Elaine is a town in Arkansas.

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 little good has happened in a very long time. 

White supremacy is a terrible thing, anywhere and everywhere. Something especially terrible happened in Elaine. . 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. In order 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. 

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. The date was September 30, 1919.

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 non-compliant black males. Compliance was, of course, interpreted in a rush to judgment, and 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 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 is an indisputable 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 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 equivalent. Were there white folks who knew the truth, maybe some 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, with its roots in the lies and hatred of racism, makes 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. Certainly, some of the commemorators were motivated by the economics of civil rights tourism. The impulse to honor is mitigated by contrasting agendas. Many Black citizens are motivated by truth and reconciliation; some are hoping for an economic shot in the arm. Some, as well as many area whites, wrestle with commemorative motivations and economic opportunism. I doubt it could be otherwise. I am certain that many of the heirs of the massacre are happy to profit from liberal guilt, much as many white folks who don't give a rat's ass about the nuances of Charley Patton's music are happy to benefit from Blues Trail markers in Mississippi. It's a business that reflects the spectrum from the noble to 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 80% boarded up. It and West Helena are distressed by any measure. Of course, Elaine is nearly a ghost town, despite its remaining 500-600 inhabitants. 

It is reasonable to question how many visitors a memorial in Elaine might attract. A memorial to the Elaine massacre is going to be a lightning rod wherever it's put. Such are the wages of horror. The civic death that follows you everywhere in Phillips County is evidence of such ravages.

The Helena 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. 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 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 the truth. But the truth is that race matters.

Elaine, Arkansas is a 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, associated with Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1922 is an urban competitor in this ghastly contest. Not that is any shortage of such sites. 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 results were 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 for centuries and is afraid to let go of power. They should be living with shame, and many are haunted by a fear that payback will be a bitch.

Elaine, Arkansas. God knows I wish this sad town a better tomorrow. It’s suffered enough.

To paraphrase Nina Simone, "Arkansas, God Damn."

- Steven J Wilson

* 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. 

Road Music: 

Charley Patton - Heart Like Railroad Steel