Elaine Massacre, September 1919

On the night of September thirtieth, nineteen nineteen, Black sharecroppers gathered inside a church near the small town of Elaine, in Phillips County, Arkansas. They were meeting with representatives of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America, an organization founded by Robert L. Hill to help Black cotton workers negotiate collectively with white planters for fairer contracts. Before the meeting ended, white men fired into the building. What followed across the next seven days was one of the largest single episodes of organized racial killing in American history.

White mobs, joined eventually by federal troops from Camp Pike, moved through the Black farming communities of the surrounding bottomlands. The precise number of people killed remains a matter of genuine historical dispute. Encyclopedia of Arkansas documentation and scholarly estimates place the toll at somewhere between one hundred and two hundred thirty-seven Black men and women. Some researchers believe the actual number was higher. Five white men were also killed. The planters described it publicly as the suppression of a Black insurrection. The sharecroppers had been trying to negotiate a cotton contract.

Twelve Black men were sentenced to death. Sixty-five others received long prison terms. The trials lasted minutes. Juries deliberated for minutes less. Defense attorneys called no witnesses.

Robert L. Hill had escaped across the state line. He spent years fighting extradition from Kansas. The twelve men on death row became the center of one of the most consequential legal battles of the twentieth century. The NAACP hired attorneys, and in nineteen twenty-three the case of Moore versus Dempsey reached the United States Supreme Court. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the majority, held that trials dominated by mob pressure violated the constitutional guarantee of due process. The ruling became a foundational precedent for modern civil rights law. All twelve men were eventually freed by nineteen twenty-five.

The church at Hoop Spur, Phillips County, is where the meeting was held. No national monument marks what happened here. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas and the Arkansas State Archives hold what the public record does.