Essay On The Elaine Massacre

Deep in the Arkansas Delta, there is a town surrounded by cotton. This town is called Elaine. Like most towns surrounded by rivers and far away from any main roads, its only landmark is a rusty water tower. Elaine’s financial decay is very apparent to anyone who happens to pass through it. It’s storefronts are boarded and abandoned and it’s school is long forgotten and crumbled. What's not apparent, is its historical value. On the day of September 30, 1919, a deadly, and possibly the bloodiest, racial confrontation of the Red Summers era, the violent time after reconstruction. This left hundreds of blacks and several whites dead. This historical event was called the Elaine Massacre, which happened only four years before the Supreme Court protected

the rights of the black population.
The event began with a meeting at a church.

About one hundred African American sharecroppers gathered at a church that was about three miles north of Elaine. The meeting was held by the Progressive Farmers and the Union of America to discuss better payment for cotton crops because many black sharecroppers were exploited for their work in the cotton industry. Guards were put on patrol around the church during the meeting to prevent any disruptions and to deter any white opponents from trying to gather intel from the meeting. During their rounds, a vehicle filled with armed white men pulled up to the church. No one knows who started the gunfight, but it ended with the death of W.A Adkins, who was a guard for the missouri-pacific railroad, and the wounding of Charles Pratt, the sheriff of Phillips County.
The next morning, Pratt sent out men to find the people involved in the shooting. Even though the group experienced very little resistance from the African American community, their fear of them (because the white population in the area was outnumbered by ten to one) caused a total of about five hundred to a thousand whites to go to Elaine to get rid of what they characterized as an”insurrection”, an act of rebellion against civil authority. They even received over 500 battle tested men from Camp Pike outside of Little

Rock.
After the battle, Colonel Isaac Jenks, commander of the US troops in Elaine, reported that only two black people died while the Memphis Press stated that a lot of blacks died that day.

Other sources of information also said the the troops tortured the African Americans to get information.
Within the first couple of days after the shootout, 285 African American captives were taken from the temporary stockades and sent to the undersized jail in Helena even though the maximum capacity of the jail was forty-eight. In 1921, Two white members of the Phillips County posse, T.K Jones and H.F Smiddy, admitted in an affidavits that the committed acts of torture against the prisoners of the Helena jail.
On October 31, 1919, 122 African Americans were charged with crimes stemming from the racial disturbance. These ranged from murder to night riding,(terroristic threatening). Everyone involved with the trial were against the defendants, even their attorneys. For example, attorney Jacob Fink, the attorney of Frank Hicks, did not interview his client, defend his

client,

challenge jurors, or do anything to help his client. By November 5, 1919, the first twelve defendants were sentenced to death by electric
chair. As a result, 65 other defendants quickly took plea bargains and were sentenced to twenty one years in prison for second degree murder. The others were either dismissed or weren’t even prosecuted.
About the same time, the New York offices of the NAACP hired the law firm of George C. Murphy, a former confederate officer, as a counsel for the twelve Elaine defendants who were waiting for death. Even at seventy nine years old, George Murphy was considered the best attorney in Arkansas and by late November, Murphy and his firm were working to save the Elaine twelve.
Their initial task was to get the twelve’s sentences changed and to ask for a new, unbiased trial. Governor Brough allowed them to have a new trial and postponed the executions until they have appealed to the Arkansas Supreme Court after the action was originally denied.