The Elaine Massacre of Nineteen Nineteen

In late September of nineteen nineteen, sharecroppers in Phillips County in the Arkansas Delta were doing something dangerous: they were organizing. The Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America was holding meetings in a church near the town of Elaine, asking that its members be allowed to hire their own lawyers to negotiate cotton prices with landlords. On the night of September thirtieth, a group of white men, some accounts say they were law officers, others say they were not, approached the church where a meeting was in progress.

Shots were fired. One white man was killed. What happened next was not a riot.

It was a massacre. Over the following days, hundreds of white men, local posses and, ultimately, United States Army troops, swept through the Black farming communities of the Elaine area. At least one hundred Black men, women, and children were killed.

Some historians place the number much higher; the exact toll has never been established and remains disputed. Five white men were also killed. The underlying cause was not the shots fired at the church.

It was the union. Landlords who profited from the sharecropping system understood that organized Black farmers were an existential threat to that system. Twelve Black men were sentenced to death.

About sixty-five more received long prison sentences. None of the white men who participated in the killings was prosecuted. The case eventually reached the United States Supreme Court in Moore v.

Dempsey in nineteen twenty-three. The Court ruled that the trials had been mob-dominated and constitutionally defective, an important early precedent for federal oversight of state criminal criminal proceedings. The twelve men were eventually released.

The union was destroyed.