Arkansas Residents Make a Case for Reparations 100 Years After the Elaine Massacre

Storm clouds were brewing above the Arkansas farmlands as Robert Scott fought his way through a dense patch of wilderness on the perimeter of a tilled, muddy field. Trekking through the black gumbo, he was surveying a long-forgotten African American burial ground about seven miles south of the small town of Elaine. As a fog of mosquitoes thickened around him, Scott stooped to inspect the fading inscription on one of the neglected cemetery’s few remaining headstones.

A teenager, Mattie Mosby died in 1919. Scott surmises that the young girl may have been one of the hundred—or hundreds—of black sharecroppers killed that year in what is now known as the Elaine Race Massacre, one of the deadliest outbreaks of racial violence in American history. With a sweep of his arm toward the acres of farmland that stretched to the horizon, the University of Arkansas archaeologist wondered how many of the surrounding graves might contain victims of the bloodletting. It’s his goal, he says, to seek out sites where mass graves might be hidden in order to better understand the century-old crime. “If they’re out there,” says Scott, who is white, “they can be found.”

His partner in this grim project, Brian Mitchell, a historian at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, sacrifices weekends and evenings to sift through the piles of records he’s collected from archives across the country. After putting his children to bed, Mitchell spends hours tending to a massive database of death certificates, letters, old newspaper articles, oral histories, and inmate files. Some of the materials hint at the carnage: Victims were thrown into mass graves; a boxcar full of black corpses was dumped from a railroad bridge into a river; bodies may have been tossed into a lake, while others were buried alongside a railroad just outside of town.

Mass graves may disappear from records, but they chisel into memories. Sondra “Dolly” Avery, an Elaine native, was around 25 years old in the 1980s when she was sitting on her neighbor’s porch, marveling at the colorful masses of blooming flowers that grew everywhere in her yard—except in one corner. Avery asked the woman, who was then about 90, “Why don’t you have any flowers there?” “Flowers don’t grow on graves,” the woman said. “People buried all over here, even where you live.”

Finding the mass graves would force Arkansas to confront the dark secret of the massacre. Even on the 100th anniversary of the violence, which began at the end of September, the tragedy today is buried so deeply by fear and a century of silence that it barely registers in American history and there is little awareness of it even among people who have spent their entire lives in the region. But the wall of silence seems to be giving way. Awareness of the racist pogrom has slowly been seeping into the public consciousness—and with that come demands for a reckoning.

Hunter Klaus

University of Arkansas archaeologist Robert Scott inspects gravestones in a century-old African American graveyard.

The harrowing testimonies that were whispered through generations have been amplified in an era when racial enmity has exploded and demands for justice for past atrocities have gone unanswered. Scott and Mitchell are part of a small group of historians and civil rights activists working to unravel the mysteries surrounding the killings that took place in the cotton fields and canebrakes around this flyspeck Delta town in southern Phillips County along the Mississippi River. “This narrative isn’t being driven by old white men,” says Mitchell, who is black, “but the voices of the people who were silenced—the people who had no voice when they were alive.”

ON THE NIGHT OF SEPTEMBER 30, 1919, 200 men, women, and children gathered in a small wooden church in Hoop Spur, an area just outside the town of Elaine. The clandestine meeting was one of the early gatherings of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union, whose leaders had been recruiting black sharecroppers across the county for the past several months.

Arkansas enjoyed soaring postwar cotton prices that made the rich soils of the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta a wellspring of profit. But black sharecroppers never shared in the fruits of this bounty. Their efforts to collect equitable payment from white landowners were met with threats of violence. In the hopes of strengthening their economic standing, the sharecroppers found inspiration in Northern black newspaper editorials that urged labor strikes and organizing. Black soldiers returning from World War I added to this volatile mix after they found that their military service hadn’t softened bigoted hearts. But newly emboldened by their wartime experiences and training, the sharecroppers of Phillips County sought to unionize.

Annie Giles was just a teenager when she and her family joined the other sharecroppers in the Hoop Spur church that September night. By 8 p.m. the house was packed. Acutely aware of the trouble that would erupt if the white landowners discovered their organizing efforts, union leaders stationed armed guards outside to keep watch.

The facts surrounding the massacre and its immediate aftermath have been documented in two books: Grif Stockley’s Blood in Their Eyes, published in 2001, and Robert Whitaker’s 2009 treatment, On the Laps of Gods. While local activists dispute some pieces of evidence presented in the two accounts today, it’s generally accepted by historians that black informants revealed the sharecroppers’ organizing plans to the landowners.

After the dust settled the next morning, one of the white men who had approached the church that night, a Missouri Pacific Railroad security officer, was reported dead. A deputy was injured. Calls came in to authorities in Helena, the Phillips County seat, where Frank Kitchens, the county sheriff and a prosperous landowner, said that the sharecropper union ambushed the men while they changed a flat tire. Declaring that a black insurrection was under way, Kitchens summoned local whites, handed out 20-gauge Winchester shotguns, and dispatched this mob 20 miles south to Elaine. These men, many of them World War I veterans, were primed to turn their weapons on the black men who had also fought for the United States.

The massacre began in earnest the next day, October 1. The white mob from Helena marched through the sharecroppers’ cabins killing people indiscriminately. Some fought back, killing or injuring some of the white men. As the mob grew in size, attracting whites from across eastern Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee, the killings became a “free-for-all,” Mitchell said. News of the massacre reached Arkansas Governor Charles Brough, who quickly wired War Secretary Newton Baker to dispatch 500 federal troops stationed in Little Rock to help suppress the “black insurrection.”

By the next day, many more people had been killed. Among them was 25-year-old World War I veteran Leroy Johnston, who had returned home to recover from the wounds he received defending France from the German invasion. Leroy was living and working with his two brothers, one a prosperous dentist in Helena, the other an auto mechanic, when their fourth brother returned from Oklahoma, where he worked as a physician. According to African American journalist Ida B. Wells, who came to Elaine to document the killings, the four brothers were returning from a hunting trip on October 2 when they heard about the massacre. They boarded a train bound for Helena. But before the train left, they were discovered by some members of the mob, handcuffed, and put in a car. As the car pulled away, the mob riddled the vehicle with bullets, killing all four brothers and the white driver.

Brian Mitchell, Univ. of Arkansas at Little Rock

A white mob gunned down the four Johnston brothers and left their corpses on the side of a road, according to journalist Ida B. Wells.

The bodies of the four brothers were left on the roadside for days, where they lay “in the hot sun just as if they had been so many dead dogs,” Wells wrote in a pamphlet she published in 1920. Historians estimate that between 100 and 300 African Americans and five whites died. Hundreds of African Americans were arrested. The 12 black men who faced the death penalty ultimately won back their lives in the 1923 landmark Supreme Court case Moore v. Dempsey. In a 6-to-2 ruling, the justices found that the actions of the white mobs had violated the due process clause of the 14th Amendment.

An October 3 New York Times story on the Elaine Race Massacre carried the headline “Trouble Traced to Socialist Agitators.” The Arkansas Gazette placed blame squarely on the sharecroppers in a report that declared, “Negroes Plan to Kill All Whites.” Newspapers across the country blamed the violence on the black sharecroppers and communist agitators for the next several months. White men had successfully distorted the event, transforming the episode from an abominable massacre to a “black insurrection,” the sum of all white fears.

The massacre was just one of many flashpoints of racial violence that gripped the nation during one of the darkest periods in American history, the Red Summer of 1919. Race massacres occurred in more than 30 cities between May and October of that year, beginning in Charleston, South Carolina, and continuing for the next six months in smaller Southern towns and larger Northern cities alike. Until the night of September 30, the bloodiest of these clashes had taken place in Washington, D.C.—when whites began randomly beating black pedestrians after a black man was accused of raping a white woman. In Chicago, rioting broke out after a black man was stoned to death for swimming on the white side of a Lake Michigan beach.

FOR DECADES, THE CHILLING STORIES that trickled down from one generation to the next seemed more rooted in legend than history. Sheila Walker first heard about the massacre from Annie Giles, her grandmother—the teenager who fled the gunfire in the Hoop Spur church in 1919. Walker was 25 when she first heard her grandmother’s retelling in 1973. Giles recalled having a premonition before she went into the crowded church. She told her granddaughter, “I knew that something was going to happen in that church—and then they started shooting.” “People were dying in front of me,” she continued, “I grabbed some children and got out of the church through the back.” Giles collapsed into hysterics, unable to finish the story—as she did every time Walker tried to press her for more details. Walker, now 71, believes her grandmother suffered from post-traumatic stress.

Courtesy Sheila Walker

Sheila Walker’s grandmother, Annie Giles (right), standing beside her mother, Sarah Moseley. Annie Giles was a teenager when she fled the attack on a church outside Elaine, Arkansas, in 1919.

Until she asked her neighbor about the bare patch of dirt in her yard, Sondra Avery had never heard about the killings. The elderly woman told her that Avery’s own great-grandfather drove a wagon loaded with black bodies out of town to dump them in graves, eight or nine at a time. Avery would not hear about the massacre again for another 30 years. “I was like, ‘Is she making this up?’” Avery says. It wasn’t until historians and civil rights advocates began seriously investigating and raising awareness of the massacre in recent years that she connected the dots. “Me, my brother, all these people lived and grew up here forever and never heard anything about this ever happening,” she says. “That’s kind of something. How can you keep that a secret all these years?”

Another Phillips County native, Anthony Davis, got more gruesome details in the 1970s from his grandmother when he was 22. She told him how she stood along the railroad tracks and watched bodies being “loaded into trucks like logs,” and she recalled decades of “hush mouth” that silenced the black communities out of fear of reprisals.

But the rumors of mass graves will remain rumors until the burial sites and human remains are discovered. “Any location where we get more than one person telling the same story are the sites we’re trying to record,” says Scott, who works with the Arkansas Archeological Survey at the University of Arkansas. There are various techniques archaeologists could use, beginning with LIDAR (light detection and ranging), an aerial light and radar mapping technology that can be used to detect subterranean anomalies in the ground like sonar on ships. “We honestly can’t say it’s a mass grave until it’s investigated by excavation,” says Scott. In Arkansas, as in many states, a state-issued permit is required before any human remains can be excavated.

There are stories about the white perpetrators, too. Chester Johnson, a 74-year-old poet now living in New York City, has fond memories of his grandfather, Lonnie Birch. Birch loomed large in Johnson’s life, having taken in Johnson as a small child after his father died and left his mother too grief-stricken to care for him. His earliest memories were sitting in the old man’s lap on the porch of his grandparents’ Little Rock, Arkansas, home and taking walks with him around the neighborhood.

But years later, as a young man, Johnson learned shocking details about his grandfather’s past: Birch was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Johnson remembers riding in the family car with his mother when she told him how Birch, who worked as an engineer with the Missouri Pacific Railroad, participated in a race riot; how he traveled back and forth to killing fields in Phillips County on the MoPac train; and how many of the deaths occurred along the railroad lines.

Courtesy Chester Johnson

Chester Johnson stands on a table on his second birthday while his grandfather, Lonnie Birch, looks on. Johnson has struggled to reconcile his fond memories of his grandfather with Birch’s role in the Elaine massacre.

The poet has long been a student of Southern history, but it wasn’t until later in life that he connected this story to the Elaine Massacre that is now edging back into Arkansas history. “I started with the idea that maybe I could reconcile the person who cared for me and loved me so much with the person who participated in this massacre,” Johnson says. “It was hard thinking through all that, but after a while I concluded that there was no way I could reconcile those two people: He remained two individuals to me.”

TIME HAS BEEN UNKIND TO PHILLIPS COUNTY. According to census data, its horn-of-plenty days are well behind it. In 1950, its population was 46,000. Today it is under 20,000. The median household income of black families—who comprise 60 percent of the population—is $18,000, roughly half that of whites. Elaine’s Main Street is marred by the husks of shops and businesses that thrived until the late 20th century. The neighborhoods and grocery stores that once sprawled along Highway 44 have vanished, demolished and overtaken by the vast farms that have flattened the earth like an iron.

“There’s some people that believe there’s been a curse on Phillips County since the massacre—that it’s part of the economic problems that exist in the Delta,” Johnson, the poet, says.

The town’s public schools, long ago shuttered by rural school consolidation policies under former Republican Governor Mike Huckabee, have fallen into nearly irreversible states of disrepair. Windows remain shattered in the chained-up Elaine High School, and roofs have collapsed in the neighboring middle school. But the elementary school on the very edge of town has been given new purpose. “Elaine Legacy Center,” the moniker that serves as both the name of the building and the name of the activist group documenting the massacre, is scrawled on the redbrick building. Established in 2017, the group has been collecting stories from its members like Sondra Avery and Anthony Davis to build their case for compensation.

But not everyone in the town is interested in atonement. In August, four months after the group planted a willow tree in remembrance of those killed in the massacre, they found that the tree had been chopped to the ground overnight. In 2017, soon after the group moved into its space in the old elementary school, some person or persons tried to burn down the building. The incident was never investigated.

Hunter Klaus

A marching band performs on Main Street in Elaine, Arkansas, during an April ceremony for victims of the massacre.

At a time when progressive Democrats have thrust the issue of reparations for slavery into the 2020 primary race, the Elaine Legacy Center group claims that reparations should include the atrocities that came after the Civil War. They believe that the rampant poverty that now defines Phillips County—the 15th-poorest county in the country—can be traced back, in part, to the massacre. “There’s a lot of blame and resentment that many of the residents still have toward what they saw as an active assault on their community,” Mitchell said. “They feel as if they’re owed something. Their ancestors were killed.”

They believe that the land farmed by large agricultural corporations throughout Phillips County would belong to black residents if it weren’t for the brazen land theft that followed the massacre. However, historians like Mitchell have yet to discover any census or land records that substantiate their claims. Without finding deeds or property tax records that show black land ownership, allegations of land theft remain unsubstantiated. “We know an atrocity took place, [but] we need more proof to make demands,” Mitchell says. These views have created tensions between the academics and civil rights activists. While academics adhere strictly to what historic records can prove, the activists argue that the oral histories are the primary gateways to understanding the history. The lack of land records, they say, does not disprove their land theft claims.

Many Arkansans, both white and black, feel proper remembrance and commemoration can heal the deep-seated wounds. Others, mostly poor blacks living in the area, feel true justice cannot be served without reparations—a kind of economic atonement. Yet Chief U.S. District Judge Brian Miller, the great-grandnephew of the four Johnston brothers who were gunned down in the massacre, wonders how such a plan could play out. “Who do you receive reparations from? The state of Arkansas? Who do you go to? The U.S. government? And then do you pay guys like me? Although I lost four great-uncles down there, I’m a federal judge and my father was a doctor, my grandfather was a doctor. Do you give me money?” he says.

Although debates over reparations have consumed African American history scholars for decades, the idea has gained new momentum in recent years. In April, Georgetown University students took a nonbinding vote to raise tuition to create a reparations fund for descendants of the school’s 1838 sale of 272 slaves to Deep South plantations. And in June, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties held a hearing on H.R. 40, which calls for a commission to study reparations for the “perpetration of gross human rights violations and crimes against humanity on African slaves and their descendants.”

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