The Elaine Massacre: The Bloodiest Race Riot in American History

The early twentieth century was an explosive time for the United States as ethnic conflicts rose exponentially. The abandonment of Reconstruction principles in the 1880s, as well as the rise of Jim Crow laws in the 1890s, were two causes for the ethnic violence of the era. These hostilities came to a head during what scholars refer to as “The Red Summer” of 1919. From June to December of that year, at least twenty race riots erupted throughout the United States.[1] One of the bloodiest confrontations occurred on September 30-October 4 near Elaine, Arkansas, a farming community on the Mississippi River that is roughly 90 miles southwest of Memphis.

            In 1919, almost four times as many African Americans lived in the region as Anglos, and many of them worked as “sharecroppers and tenants on numerous plantations.”[2] The primary responsibility of these African Americans was to grow cotton. After the harvest, they handed their crop over to Anglo landlords, who were responsible for selling the cotton. The landlords then gave a percentage of the profits to the African American sharecroppers, who had no say regarding the percentage they received for their labors. Often they waited many months before the landlords finally turned over to them a mere fraction of the fruit of their labors.[3]

            The trigger that set off the Elaine Massacre remains a mystery. Many Anglos in the area insisted that African Americans had banded together to murder twenty-one Anglo farmers on October 6 because they wanted to seize the cotton industry for themselves.[4] This story was nothing more than a fabrication to cover what actually happened because the truth was horrendous. In reality,

The terrible crime these [African American] men had committed was to organize their members into a union for the purpose of getting the market price for their cotton, to buy land of their own and to employ a lawyer to get settlements of their accounts with their white landlords. These Negroes believed their chance had come to make some money for themselves and get out from under the white landlord’s thumb.[5]

Anglos insisted the plot to kill the landlords came to light when an Anglo deputy from nearby Helena, who was repairing a flat tire on his vehicle, was killed by a group of African American farmers. The farmers were meeting in a nearby church building to strategize how to secure a better price for their cotton.[6] Debate still roars over whether the deputy and his partner or the African Americans shot first,[7] but the consequence of the skirmish was calamitous and affected dozens of African American families who had nothing to do with the battle.

Ultimately, the hostilities escalated to the point that federal troops, armed with machine guns, marched into the region at the behest of the Arkansas Governor. The result of the conflict was the death of five Anglos, as well as an indeterminable number of African Americans. Officially, the number stood at twenty-five deaths,[8] but the actual quantity was well over one hundred.[9] One account placed the death toll at 856.[10] In the end, officials arrested over one hundred African Americans and placed twelve of them on trial, and an all-White jury sentenced them to death.[11] In early 1923, the United States Supreme Court opined that these trials were faulty, and by November of that year, all of the men had been freed.[12] Sadly, no Anglos who participated in the massacre were brought to justice for their murderous attack. Of the hundreds who were killed, many of the bodies never were recovered, and remain hidden to this day.

The Elaine massacre marks the “bloodiest clash of a tumultuous year of racial violence and labor strife in the United States.”[13] Some scholars consider it “possibly the bloodiest racial conflict in the history of the United States.”[14] Although the episode occurred roughly a century ago, the happenings near Elaine capture well the zeitgeist of the era. It also helped to set the tone for the climate in which the Civil Rights developed a generation later in the 1950s, a period in which the majority of conservatives and liberal Anglos alike criticized the efforts of Civil Rights leaders.[15]

What can we learn from the Elaine Massacre? First, it is important to study history. Most readers of this blog likely never have heard of this tragedy from America’s past. The old adage is that people who do not know history are doomed to repeat it, and there are innumerable tragedies from our past that we must never repeat.

Second, in an era when ethnic relations are eroding, we must do everything in our power to halt this attrition. This requires having honest conversations with one another even when they are painful, listening to one in a respectful way, calling out ethnic problems whenever they raise their heads, and getting out of our ethnic bubbles so that we can do life together. May we learn more perfectly to love our neighbors as ourselves!

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[1] O. A. Rogers Jr., “The Elaine Race Riots,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 19.2 (Summer 1960): 142.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 143-44.

[4] For a defense of this view by two lifelong residents of two lifelong residents of Phillips County, Arkansas, the county in which Elaine is located, see J. W. Butts and Dorothy James, “The Underlying Cause of the Elaine Riot of 1919,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 20.1 (Spring 1961): 95-104.

[5] Ida B. Wells-Barnett, The Arkansas Race Riot (Chicago: Pamphlet, 1920), 7.

[6] Kieran Taylor, “‘We Have Just Begun’: Black Organizing and White Response in the Arkansas Delta, 1919,” Arkansas Historical Quartery 58.3 (Autumn 1999): 265. Jeannie M. Whayne, “Low Villains and Wickedness in High Places: Race and Class in the Elaine Riots,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 58.3 (Autumn 1999): 286.

[7] Grif Stockley and Jeannie M. Whayne, “Federal Troops and the Elaine Massacres: A Colloquy,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 61.3 (Autumn 2002): 273.

[8] Taylor, “‘We Have Just Begun,’” 266.

[9] Walter F. White, “‘Massacring Whites’ in Arkansas,” Nation, December 6, 1919, 715.

[10] L. S. Dunaway, What a Preacher Saw Through a Keyhole (Little Rock, Parke-Harper, 1925), 108-9.

[11] Tom Dillard, “Scipio A. Jones,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 31.3 (Autumn 1972): 206-7.

[12] Ibid., 208-9.

[13] Taylor, “‘We Have Just Begun,’” 266.

[14] “Elaine Massacre,” Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture, http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=1102 (accessed September 19, 2017).

[15] Edward Gilbreath, Reconciliation Blues: A Black Evangelical’s Inside View of White Christianity (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2006), 105. One evidence of this reality was King’s frustration that the “white moderate” often hindered his efforts more than members of the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klan. See “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, http://okra.stanford.edu/transcription/document_images/ undecided/630416-019.pdf (November 24, 2017).