. Spreading rumors of a "black insurrection," Helena's white businessmen gathered posses of white men from Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee and waged a three-day war not only on the county's black sharecroppers but on any black person who crossed their path.
White residents and participants later recalled posses chasing black people into the canebrake and shooting indiscriminately at them. The African Americans caught in the violence told their children and grandchildren stories of being placed under house arrest in their own homes, witnessing neighbors gunned down, and being forced by white men to dig mass graves for the victims.