Robert Whitaker’s On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919
and the Struggle for Justice that Remade a Nation, details the events
surrounding the Elaine, Arkansas race riots of late September and early
October 1919. Although a more appropriate term might be Elaine race massacre,
considering the number of black people who lost their lives at the hands of
whites. In the summer of
1919 the nation was consumed with a “Red” scare, fearing the rise of Communism
in the world, and more specifically seeing this as an influence on blacks who
were enslaved in the sharecropping system, and laboring under a white supremacist
philosophy that was manifesting itself in Jim Crow segregation. Injustice was “business
as usual” in the South, with black sharecroppers consistently cheated out of
their fair share of cotton revenues.
Against this
backdrop, a gathering had been convened on the evening of September 30, 1919 at
the Hoop Spur Baptist Church, near Elaine, Arkansas.[1] They
gathered with the intent of unionizing to protest the treatment they received
at the hands of white landowners. With the atmosphere of violence surrounding
the community, as a precautionary move, armed guards were stationed at the
church. Their fears were not misplaced, a little after 11 pm, a Model T Ford
pulled close to the church and two white men, Charles Pratt and W.A. Adkins,
along with a black prison trustee, Kid Collins got out of the car and
approached the church armed with guns.[2] Gunfire erupted, and when the smoke had
cleared, W.A. Adkins was dead and the Baptist church was riddled with bullets,
sending the occupants fleeing into the darkness.
It is not hyperbolic to refer to the
response by white posses and soldiers to this “uprising” as overkill. The white
population feared that this was a black insurrection, and that fear resulted in
countless numbers of white men descending on Elaine from nearby counties and
the state of Mississippi, as well as soldiers from nearby Camp Pike who were
ordered to put down the “uprising”. The estimates of blacks killed is debated,
with some estimates as high as 856, but “What so many remembered, however, was
simply the sight of corpses strewn about everywhere.”[3]
The white
propaganda that emerged from the killings was quick and supported by media
reports at the time. Although they were conflicting, all supported the
narrative of a black uprising that had been put down by white men with guns.
“The uprising, concluded the Arkansas
Democrat, had been “nipped in the bud by prompt and vigorous action, which
does credit to Phillips County, both for its efficiency and its notable self
restraint. In spite of some very aggravating circumstances, absolutely no
violence has been done to law-abiding Negroes or to Negroes who showed a
willingness to surrender their arms without bloodshed.”[4]
The events in
Elaine served as a bellwether perhaps in the direction of race relations in the
United States, at least as events would follow in the courts. The NAACP
dispatched Walter White to investigate these events in a region deemed so
dangerous it was referred to as the “American Congo”.[5]
White served as a secretary for the NAACP and “…returned to the scene of
numerous lynchings in 1918, his vivid reports triggering a surge in the NAACP’s
membership rolls…”[6]
White would go on to write concerning the Elaine events, “The riot in Arkansas
was about “debt-slavery” and the “systematic robbery of tenant farmers and
sharecroppers.” His was an account of the exploitation of blacks, and provided
a powerful counter narrative to the white story of a Negro uprising.”[7]
Eventually twelve
men were sentenced to the electric chair for their part in leading the Elaine
“riot”. There experience in the courtroom had been anything but fair, with
members of the posse that hunted them down serving on the juries. The twelve
Negroes fate was sealed it seemed, but then a black lawyer by the name of
Scipio Africanus Jones stepped up to defend them. Through an
extended series of appeals and legal maneuverings, Jones eventually won the
release of the twelve. As one publication wrote of the victory, “Mr. Jones went
down to Helena and took charge of that case when it was a tangled mess after
the defendants had been beaten into making damaging statements…All hail Judge
Jones! Praise him for his knowledge of the law, his nerve, his patience and his
sagacity.”[8]
The legacy of the
events of Elaine, Arkansas in the summer of 1919, serve as a reminder that the
ideas and philosophies of white supremacist and greed are apt to contaminate
any generation. Although it is hard for moderns to imagine injustice on the
scale of Elaine and Hoop Spur, it is evident that injustices due to race are
still perpetrated today. The streets of Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore,
Maryland tell those stories. Yet, in all of these instances there are
individual stories of heroism that serve as beacon of light in the darkness, acts
of kindness and defiance, which serve to contrast the criminal landscape
against which they are cast. For instance,
Frank Moore, a sharecropper and World War I veteran, who was convicted of being
a leader of the Elaine “uprising”, endured the torture and humiliation of his
white captors, never once offering false testimony. He refused to give up the
one thing his accusers and captors could not take from him, his personal
integrity. Whitaker writes, “Frank Moore was whipped at least three times to
try to compel him to give evidence against himself and the other petitioners,
which he never did do. He stated that he would rather die in this manner than
to tell something on himself or others that was not true.”[9]
The tragedies of
Elaine, Arkansas in the twentieth century, and the developing tragedies of
Ferguson and Baltimore in the twenty first century serve as a reminder that
injustice continues to plague the United States. Part of the answer, perhaps,
is the individual acts of courage and kindness, as was exemplified by Frank
Moore and others. The depths of unjust darkness can never extinguish the light
of a single individual, no matter how alone they might be. May these lights
continue to shine.
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