Elaine, Arkansas is in Phillips County, one of the poorest counties in the United States, a flat expanse of deprivation where your Google Maps won’t keep you from getting lost.
Elaine is lost. It looks like a place where nothing good has happened in a very long time.
That's, at least in part, because something terrible happened there. Something a majority of Americans don't know about.
I'm educated as a historian, but I lack the imprimatur of an advanced degree. I will do my best to offer a concise history lesson.
The facts are straightforward. To escape destitution and indentured servitude, black sharecroppers in the Arkansas delta organized under the banner of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. On the 30th of September 1919, a prominent, white attorney named Ulysses Bratton traveled the three hours from Little Rock to meet with the workers to discuss strategy. They met at a small church on the outskirts of Elaine at a place called Hoop Spur. But the unionization of black sharecroppers was not something amenable to the white landowners of Phillips County. Not part of the racist zeitgeist, you see.
In the summer of 1919, at the conclusion of the First World War, America was in the midst of the first Red Scare. The passage of the Sedition Act of 1918 placed new limits on free speech. A few legitimate threats from anarchists were the kindling for a bonfire of anti-communist fervor. Many of these anarchists were immigrants, which fueled Protestant America's fear of anyone and anything foreign. Similar distrust and fear extended to African Americans, despite their having fought in large numbers during World War I. Some returned with the idea that they were entitled to the benefits of citizenship, not a popular idea in much of white America, especially in the Jim Crow south.
As word of the meeting reached landowners and local authorities, an armed delegation was sent to disperse those at the meeting. The white posse fired shots into the church; shots were returned from inside the church, and a white deputy was killed in the altercation, an ambush that backfired.
This set into motion a sequence of events that resulted in the death of hundreds of black Arkansans, few estimates were under two hundred, and some exceeded eight hundred. Soon after the exchange of fire at Hoop Spur, Governor Charles Brough dispatched some five hundred troops from nearby Camp Pike with orders to shoot to kill any immediately non-compliant black male. Compliance interpreted in a rush to judgment, the farmlands surrounding Elaine became killing fields. The pretext was a Caucasian hysteria based on the delusion that not only were the sharecroppers looking to organize, they were organizing to slaughter all the white folks in the county.
Established news sources parroted the local white version of events - that Negroes were organizing to go on a killing spree. If they were so bent on white slaughter, might not the black men in that humble church have been better armed? The 800:5 ratio of black/white deaths surely is an indication of the lack of black militarization.
Despite the astonishing discrepancy between black and white deaths during the Elaine Massacre, Arkansas state authorities rounded up scores of black men, eventually bringing murder charges against what came to be known as the "Elaine Twelve." How these twelve men were selected from hundreds rounded up for the death of five white men is a mystery of white rage. *
Elaine was a distillation of the white fantasy of black rage. The same white derangement syndrome that upheld some fantastic notion of imperiled Southern womanhood at the mercy of big black men bent on sexual assault. The white derangement that resulted in the death of no fewer than 4,000 (likely so many more) black men, lynched because white men, particularly in the South, were demented by racism. Utter lunacy leading to horror. When you dehumanize millions because of the color of their skin, the worst of human behavior is possible.
The story of the Elaine Massacre went underground, buried in East-Central Arkansas, and of little concern to most of America. I wonder, what sort of stories did the white citizens of Phillips County tell themselves? That the slaughter of hundreds of black Arkansans was the result of a riot? This isn’t semantics. A riot and a massacre are not indistinguishable. Were there white folks who knew the truth, even deplored the truth, but remained silent? The fear of reprisal for telling the truth is a hallmark of racial oppression.
A tragic theme emerges in my travels in Mississippi and Arkansas. Where the violence against African Americans was most extreme or profound the remaining communities are permanently damaged. Elaine is a sad-ass place. There are other factors contributing to Elaine's plight. Rural America, in general, is a world lost to capitalism's version of progress. Nonetheless, the unrelenting horror of the Elaine Massacre and its roots in the lies and hatred of racism make Elaine's gloom especially onerous. Or so it feels to me when I walk Elaine's main drag and drive through its impoverished streets. I think to myself, this is a slough of sorrow, this Elaine, Arkansas. And Elaine, Arkansas is very much a piece of America.
In 2019, a century exactly after the Elaine Massacre, Phillips County erected a memorial, simply called the "Elaine Massacre Memorial." It's situated on a public square on the edge of Helena, Arkansas' downtown. Many Elaine residents were angered by the decision to locate the memorial in Helena, some twenty miles away. Others plainly rationalized that it was better in Helena than nowhere. I wonder if the commemorators were motivated by the economics of civil rights tourism. The consensus to honor is mitigated by contrasting agendas. Black citizens may be sincerely motivated by truth and reconciliation; whites seem to represent a mixed bag of the sincere and the opportunistic. No doubt that the heirs of the perpetrators of hideous racist behavior are happy to profit from liberal guilt. It's a business, if you will, that provides evidence of both the noble and the slimy. Elaine, tiny and without other attractions, arguably wouldn't receive the number of visitors Helena might. Granted, there's nowhere in Elaine to accommodate or even feed such visitors.
But if you’ve ever visited Helena you know that the downtown is 90% boarded up. It’s a god damn ghost town. I reckon that any place you put a memorial to the Elaine massacre is going to feature fear and loathing and aridity of the soul. Racism this grotesque has a price. And the civic death that follows you everywhere in Phillips County is evidence of such ravages.
The memorial itself is impressive in scale. Austere, almost brutalist, save its curving, sinuous lines. A piazza of a sort, at its center is a map of Phillips County. But no verbiage accompanies the map and it strikes me as a strangely arbitrary focal point. Vague and outsized. And when language enters the picture, it blows it, totally:
“Those known and unknown.” There’s an oblique way to say that accurate slaughter records of African Americans were not a high priority in Arkansas in 1919. Consider the vaguely drab pronoun “those.” Five fucking white guys. Is Phillips County saying that the race of the hundreds of massacred is somehow secondary, even irrelevant? If this is an attempt at reconciliation by memorialization, it’s an epic fail. The white folk may want the comfort of forgiveness without speaking truth. But the truth is that race matters.
Elaine, Arkansas is ground zero for American destiny in a world built by Jim Crow. It’s one of the most extreme examples of white terror in America. The Greenwood Massacre on Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, three years after 1919, is an urban competitor in this ghastly contest.
Elaine is decidedly rural; Greenwood was a bustling, mercantile section of a larger city. The events that set each massacre in motion were different, but the response was the same. Hundreds of black citizens were annihilated by white Americans. The white racist public had the local police and state militia behind them, prepared to intervene. White rage emerged from an inchoate and magnified sense of fear among whites – that’s what happens when one part of the population has inflicted obscene hardship, terror, and death upon another and is afraid to let go of power because they are damn afraid payback will be a bitch.
To paraphrase Nina Simone, "Arkansas, God Damn."
Elaine, Arkansas. God knows I wish this sad town a better tomorrow. It’s suffered enough.
* One good thing came from the case of the "Elaine Twelve." In what looked to be a certain pig circus, the NAACP shepherded the defendants' case through the Arkansas courts, ultimately reaching the United States Supreme Court. In the case of Moore v. Dempsey, on February 1923, in a judgment of 6-2, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the court, " 'if the case is that the whole proceeding is a mask – that counsel, jury, and judge were swept to the fatal end by an irresistible wave of public passion,' then it was the duty of the Supreme Court to intervene as the guarantor of the petitioners’ constitutional rights where the state of Arkansas had failed." It was a landmark decision with respect to black defendants' rights in criminal cases.
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