102 years ago this month, white mobs organized by white elites and planters in Phillips County, Arkansas swarmed into Elaine and other rural Black sharecropping communities in the Arkansas Delta. An organizing attempt by Black sharecroppers and a potential lawsuit to secure fair prices for cotton had so threatened the power of white planters in Phillips County that, warning of "Negro insurrection," they called for immense violence against Black sharecroppers in the area, and indeed against any Black citizen the armed white mobs encountered.
In approximately two days of vigilante and state-sponsored violence, hundreds of Black people were killed, many likely buried in mass graves or their bodies thrown into the Mississippi River. Five white men died. More than a hundred Black men were jailed in the Phillips County Jail, not released until a white person vouched for them. The massacre led to an increase in migration of Black people away from the Arkansas Delta, and cost Black sharecroppers and their families hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in lost cotton profits.
I first encountered the Elaine Massacre in college (notably not in any of the history classes I took as a student at private or public schools in Arkansas). I wrote my undergraduate history thesis on the role white newspapers played in stirring up baseless fears of Black insurrection, in egging on and justifying the massacre. Accounts in local white newspapers were reprinted by national papers, including the New York Times, without attempts to verify the truth of what had actually happened. Black journalists like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Walter White, by contrast, risked their lives to travel to Phillips County and report on the scene as they encountered it. Walter White narrowly escaped being lynched on his trip.
Over the last three years, I've tried to take the lessons I learned from reading all those century-old newspaper accounts with me as I've had the privilege to report on the community's ongoing work to reckon with the history of the massacre and move towards restorative justice and healing. This year, I attended and wrote about on the first annual Elaine Unity Fest, hosted by the Descendants of the Elaine Massacre of 1919, which was co-founded by Lisa Hicks Gilbert. You can read that story here.
Every time I report on Elaine, I'm struck again by how much interest there is in the history of what happened there compared to how little people are interested in solving the problems the city and county face today. It's reflected in which stories get the most traffic and are shared the most on social media; this brief account of the massacre from the Southern Exposure archives has received more attention, for example, than many of the stories we've published on fights for restorative justice in Elaine.