Two years before the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921, one of the bloodiest racial slaughters in American history occurred in Phillips County, Arkansas. This week marks the 107th anniversary of the tragedy, when hundreds of Black sharecroppers gathered to organize for fair cotton prices. For that simple demand, they were met with a state-sanctioned manhunt that history class conveniently forgot to mention.
Following World War I, Black sharecroppers in the Arkansas Delta were trapped in extreme economic exploitation by white landowners who controlled the economy and sold cotton on their own schedule.
To fight back, Robert L. Hill, a Black farmer from Winchester, Arkansas, founded the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America to secure fair prices for disenfranchised Black farmers’ cotton crops, and break free from predatory contracts, the Smithsonian reported.
On the evening of September 30, 1919, approximately 100 Black sharecroppers—with armed guards posted outside to prevent disruptions and intelligence gathering by white opponents—attended a union meeting at a church three miles north of Elaine, according to NPR. Then, the first gunshot rang out, igniting a bloody massacre that changed the course of history forever.
Gunfire went off after two white men approached the church—although who fired the first shot remains highly contested. Shortly after, a brutal shootout took place in front of the church between the armed Black guards and three individuals. A white security officer for the Missouri-Pacific Railroad, W.A. Adkins, was killed. Charles Pratt, Phillips County’s white deputy sheriff, was wounded—and word spread like wildfire.
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When a Black trustee alerted officials, a massive white mob formed after they learned that a Black uprising was underway. “A posse was dispatched and within a few hours hundreds of white men, many of them the “low down” variety, began to comb the area for blacks they believed were launching an insurrection,” according to “Revolution in the Land: Southern Agriculture in the 20th Century.”
The white mob also had the support of Arkansas Governor Charles Hillman Brough, who called in nearly 600 federal troops to fight a “Negro uprising.” Rather than keeping the peace, a mob of 500 to 1,000 armed white men and the military hunted down Black residents for three days.
Black people—who outnumbered whites in the area around Elaine by a ten-to-one ratio—were randomly attacked and killed on site. The terror claimed entire families who thought they were safe—including a soldier returning home from World War I, only to be dragged from a train and murdered before he ever made it back to his front porch, the Guardian reported.
The massacre was so horrific, an eye witness recalled how soldiers “committed one murder after another with all the calm deliberation in the world, either too heartless to realize the enormity of their crimes, or too drunk on moonshine to give a continental darn” in his book, “What a Preacher Saw Through a Key-Hole in Arkansas.”
Historians estimate at least 200 Black Americans were killed, though the true toll is likely much higher. Local observers suggest that more than 800 Black lives were lost—a figure that, if accurate, would make the Elaine Massacre the deadliest racial conflict for African Americans in U.S. history, per the Guardian.
It wasn’t until federal troops disarmed both parties in Elaine on October 2, 1919, did the killing subside. Instead of receiving justice, Black victims of the Elaine Massacre received handcuffs and murder charges.
Troops arrested hundreds of Black residents, and kept them in makeshift enclosures until they could be questioned. If their white employer couldn’t vouch for them, they remained jailed, losing their land as a result. While no white perpetrators were ever prosecuted, authorities charged 122 Black individuals with murder or behavior threatening murder.
A dozen Black sharecroppers, who later became known as the Elaine 12, were wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to death by an all-white jury in trials that averaged 5-10 minutes, the University of Arkansas reported.
Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court found that the convictions of the Elaine 12 defendants was unconstitutional because of a lack of due process, and their sentences were commuted. They were never exonerated.
On the massacre’s 100th anniversary, the Elaine Massacre Memorial was unveiled across from the very courthouse where the trials for the Elaine 12 were held.
“The Elaine Massacre marked one of the darkest moments in our state’s history,” the office of Arkansas’s Governor Asa Hutchinson said at the time, per the Guardian. “The lessons that we can learn from 100 years ago are relevant today as we navigate race relations in the 21st century. I’m grateful that we as a state are taking the opportunity to remember the history and learn from it.”
