More Historical Evidence About the 1919 Elaine Massacre
In March 2024, Ending Racism USA board member Don Manning-Miller and I, Ken Bedell, visited Elaine, Arkansas, where our board member Dr. Mary Olson has been working for many years. This area in Phillips County is also where board member Naomi Cottoms, who recently passed away, grew up and spent most of her life.
A sobering reality always overcomes me when I drive south from Helena-West Helena, the county seat of Phillips County, to Elaine. On my left, the road follows the Mississippi River. For more than twenty miles on the right, the land is flat with huge fields. I know that these fields are farmed by white farmers who use industrial practices where soybeans, corn, rice, and cotton are grown because these crops are subsidized by the U.S. government. Then they apply chemical fertilizers and other chemical pesticides and herbicides like Paraquat and dicamba.
Elaine is the largest town in the middle of the county, so you can’t miss it. The main street is lined with the shells of businesses. I noticed that Dollar General opened a store on Main Street. But the town looks as I remember it from last time: very depressed. I met a group of four Black residents at the Elaine Legacy Center. They told me stories that they heard from their grandparents and great grandparents about Elaine being a thriving Black community before the 1919 massacre. As well as killing hundreds of Black people, businesses and farms were stolen by whites.
The following day I made a new friend, Jennifer Hadlock. She is a genealogist, reparationist, and movement lawyer. She was living in New York City when she learned about the Elaine massacre. She told me about the 1919 Massacre with a new twist. She has done extensive research of records in courthouses and other places to document that Blacks in Elaine were landowners before the massacre and after the massacre they were not. The massacre continues as white privileged capitalism keeps the descendants and other Blacks in Elaine in poverty. The land and manner of the farming is poisoning people and the water.
Hadlock’s article, “The Slow Massacre: East Phillips and North Desha Counties, Arkansas: Then and Now,” puts her research into context and demonstrates that the true history of the Elaine massacre is quite different from the story told by white residents and many historians. The “good white men” who killed hundreds were not putting down a dangerous rebellion of Black landless sharecroppers. They were destroying a prosperous community that included land-owning Black farmers.
More than that, she illustrates how whites have continued to impoverish the descendants of the massacre and other Blacks in Elaine to this day. I encourage you to read her article.