In the aftermath of the anti-racist uprisings of 2020 and the Trump presidency, many American newspapers are reckoning with how their coverage has made them complicit in racism and racial violence. Caught up in the unattainable and relatively recent ideal of journalistic objectivity, which did not take root until the 1930s, the traditional news media has struggled to cover the communities it now claims as its audience. While the historical and contemporary failures of mainstream, historically White newspapers have come to light, the path forward is not so clear.
But one historic model for how to do better can be found in Black newspaper coverage from a century ago. Amid a deluge of racist massacres in the aftermath of the First World War and the subsequent influenza pandemic, the massacre in Elaine, Ark., in 1919 was among the worst, with several hundred African Americans killed in two days of violence. While state officials sought to cover up the truth by promulgating lies through the local and national White press, Black reporters — working not just for truth, but for justice — told the more accurate story. They put the massacre in context, offered sustained coverage long past the headline moment and got specific about the systemic ills victims faced.
The Arkansas Delta region was dotted with cotton-producing slave plantations before the Civil War. After the war, many Black residents remained on the land, working as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Though a number of Black politicians held state and local office in the area during Reconstruction, the state disenfranchised its Black citizens by the late 19th century. Most remained tied to the land, trapped in the sharecropping system.
In the fall of 1919, however, Black sharecroppers in Phillips County organized a union. It was one of the earliest attempts to form a sharecroppers union in the Deep South, and its members hoped to leverage high demand for cotton into fair prices for their crops and remuneration for their labor. The county’s White political and economic elite feared the union would upend White economic and political power in the region, especially in the context of the ongoing Red Scare and labor unrest after World War I.
On Sept. 30, a White railroad guard died in a gunfight outside a church where Black unionized sharecroppers were meeting. A White sheriff’s deputy was injured as well. The Phillips County sheriff sent posses of White men to investigate. White mobs soon started traveling from within and outside the county as they heard rumors about a Black insurrection. The mobs indiscriminately shot Black people on the road, pillaged their homes and chased the Black population into hiding.
The mob terror lasted three days. Federal troops called in to quash it instead almost certainly participated in the slaughter. The gangs killed hundreds of Black people — the exact number is unknown because local White newspapers failed to report it. Five White people died in the violence and the White press covered their deaths in detail.
Beyond the killing, police and the military arbitrarily arrested 285 Black people, set up sham trials and convicted more than 50 of crimes ranging from “night riding” to first-degree murder. Twelve Black men, now known as the Elaine Twelve, faced an all-White jury and were given death sentences.
A local White newspaper, the Helena World, called the mobs of men that swarmed into the county “visitors” who had “assisted in preserving order.” It ignored the Black union members (and their White lawyer) who were languishing in the county jail, and did not even mention the union until two days after the massacre ended. Then it claimed that White “outside agitators” had been responsible for the union. Their stories fed into reporting in the New York Times that blamed the massacre on socialist and communist agitators trying to stir up a Black insurrection.
Local newspapers reflected the White supremacy of Arkansas society. White Arkansans were predisposed to believe that the violence in Elaine had been justified.
But Black journalists knew the White press would not cover racist violence fairly, so they investigated what had happened themselves. Rather than repeating official state stories like the White press did (locally and reproduced by the national papers), Black journalists sought firsthand knowledge of the events.
For example, Walter F. White, then an NAACP investigator, went down to the Delta himself. Although he was African American, he could be perceived as a White man, and thus he gained access to officials. He interviewed White local residents and even Arkansas Gov. Charles Brough. But instead of parroting their words, he provided broader context in the reporting he published in the Crisis, the Survey and the Nation.
Focused on the economic exploitation of sharecroppers, White illuminated how local elites responded to unions and to the massacre. He also highlighted how the White press fueled the false narrative that the riot was justified by a purported Black “insurrection.” He wrote that there was no insurrection. Instead, driven by fears of race and class upheaval, the violent White backlash came in response to Black sharecroppers’ attempt to build collective economic power.
The massacre, he wrote, was “an example of the underlying corruption and injustice that will lead to further conflict” if the basic issue — economic exploitation of Black workers — was not addressed. He also covered the Elaine Massacre for a White periodical, the Nation, read by largely White audiences, bringing more sympathetic White attention to the underlying issues and the event.
In December 1919, Black journalist Ida B. Wells visited the imprisoned Elaine Twelve and interviewed the men and their families. Her pamphlet, “The Arkansas Race Riot,” included testimonies from the defendants, a lengthy discussion of sharecropping and a specific accounting of the money Elaine’s sharecroppers had lost while they were incarcerated during the cotton harvest. She blended firsthand testimony with the broader context of the massacre and the racist power structures of the Deep South, specifically the exploitative sharecropping system.
Black newspapers published coverage of the Elaine Twelve for years, from 1919 until they were freed — some in 1923, some in 1925.
Their sustained attention slowly helped shift public opinion in favor of the defendants, six of whom were released after an appeal to the Arkansas Supreme Court, and the other six of whom appealed their convictions to the U.S. Supreme Court with the help of the NAACP and Scipio Jones, a Black lawyer in Arkansas. Writing for the majority in a 1923 Supreme Court ruling that said six of the defendants had been denied due process, then-Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that local White newspapers “daily published inflammatory articles” contributing to paranoia and a lynch mob mentality. By the time defendants were released in 1925, even the New York Times was publishing stories about the exploitative system of “peonage” in the Southern states.
Black journalists kept the truth in view and in context, because they could look beyond official stories and the White perspective on what had taken place. They understood Black Arkansans as human beings whose lives and deaths had mattered. They recognized the inhumanity of the sharecropping system itself, as well as how Black people’s moves to organize to gain economic power threatened the foundations of White wealth in the region.
As a result, they helped shift the national attitude toward the sharecropping system and ensured that the Elaine Twelve received a measure of the justice that a racist justice system “swept to the fatal end by an irresistible wave of public passion,” as Holmes wrote in his opinion, had denied them.
The work of Black journalists is a model for how newspapers today can better cover sensational, headline-grabbing incidents of racist violence and racial injustice: putting them in social, political and historical context, giving them sustained attention and questioning the official narrative of events. Mainstream newspapers today might also glean something from the contemporary Black press, which has always taken Black audiences and Black experiences seriously. No racial reckoning in mainstream news organizations can be undertaken without doing the same.