Life as a black southern sharecropper after the turn of the 20th century was rough. The region was straightjacketed with rigid racial codes and attitudes — enforced by Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and racial segregation.
Sharecroppers faced increasing debt, and complained of landlords stealing crops and possessions, and even tossing them off property. Landowners refused to pay fair market prices, effectively providing starvation wages and profiting nicely themselves.
New York Public Library
Cotton harvest piled on the porch of a sharecropper's home, Maria plantation, Arkansas. October 1935.
In response, black sharecroppers in Arkansas attempted to form a union. The reaction from whites was incendiary. September 30 marks the 98th anniversary of the Elaine, Arkansas massacre, in which 237 black Americans were killed. It’s been described as possibly the bloodiest racial conflict in the history of the United States.
The summer and autumn of 1919, in fact, has been termed “Red Summer,” after racist-fueled violence in cities across the country ended in hundreds of deaths, mostly of black people killed by whites. The violence grew out of cross currents of labor unrest and racism, fed by post-World War I competition for housing and jobs, and stoked fears of bolshevism and socialist and communist “influence” on the black civil rights movement. (Not that the summer of 1919 was alone in extreme violence toward black people. Oklahoma’s Tulsa race “riot” in 1921, an attack on a thriving neighborhood known as Black Wall Street, killed hundreds of black people and devastated the livelihoods and homes of thousands.)
Robert Hill, who founded the Arkansas sharecroppers union, Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America, had a simple idea: “The union wants to know why it is that the laborers cannot control their just earnings, which they work for.”
Each member of the union was tasked with recruiting an additional twenty-five members, to create “lodges” where members could meet, share stories, and strategize. In Phillips County, Arkansas, where Hill was located, seven lodges formed rather quickly in 1919, threatening the white landowner aristocracy.
As was the case in many coal mining and steel forging towns across the country during this time, a few landowners in Elaine controlled most of the local economy—grocers, government, police, courts, and more. The town’s people were 90 percent African American, all of them sharecroppers and laborers.
On the evening of September 30, 1919, one hundred members of the union attended a meeting just a few miles from Elaine. Knowing that they were challenging power, some of the union members came armed and acted as security around the building. This was prescient; a car with three white people, including the local sheriff’s deputy and a member of the security force for the Missouri-Pacific Railroad pulled up outside.
A shootout began; the deputy was wounded and the rail security guard, killed. While it’s never been determined who fired the first shot, it created the rationale for the attacks that began the next morning, and justification for the mass murder that followed.
Fake news of the day. October 3, 1919 issue of "The Gazette", Arkansas
The local sheriff sent a posse to investigate, which amassed into a mob of nearly 1,000 white people from the areas surrounding Elaine, all looking to quell the “insurrection.” The local citizen mob began a slaughter of the black residents of Elaine, using guns, lynchings, and even burning people alive.
A panicked War Department sent 500 U.S. troops to the scene, spurred by a ginned-up fear of unions members as “Bolsheviks,” spreading communism. President Woodrow Wilson had even declared in March of 1919 that, “the American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America.” They arrived on the morning of October 2nd, at which point the white mob began to dissolve as people returned to their homes.
But when the troops arrived, they continued murdering local African Americans, torturing some to get “information.” In the end, 237 African Americans and 5 white people had died. It’s likely that some of the wounded would have survived if given medical treatment, but this was prevented by the attackers, as well as by a 1915 Arkansas law barring white nurses from treating black men.
Twelve men were sentenced to die in the immediate aftermath of the massacre. The NAACP represented the men on appeal and successfully got their death sentences overturned, six by the Arkansas Supreme Court in 1921 and the others by the United States Supreme Court in 1925.
The troops confined 285 black men in stockades. Twelve were accused of murder and sentenced to the electric chair (and eventually, after years of appeals, released). Sixty-five pled guilty to crimes they’d never committed and served jail sentences of up to twenty-one years. Some were never charged and ultimately released.
The racial violence of the Red Summer of 1919 was distinguished by the fact that African Americans across the country, many of them returning World War I veterans, began to defend themselves against attacks, and in a coordinated manner. In Washington, D.C. earlier that year black WWI veterans helped repel random but frequent racist attacks by white residents, spurred by false rumors of the rape of a white woman. When local police refused to intervene, some of the African American residents retrieved their weapons and brandished them as they came to the defense of their brothers and sisters, the standoff ending with the summoning of the National Guard.
In late July, a “race riot” in Chicago began with a young African American man killed by a white stone-thrower who thought the man had gotten too close to a “whites only” swimming section on Lake Michigan. Ensuing fighting lasted three days before federal troops arrived, with armed black civilians and veterans groups confronting white mobs in shootouts and street fights.
Some 350,000 black men served overseas in World War I. Writing early in 1919, W.E.B. Dubois observed: "We return from the slavery of uniform which the world's madness demanded us to don to the freedom of civil garb. We stand again to look America squarely in the face and call a spade a spade. We sing: This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land ...We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting.”
W.E.B. Dubois, 1919.
The failure of the justice system to protect people of color and to indict white members of the armed forces that commit murder on the job, as well as the systematic continuation of violence against black people was accepted by those in power 100 years ago.
But these failures still exist today. And when Colin Kaepernick and others attempt to shed light on them, and in nonviolent ways, parts of our society aggressively demand “allegiance” from black American people, and threaten violence to get it. And when torch-bearing fascists march in Charlottesville, Virginia, it’s a threat of intimidation and violence toward anyone perceived to “disrespect” white culture.
Simply because they dare to demand equal justice and a fair share.
Brandon Weber has a new book coming out in March: Class War, USA: Dispatches From Workers’ Struggles in American History, available at Powell's and Amazon.