"We Have Just Begun": Black Organizing and White Response in the Arkansas Delta, 1919

"We Have Just Begun": Black Organizing and White Response in the Arkansas Delta, 1919Author(s): Kieran TaylorSource: The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 264-284Published by: Arkansas Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40026229 .

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Dr. D. A. E. Johnston, a Helena dentist killed during the Elaine Race Riot. Courtesy, Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield.



"We Have Just Begun": Black

Organizing and White Response in the Arkansas Delta, 1919

KIERAN TAYLOR

Un the last night of September 1919, Phillips County deputy sheriff Charles Pratt and two assistants traveled twenty miles south out of Helena, Arkansas, in apparent pursuit of a bootlegger. Shortly after stopping-reportedly to repair a flat tire-in front of a small church at Hoop Spur, just north of the town of Elaine, a shot rang out, followed quickly by a volley of gunfire. Inside the church, a group of black farmers was meeting to consider plans to demand a better price for their cotton and a fairer settlement from their landlords. Many had recently joined the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America, a local group that had organized chapters of black workers in several Phillips County communities. Interrupted in their discussions by the shooting and believing their union to be under attack, the men hastened to the windows, loaded their weapons, and joined the fray.1

Kieran Taylor is assistant editor at the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project at Stanford University.

According to the official version, either someone within the church or the armed guards posted outside the meeting fired on Pratt and his deputies. Union members later maintained that Pratt had shot into the church intending to provoke a larger conflict. For the best accounts of the Elaine riot, see Arthur Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-In, 1919 and the

THE ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY VOL. LVIII, NO. 3, AUTUMN 1999



266 ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

After receiving news of the initial clash at Hoop Spur, public officials, local businessmen, and plantation owners in Helena organized a campaign to crush the black union. Their efforts, aided by the intervention of more than five hundred federal troops, marked the bloodiest clash of a tumultuous year of racial violence and labor strife in the United States.2 Joining armed posses from three states, the troops raided homes, chased sharecroppers into the woods, jailed and interrogated hundreds of black men and women, and forced hundreds more back to work in the fields and sawmills. Army reports acknowledged twenty-five African Americans were killed. Unofficial reports place the death toll much higher.3 In the aftermath of the "Elaine Race Riot," sixty-seven African Americans were hurriedly sentenced to prison terms for their participation in a purported rebellion and twelve were condemned to death for the murder of five white people who died in the fighting. All the sentences were overturned after a highly- publicized five-year legal battle that reached the United States Supreme Court.4

1960s: A Study in the Connection between Conflict and Violence (Garden City, NY:

Doubleday and Company, 1966); B. BorenMcCool, Union, Reaction, and Riot: A Biography of a Rural Race Riot (Memphis: Memphis State University, 1970); O. A. Rogers, "The Elaine Race Riots of 1 9 1 9 "Arkansas Historical Quarterly 1 9 (Summer 1 960) : 1 42- 1 50. For a defense of the white response, see J. W. Butts and Dorothy James, "The Underlying Causes of the Elaine Riot of \9\9" Arkansas Historical Quarterly 20 (Spring 1961): 95-104.

2At least twenty-five U.S. towns or cities experienced violent racial conflicts during 1919, including Washington, Chicago, Omaha, Baltimore, and Millen, Georgia. Violent labor

disputes affected dozens of other cities. 3Walter White, investigating for the NAACP, reported that as many as one hundred

African Americans may have been killed (White, "'Massacring Whites' in Arkansas," The Nation, December 6, 1919, 715-716). Arkansas writer L. S. Dunaway suggested an even more shocking figure of 856 (Dunaway, What a Preacher Saw Through a Key -Hole in

Arfomyas[LittleRock:Parke-Harper, 1925], 102, 108-109). While a strong case can be made that the events represented more of a white rout than a riot, the latter term is not entirely inappropriate considering the evidence of black resistance, however limited in the face of the U.S. Army.

4Richard Cortner's A Mob Intent on Death: The NAACP and the Arkansas Riot Cases

(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988) offers a thorough account of the NAACP-led legal battle to free the sharecroppers and the case's importance in the

development of American criminal law.



BLACK ORGANIZING IN THE ARKANSAS DELTA 267

Looking back across eighty years, the attempt by African American workers to organize a union in the Arkansas delta might appear foolhardy, even self-destructive, given the overwhelming political, social, and economic power of the white elites. It would be easy to fall back upon popular stereotypes of black southerners in explaining the surprising upsurge of militancy in Phillips County. Their efforts might be dismissed as the tragic result of the assumed rural isolation, ignorance, and naivete of black delta farmers. Similarly, it would be easy to rely on popular representations of white southerners to explain the murderous reaction of Phillips County whites. Most contemporaneous press accounts and some historical treatments have considered the events in such a way. The southern press presumed that gullible sharecroppers had been duped into a money-making scheme by either Robert L. Hill, a charismatic black union organizer, or U. S. Bratton, a white attorney who had provided legal assistance to some of the union members.5 The national black press and liberal magazines emphasized the viciousness of the posses and law enforcement officials, but offered little to explain the motivations of Phillips County whites. Attempting to build popular support for the legal defense of the accused sharecroppers, these publications described the black men as simple and guileless victims of a racist hysteria.6 Much of the subsequent scholarship on Elaine, including two books and a half-dozen articles, has not proceeded much beyond these characterizations. The black farmers are portrayed as passive victims while whites remain a monolithic mob of reactionary hatemongers.

The stereotypes, however, obscure the very distinctive conditions shaping the actions of both blacks and whites in Phillips County in 1 9 1 9. At the end of the First World War, county residents confronted radically changing economic and social conditions. Under these circumstances, blacks and whites developed conflicting visions of Phillips County

' s future and their role in it. Drawing on the resources of their communities, they fashioned responses to the changing conditions in order to effect these

5See, for example, "Deliberate Plan to Murder Whites of Arkansas," Jackson Daily Clarion Ledger, October 7, 1 9 1 9, and Halbert B . Phillips, "Phillips County Uprising Halted; Six More Slain," Memphis Commercial Appeal, October 3, 1919.

6White, "'Massacring Whites'," 715-716; Scipio Jones, "The Arkansas Peons," The Crisis, December 1921, 72-76 and January 1922, 115-117; Walter White, "Truth Comes to

Light When Unprejudiced Report is Given," Chicago Defender, November 1, 1919.




competing visions . Their respective strategies-the establishment of a union and the mounting of a thorough counter-revolt-should be seen as neither naive on the one hand nor irrational on the other, but as a measure of how deeply black consciousness had changed in Phillips County during the war era.

Richard Wright, destined to become one of America' s preeminent black authors, lived in Elaine, Arkansas, for a few months during the fall of 1 9 1 6. There, he enjoyed the love and happiness to which eight-year-old boys are entitled. Surrounded by a large garden, the pretty bungalow where Wright lived with his mother, younger brother, aunt, and uncle stood out among the rows of tiny homes owned by black and white neighbors in the growing eastern Arkansas town. The poverty that Wright had once known in Mississippi orphanages and sharecropper shacks seemed worlds away. Nevertheless, he continued to filch and horde biscuits from the dinner table as if he expected his good fortune to disappear. Mostly, young Wright's happiness stemmed from his finding a friend and mentor in his uncle, Silas Hoskins. With money Hoskins made building homes in Elaine, he bought and operated a successful tavern that catered to local black sawmill workers. He was a proud man, refusing to bow to the threats of whites in Elaine who considered his independence and financial success an affront. As they rode in Hoskins ' s buggy, Wright sat proudly next to his uncle knowing the man was envied in the black community and resented by whites.

During the winter of 1916, white businessmen in Elaine murdered Silas Hoskins after he refused to sell them his tavern. When Wright's mother learned the men planned to kill the Wright family as well, she and her sister fled with the young boys to West Helena, where they remained indoors for several weeks. Writing of the incident twenty-one years later, Richard Wright reflected on his earnest confusion at his family's inability to do anything but flee in the face of white terror: "Why had we not fought back, I asked my mother, and the fear that was in her made her slap me into silence."7

7Richard Wright, Black Boy, A Record of Childhood and Youth (New York: Harper and

Bros., 1937), 48. The portrait of Wright's childhood in Elaine is drawn from Black Boy and Michael Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).




Before the First World War, even black families as well off as Wright' s had few options in confronting the repression that African Americans faced in the neighborhoods, cotton fields, sawmills, and stores of Phillips County. Though blacks outnumbered whites three to one, whites owned the factories, a majority of stores, and most of the farmland. They controlled the local government. Overt resistance to white power invited the possibility of a long jail sentence, almost certain unemployment, and possible physical harm. Fraudulent employment practices by which planters kept their laborers in perpetual debt often made emigration to the North-the most common strategy for resisting white oppression in the South-difficult.8 Yet three years and a World War after Hoskins's murder, black people embraced collective and overt action to defend their economic interests and preserve their dignity, most notably through the formation of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America.

This shift in strategies that led to the establishment of the union was primarily an attempt to advance black interests amidst a rapidly changing local economy. Wartime conditions expanded the range of options for black workers in the Mississippi Delta. The opportunity of factory work in the North and the call for military service encouraged black sharecroppers to leave the plantations. The ensuing labor shortage left those remaining in a better position to bargain over wages, settlements, and working conditions. The rising price of cotton during the war only heightened black expectations. Locally, cotton that sold for eleven cents a pound in 1915, earned twenty-three cents in 1916, twenty-eight cents in 1917, and forty cents by 1 9 1 9. With more money in their pockets, African Americans began purchasing farms. Black farm ownership increased forty percent in Phillips County between 1910 and 1 920, offering tenants an alternative to plantation exploitation or northern emigration. The existence of this group of new farmers, freed from planter control, facilitated the emergence of autonomous black organizations. Of the men who were later sentenced to

8For discussions of the working conditions of tenant farmers, see John William Graves, Town and Country: Race Relations in an Urban-Rural Context, Arkansas, 1865-1905

(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1990), 70-96; White, Chicago Defender, November 1,1919; "The Real Causes of Two Race Riots," The Crisis, December 1919, 56- 62.




die for their role in the union, several of them likely farmed their own land, and at least one of them, Ed Ware, owned an automobile.9

The war affected black consciousness in other ways. Black men who entered the military (of 1 ,680 inductees in Phillips County, as many as 1 ,2 1 8 may have been black) were well fed and may for the first time in their lives have had some spending money. 10 Shortly after his induction, a black soldier from Helena wrote home excitedly to tell his mother of military life at Camp Sherman, Ohio: "I can go to Cleveland every Saturday if I want to. We have shows and all kinds of music and games for a good time. We play football and have prize fights here at the camp. We do not have to buy anything but stamps."11

While induction might well improve their material circumstances, it is unlikely that young black men in Phillips County uniformly greeted the war with enthusiasm, however. The Reverend Dr. E. C. Morris, longtime pastor of Helena's Centennial Baptist Church and the president of the National Baptist Convention since the group's founding in 1895, did, like many middle-class African Americans, regard the United States' entrance into the war as an opportunity to advance the cause of the race. Believing African Americans' full rights as citizens would be restored in exchange for their support of the war, Morris offered sermons and speeches encouraging registration, the purchase of war bonds, and food rationing.

12 Yet only one in three African Americans in Arkansas responded to their draft notices and the problem was likely more acute in the rural delta.13 While the Helena World attributed this lukewarm support of the draft not to disloyalty but to ignorance and illiteracy, Nan Elizabeth Woodruff suggests that tenant

9U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920 Agriculture (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1922) vol. 4, pt. 2, Table 10; Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, "African-American Struggles for Citizenship in the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas in the Age of Jim Crow," Radical History Review 55 (Winter 1993): 36-37; "Street Car Smashes Ford," Helena World, July 15, 1919 and "Municipal Report," Helena World, July 18, 1919.

10McCool, Union, Reaction, and Riot, 8. nLouis Gill's letter to his mother was published as "Helena Negro Is Pleased With

Army," Helena World, December 21, 1917. nHelena World, October 30, 1917; Fon Louise Gordon, Caste and Class, the Black

Experience in Arkansas, 1880-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 128.

13Woodruff, "African-American Struggles," 38.



BLACK ORGANIZING IN THE ARKANSAS DELTA 27 1

farmers' refusal to support the war effort was a deliberate response to the existing system of power relations. Woodruff argues that by not enlisting, black deltans resisted the efforts of planter-dominated local defense councils to control their labor and their cultural lives.14

Whether or not African Americans supported the war, though, it undoubtedly affected the way they understood their situation. Even those who did not register surely noted the pro-democratic rhetoric emanating from Washington, D.C., and registered the contrast between that rhetoric and the conditions that they faced on the job and in the community. African Americans who ended up in the army and traveled to Europe may have encountered an unprecedented measure of equality. When they returned home they expected to be rewarded with less discriminatory treatment and new opportunities for advancement in return for their service and sacrifice. As one leader of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union explained after the Elaine riot: "We helped you fight the Germans, and are ready to help you fight the next fellows that get after you, but we want to be treated fairly."15 A military report issued soon after the Hoop Spur shootout claimed that most of the leaders of the union and its most aggressive members were ex-servicemen.16 The report was never substantiated, but it suggests-at very least-that whites recognized that wartime service was a factor in shaping the new, more militant black consciousness. White people of all classes suffered a particular phobia of returned black veterans. It was even rumored locally that black veterans had received "letters from French girls urging them to rise up against the white population and secure their 'rights.'"17 No such letters ever materialized, but the rumor illustrates the mixing of new anxieties whites felt over the return of the black veterans with old fears of miscegenation.

If the First World War expanded black opportunity and steeled black determination, Nan Elizabeth Woodruff has described how it also accentuated planter power by placing delta elites in control of local boards

14Ibid.; "Not Real Slackers," Helena World, October 6, 1917. 15Robert L. Hill to Arkansas Gazette, December 11, 1919, reprinted as "Alleged Note

Received From Robert L. Hill," Helena World, December 17, 1919.

16McCool, Union, Reaction, and Riot, 13. 17"Race Riot Excites Phillips County; Ten Are Killed," Memphis Commercial Appeal,

October 2, 1919.




that implemented federal mobilization policy. 18 Yet the federal government

involved itself in other ways in southern life during this decade-ways that may have suggested to African Americans that Washington might once again be the ally and provider it had been in the Reconstruction era. In the spring of 1916 the Department of Agriculture sent its first black demonstration agent to Phillips County to interest African-American farmers in the government's "safe farming campaign."19 Also in 1916 federal agents investigated sharecropping in Arkansas and uncovered instances of peonage and other abuses of tenants. Their report discovered an "acute unrest . . . developing among the tenants" and warned of "clear indications of the beginning of organized resistance which may result in civil disturbances of a serious character."20 Though the government apparently failed to act on these findings, the investigation may have served as a symbol of hope for African Americans by providing an unprecedented platform for their grievances and lending official authority to their conviction that they were being treated unjustly. Certainly, organizers of the Progressive Farmers and Householders Union strategically capitalized on the hopes federal authorities had raised and on the historic identification-dating from emancipation-of the black community with the federal government. Organizer Robert Hill identified himself in union literature as an agent of the federal government and applicants to the union pledged to "defend this government and her constitution at all times."21 Also, the union constitution claimed the group was "first organized under the act of Congress 1865," and membership registration forms bore various federal symbols, including the stamp: "Orders of Washington, D.C. The Great Torch of Liberty."22

The war and its aftermath played yet another role in shaping events in Phillips County. The formation of the union, though typecast as a response to local racial tensions, should not be divorced from the postwar mobilization

l8Woodruff, "African American Struggles," 37, 46. 19"Movement to Aid the Negro Farmers Here," Helena World, March 23, 1919. 20Waskow, From Race Riot, 122.

21White, '"Massacring Whites'," 715; McCool, Union, Reaction, and Riot, 13. 22The United States Constitution and By-Laws of the Progressive Farmers and

Household Union of America, reprinted in Bessie Ferguson, "The Elaine Race Riot" (M.A. thesis, George Peabody College for Teachers, 1927), xiii-xviii; McCool, Union, Reaction, and

Riot, 14.




of labor in 1 9 1 9, a year in which one in five American workers spent some time out on strike. A present-day visitor to Elaine cannot help but notice the seeming isolation of the community. The town sits just west of a two-lane highway nearly twenty miles south of Helena. A driver from Helena winds through acres of cotton fields, small patches of uncleared woods, and, as the road veers toward the Mississippi River, marshy wetlands upon which sits an occasional home. But it would be a mistake to confuse Elaine' s physical separation with intellectual or social isolation either now or eighty years ago. In 1919 just one unpaved road ran between Helena and Elaine, but many people traveled on the daily Missouri Pacific train that stopped at the foot of town. Others shuttled back and forth by boat down the Mississippi River. An informal network of black trainmen, dock, and river workers served as an important channel of information from Memphis, St. Louis, Chicago, and New Orleans. They also passed along news about working and housing conditions in northern industrial centers. Assuredly, local African Americans heard eyewitness accounts of the "race riots" in East St. Louis in 1917 and in Chicago in July 1919, as well as reports on the campaign for fair employment by black railroad workers in Memphis.23

Along with their own information, these workers delivered copies of the Chicago Defender to Phillips County's black community. This African- American newspaper was likely the community

' s most important source of printed information.24 Throughout the late 1 9 1 Os, a loyal correspondent from Helena' s black middle class had sent a society column to the Defender for publication. Printed along with dispatches from a dozen other southern towns, these reports featured family news, health updates, and the travel plans of community members. But the Defender circulated outside the urban middle class as well. According to shipping lists, the area within a ninety-mile radius of Phillips County had among the highest number of subscribers in the South. The paper' s circulation in 1 9 1 9 was one hundred

23Eric Arnesen, "Charting an Independent Course: African American Railroad Workers in the World War I Era," in Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience, Arnesen, Julie Greene, and Bruce Laurie eds. (Urbana: University of Illinois

Press, 1998), 295-303. 24James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great

Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 78-82.




and thirty thousand, but its audience was far larger. Readers shared copies of the Defender in barber shops, stores, and taverns.25

In Phillips County as elsewhere in the South, the Defender undoubtedly played a crucial role in shaping black consciousness during and after the war. It vehemently denounced Jim Crow and southern racist violence while heralding the achievements of individual African Americans. Arkansas governor Charles H. Brough was so convinced that the Defender aroused black sentiment that in the wake of the Phillips County riot, he petitioned the postmaster general to have the newspaper banned in the state.26

The Defender' s posture toward labor organization may also have been influential. Since its beginning in 1905, the Defender had taken an ambivalent stance toward trade unions and strikes.27 At times the paper advocated strikebreaking, recognizing it as the only means for African Americans to break into some industries. The 1918 Chicago packinghouse workers strike, a multi-racial effort, and the attempt to organize the nation's steel workers in 1919, however, caused the Defender to tentatively embrace the union cause. This shift in sentiment would not necessarily have gone unnoticed in Phillips County. And the black community would have had that message reinforced by examples of organizing closer to home. Less than two months before the shootout at Hoop Spur, the railroad employees of the Missouri Pacific shops in Helena struck for higher wages.28

It was out of this volatile mix-the new possibilities and expectations bred by war and a renewed federal presence in the South, the return of black veterans, the example of labor militancy, the threats being posed to black communities across the nation by white violence-that the Progressive Farmers and Household Union was formed. Emerging most strongly from the rich cotton land south of Helena, several hundred African Americans joined the union, organizing lodges in the towns of Mellwood, Ratio, Hoop Spur, Elaine, Old Town, Countiss, and Ferguson. Black workers rallied to the union cause hoping to combat their landlords by striking for higher wages, withholding cotton in hopes of a more equitable settlement, and suing

25Ibid., 77, 79-80. 26"To Investigate Negro Sheet," Helena World, November 4, 1919.

27Grossman, Land of Hope, 231-236. 28"Local Shopmen Are Now Out," Helena World, August 6, 1919.




corrupt plantation owners. The secret phrase to gain entrance to the meeting at Hoop Spur was reportedly "we have just begun."29 Affirming the essentially economic foundations of the union, Robert Hill later described the conditions faced by local sharecroppers: "It was a fact that the people could not get statements of their accounts and their cotton was being shipped and the custom in that section was the landlord would take the cotton and seed and ship them away and didn't ask them no odds and the people had decided to put their money together and get legal help and some how up about Elaine, Arkansas, the white people had ordered the Negroes to stop meeting and from that the trouble came up."30

Denied fair treatment, these black unionists readily embraced militant measures to protect their interests. Possibly nothing indicates this more clearly than the sharecroppers' willingness to fight back though heavily outnumbered and outgunned by the U.S. troops. Newspaper accounts from the trials of the leaders described the union's military strategy and featured statements the leaders allegedly made encouraging black farmers to retaliate against the white forces.31 Though much of this testimony must remain suspect, given the apparent use of force, even torture, to extract evidence against black defendants, it does suggest an acknowledgment of the determination with which blacks acted and the specters that their wartime military experience conjured up among the white community. According to one account, union leaders barked commands as men marched in formation: "Moore gave most of the orders. But Ed Hicks and Knox helped him. Moore walked in front of us. Hicks walked along the middle and Knox at the rear threatening to kill anybody who broke ranks."32

29"Deliberate Plan to Murder Whites of Arkansas," Jackson Clarion Ledger, October 7, 1919.

30Hill to NAACP, November 26, 1919, Arthur Waskow Papers, State Historical

Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin. 31Hill specifically denied the allegations that the union planned to murder plantation

owners. In a letter to the NAACP he maintained his ignorance of such a plot suggesting that "it would be awful foolish for me to go to Phillips County only to plan killing whites of that

county" (Ibid.). 32As suspect as this testimony is, the white casualties do suggest that, at the very least,

blacks did offer meaningful resistance to the assault (Moss E. Penn, "Six Negroes Found

Guilty," Helena World, November 4, 1919).




Others in Phillips County's heterogeneous black community pursued their economic interests in other, surely less alarming ways. Many in Helena's black middle class had participated in Booker T. Washington's National Negro Business League since that organization's founding in 1900. In keeping with Washington's philosophy, the League sought to promote community self-sufficiency through the development of black-owned businesses.33 But, though the tone of the League differed from that of the Progressive Farmers, some in Helena's black middle class likely sympathized with the goals of the union. Early in the war, the Reverend E. C. Morris, who had good relations with the white community, had "humbly" recommended that white employers either raise wages to meet inflation or expect black workers to continue to move north.34 Among those in attendance at the national convention of the National Negro Business League in Little Rock in 1 9 1 1 had been a Helena dentist, D. A. E. Johnston, whose mysterious death eight years later during the Elaine riot may have stemmed from his support of the sharecroppers.35 During the fighting, Phillips County officials intercepted Johnston and three of his brothers, who had been traveling in an automobile purportedly loaded with weapons. The Arkansas Gazette portrayed Johnston as a ringleader of the black insurrection, and the official version of the story contended that Johnston was killed with his brothers after he shot one of the men who was taking him into custody. Contemporary black accounts, as well as African- American oral tradition in Phillips County, suggest, however, that Johnston was uninvolved in (and perhaps even unaware of ) the fighting and was armed simply because he had been hunting. Some believed that whites used the riot as a pretext for murdering Johnston, who had a reputation as a champion of racial equality.36 If he was in some manner connected to the

^ Records of the National Negro Business League (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1994), pt. 1, First Annual Conference Proceedings 1900, 221.

34Morris appealed unsuccessfully to the planter's patriotism, arguing that the war effort demanded that black field laborers remain in the South to produce food {Helena World, May 27, 1917).

^Records of the National Negro Business League, Pt.. 1, Twelfth Annual Conference

Proceedings 1911, membership lists.

36Cortner, Mob Intent on Death, 9, 31; C. Calvin Smith, "Serving the Poorest of the Poor: Black Medical Practitioners in the Arkansas Delta, 1880-1960," Arkansas Historical

Quarterly 57 (Autumn 1998): 301-302.




union, Johnston may have been unique among Helena's middle-class African Americans. Other members of the community demonstrated their support, however, by later raising money for the legal defense fund of the twelve union men who were condemned to death.

Still, there were distinct limits to the collaboration between the black working and middle class in Phillips County. This might best be illustrated by a letter written by leaders of the newly-formed Helena Colored YMCA and published in the Helena World a week before the riot. The Colored YMCA representatives were distraught. A vicious rumor traveling through the community linked their organization with the union. The authors denied any connection between the Y and the crowd of men who had been visiting the black section of town, "chastising" the residents and urging them to stand up for their rights. While the YMCA leaders admitted problems existed in Phillips County, they suggested that education and recreation for black youth held out the best hope for improving the race. The leaders added that change would only be achieved through cooperation with the "best white people" of Helena.37

If the Phillips County black community was not a monolith, neither was its white community. But white people of all sorts must have seen their postwar expectations confounded by local African Americans' more aggressive pursuit of their own interests. At about the same time that Richard Wright' s family was hiding in their West Helena apartment, just a few miles to the east Alvin Solomon, the twenty-year-old son of a Jewish tailor, was making plans to get rich in the rapidly growing town of Helena.38 After holding several menial jobs, including a stint toting beer buckets for alcoholic tailors, Solomon began to earn a respectable living as a clerk in a downtown bank in 1 9 1 6. But following his father' s example, and recognizing the financial opportunities Helena offered, Solomon dreamt of launching his own business.

The war intervened, however, and Solomon quickly found himself in France. He saw little action in Europe, but his assignment to the army post

"Helena World, September 23, 1919. 38 Alvin Solomon's story is taken from a recorded interview in the author's possession.

The interview was conducted at Solomon's Helena home on March 25, 1996, one week after his 100th birthday.




office offered Solomon ample time to develop his plans of owning a business in his hometown. The news from home only fueled his hopes. Cotton prices nearly quadrupled during the war. Solomon' s dream remained with him through two years of service and was with him still on his first night back in Helena when a neighbor summoned him to the courthouse. There, law officials issued shotguns to Solomon and hundreds of recently returned white veterans, and sent the men south to Elaine to put down an uprising of black sharecroppers. He went without thinking twice.

In an interview seventy-seven years later, Alvin Solomon downplayed his role in the events of 1919. He remembered arriving in Elaine only after federal troops had restored "order" and held to the traditional justifications given in defense of white violence: outside agitators incited blacks to riot; posses only killed tenants who fought back; Elaine's white community had fallen under attack. But Solomon bore little resemblance to the stereotypical southern mob member. Later in life, he held no grudge against black people, and even lectured prejudiced friends on tolerance. He was never the irrational rebel of myth, blinded by his hatred of African Americans. Rather, in taking up arms against his black neighbors in 1 9 1 9, Alvin Solomon-and hundreds of other whites in Phillips County-may have been making a deliberate choice to defend a vision of a postwar economy that anticipated increased profits and growth but assumed the continued subjugation of black labor. To be sure, the white response to the union was conditioned by years of racism, concretized in Arkansas by the passage of state laws mandating school segregation, disfranchising black voters, and enforcing unfair labor contracts. Racism was a constant, stretching back many decades and forward several more. But ascribing the white community

' s reaction solely to its racial ideology obscures factors that triggered that reaction and shaped the complex motivations of the white rioters of 1919: the changing local economy, the growing presence of the federal government in Phillips County, and the failure of paternalism to control black labor.

Just as the union developed as an attempt to advance black economic interests, the response of the white community sought to thwart a perceived threat to their livelihoods. Ambitious white storekeepers, farmers, and clerks like Alvin Solomon could not have welcomed the prospect of an economic and social order disrupted by the successes of a militant black sharecroppers' union. Elite whites must have understood even more acutely the threat of black organization. Recognizing both the opportunity for Helena to exploit its location on the Mississippi River and the need to




modernize the town, a group of progressive farmers, bankers, and businessmen had organized the Business Man's League in early 1916. Over the next three years the League, headed by E. M. Allen, an officer of the area' s largest corporate plantation, championed crop diversification, paved roads, rail construction, and a downtown drainage system.39 Coming off a poor year in which the cotton crop was destroyed by bad weather, there was a great deal of optimism looking toward the fall of 1 9 1 9. In February, several hundred prominent Phillips County white men, many of them Business Man's League members, organized to reduce cotton acreage in an attempt to elevate prices for the coming fall. The Helena World cheered the group' s efforts, noting that the larger cotton plantation owners had never before heeded the calls for acreage reduction and diversification.40

The powerful group realized, though, that the mobility of black laborers endangered their anticipated high profits for the fall. Employing a tactic they had used successfully the year before, many cotton planters delayed payment to their laborers for several months and defended the practice by maintaining that they were holding on to the cotton until the price peaked. The workers, however, understood the move as a deliberate attempt to restrict their mobility. Other planters offered sharecroppers only fifteen cents a pound for their cotton, less than half the going price.41 These were

39While the Business Man's League worked publicly during the day for the economic

development of Phillips County, at night the same men made many of the most important decisions in secret, in the halls of fraternal orders. At least ten fraternal societies operated in Helena during 1919, including the Odd Fellows, the Masons, the Woodmen of the World, and the Elks. According to Alvin Solomon, the Elks in particular were powerful and included most of the town's government officials and the men who controlled much of Helena's vice

industry. Membership in the Elks provided access to precious city contracts and prime Cherry Street real estate (Solomon interview).

^Helena World, February 20, 1919. 4lThe Crisis, December 1919, 57. Local merchants collaborated with the planters by

charging tenant farmers much higher prices for goods purchased on credit. A survey of a dozen items at Dowdy and Longnecker, an Elaine grocery store, shows the markup for goods bought on credit ranged from thirty-three percent to sixty percent (Ferguson, "The Elaine Race Riot," 1 7). Alvin Solomon remembers abusive planter-tenant relationships as the norm: "Most of these tenant farmers didn't get a break. They kept the books on them and they were always in debt. They'd give them what they wanted to give them. There were some

exceptions to that, but the exception was just against the rule."




precisely the sorts of practices that the union organized against and threatened litigation over.

The white response to the union was further sharpened by the existing anxiety over the implications of the war and the expanded federal role in the South, coupled with the realization that Phillips County was not immune to the radical ferment that had swept the rest of the nation. Unlike Helena's black community leaders, local white elites remained ambivalent about the war effort, as much as their control of various boards may have enhanced their authority.42 Planters and businessmen enjoyed the booming cotton prices, but could not have been happy about the potential effects of the federal government' s democratic rhetoric upon their black labor force. They were rightly fearful that the wartime upheaval would increase the mobility and militancy of their laborers. In the fall of 1917, an agent from the U.S. Department of Labor ventured into Phillips County to contract several hundred black laborers to work on the construction of an army base near Little Rock. The Department maintained it recruited only idle workers, but the hiring reportedly caused such labor scarcity that the lumber mills needed to employ women to sustain production. While assuring the public of its patriotism, the Business Man's League lodged a complaint with the Department of Labor. Within days, the federal contractor released the black laborers from work and "encouraged" them to return to their Phillips County employers. In the wake of the events, the Business Man's League suggested that area employers "warn their employees that labor conditions in the North are certainly far from being ideal, that Negroes in the South especially in this particular locality are not being victimized, but rather to the contrary, are as well treated as are laborers anywhere else in the world."43

Just three weeks after the Business Man's League's clash with the Labor Department, sheriffs deputies arrested organizers Red Wiggins and Roy Dramer for encouraging black railroad workers near Helena to join a union. A Helena municipal court judge found the two men guilty of "threatening and intimidating" the workers, fined them five hundred dollars,

42Many southern planters and politicians had initially opposed the war because the British blockade closed access to continental markets and hurt cotton exports.

43"Protests Against Labor Deportation," Helena World, August 7, 1917; "Army Posts Will Use No More Negro Labor," Helena World, August 10, 1917.



BLACK ORGANIZING IN THE ARKANSAS DELTA 28 1

and sentenced them to twelve month jail terms.^In delivering the sentence, the Helena municipal court judge declared that "in the present crisis of the country it was a most unpropitious time for creating dissension in the ranks of labor." If the response to these incidents seems extreme, it was only because whites well understood that social changes threatened to mobilize the inert black labor force upon which their livelihoods depended.

By the summer of 1919, the Helena World began regularly reporting news of the strike wave sweeping the nation and editorialized against the rise of Bolshevism and anarchy.45 As early as November 1917 the World had alerted local factory and mill owners to the alleged presence of a radical union, the Industrial Workers of the World, in Phillips County: "It is said that explosives have been found in a trunk at a local railway station, and that the trunk was shipped to Helena by an I.W.W."46 The regularity of stories about strikes and social upheaval and the alarmed tone of the coverage assuredly exacerbated whites' anxieties approaching the fall of 1919 when they began hearing rumors of a revolt among their black tenant farmers. Alvin Solomon remembers that such rumors circulated widely among the white community well in advance of the incident at Hoop Spur. According to Solomon, black servants disclosed to their white employers that the farmers were organizing, and this created a climate of severe mistrust and fear between the races. Similarly, Robert Hill later suggested that "lying negroes carrying tales back and from the whites caused the whites to say hard things about the union" and eventually provoked the attack on the union.47

The dramatic response of the white community was a measure of the failure of the usual, less extreme methods for controlling black labor in Phillips County. Like the local employers whose interests it represented, the Helena World, in its coverage of race issues, precariously balanced the need to subjugate black labor while not becoming so strident as to encourage out-migration. In an editorial declaring war on bootleggers who

44"Negroes Feared Threats of Men" and "A Risky Business," both in Helena World,

August 30, 1917. 45See the coverage and editorials following the May Day riots of 1919; Helena World,

May 1-15, 1919. 46"Plans of Helena found on I.W.W.," Helena World, November 16, 1917. 47Hill to U. S. Bratton, December 4, 1919, Waskow Papers.




sold denatured alcohol, the paper suggested that while whites harmed by drinking the poison should know better, "the ignorant Negro" should be protected by strict laws against still operators: "He is an asset which the community can ill afford to lose or abuse or neglect. He is a producer, and occupies a place in our economic life which cannot be easily filled by others."48 The paper condemned lynching and mob violence, though it featured stories of such violence in other parts of the South, perhaps as a warning to local blacks to adhere to social norms.

But the mobilization of the black community in the fall of 1 9 1 9 forced whites to surrender their commitment to paternalism and embrace irregular and extreme modes of behavior, including the hiring of spies and detectives before the riot and, later, the resorting to mob law, federal intervention in the shape of the U. S. Army, and show trials. As they were unaccustomed to organized challenges to paternalism, whites were caught sorely off-guard by the union as rural black preachers, women, and senior citizens joined the young black men who made up the group's core. As one white observer noted: "One of the remarkable things that I have observed is that I did not see among them more than one hundred prisoners what I could consider a bad negro. They are all that peaceable working class type."49

Though the business and planter interests of Phillips County ultimately prevailed by defeating the union, their hopes for a return to the pre-war work arrangements were not entirely fulfilled. As soon as the riot subsided, Phillips County planters and businessmen set out to secure workers to pick the cotton and man the mills. The Helena World urged black laborers to forget about the uproar and return to work: "Go back, then, to the fields, the lumber camps, the sawmills and other employments in which you were formerly engaged and take up the implements of honest industry which you threw away at the instance of the most disreputable set of scoundrels that ever breathed the air of a free country."50 Hundreds of black tenants, though, had already left Phillips County. When Frank Carruth of Elaine visited Greenwood, Mississippi two weeks after the riot, he told friends of

48"More Agitation," Helena World, May 14, 1919.

49Report, Major Robert O. Poage, October 14, 1919, Abraham Glasser Files, Records of the Department of Justice, Record Group 60, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.

50"Honest Work the Remedy," Helena World, October 6, 1919.




the terrible labor shortage caused by the violence. The Greenwood Commonwealth reported:

With a splendid cotton crop in the field and no prospect of getting it gathered, that is the problem confronting the planters of near Helena, Arkansas. . . . Mr. Carruth told Mr. Bonner that outsiders had no idea of the serious conditions confronting the people there as a result of the race riot. He said many of the negroes were in jail while the riot was being investigated and scores of others had left the county. He stated labor was scarce and that few negroes could be secured to gather the cotton crop. White people will have to be brought in from the outside if they are able to save the crop, he declared. He told of one planter who had 300 acres of fine cotton and not a negro on his plantation."51

By 1 925 , there were 592 fewer black tenants than in 1 920 while the number of white tenant farmers increased by seventeen.52 Between 1 920 and 1 930 the county lost 5,660 African Americans, or almost one in every five black residents-at the same time as the white population grew fifteen percent.53

Living in very separate worlds, both the black and white communities of Phillips County emerged from the First World War with clear but ultimately incompatible agendas. African Americans, emboldened by their wartime experience and mobilized by rising cotton prices and opportunities in northern factories, developed militant strategies to counter racial and economic injustice. These black workers were neither ignorant nor isolated, misled nor manipulated. Nurtured by the national black press, their churches, and a union, Phillips County African Americans forged a consciousness that offered an alternative to acquiescence.

In the white community, rising cotton prices bred high expectations for the postwar period. But the increased mobility and militancy of their black

51"Tells of Labor Scarcity at Helena," Greenwood Commonwealth, October 15, 1919. 52U.S. Bureau of the Census, United States Census of Agriculture: 1925. The Southern

States (Washington: GPO, 1927), vol. 2, 920. 53U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United

States: 1930. Characteristics of the Population for Counties, Cities, Townships, Alabama -

Missouri (Washington: GPO, 1932), vol. 3, pt. 2, 180.




laborers undermined these expectations, reminding whites of their economic dependence on tenants and black workers more generally. That they were driven to such extreme levels of brutality to stop the Progressive Farmers Union is less a measure of their paranoia or emotional immaturity than a testament to the depth of black organization. The less drastic and disruptive methods of controlling black labor that delta whites had developed over the years clearly had become inadequate. Far from being the rabid or irrational Southerners of myth, Phillips County whites skillfully drew on the full range of institutions that comprised the core of their power-the press, the military, the courts, their fraternal clubs, and the mob-to crush the insurgent workers.



Documents

"We Have Just Begun": Black Organizing and White Response in the Arkansas Delta, 1919