Hellraisers Journal – Sunday December 7, 1919
New York, New York – Equity Congress to Fight for Condemned Union Men
From The New York Age of December 6, 1919:
TO AID FIGHT FOR NEGRO RIOT MARTYRS.
Defamatory Headline from Arkansas Gazette of October 3, 1919
To raise funds to assist in the fight for the lives of the twelve men sentenced to death on account of the Elaine, Ark., riots, the Equity Congress of New York City is arranging to hold a mass meeting on Sunday, December 7, at the 15th Regiment Armory, 132nd street and Seventh avenue, at 5 o’clock.
A number of prominent citizens will speak and good music will be given. The people are urged to be present and give tangible aid in this important matter.
Of the twelve men convicted and sentenced to death, six were to be executed on December 26 and six on January 2, but Governor Brough of Arkansas has announced that he would postpone the executions to make it possible for appeals to be filed in behalf of the condemned men.
Counsel must be secured to take the appeals lo the Arkansas Supreme Court and funds must be provided with which to pay the counsel fees. The Equity Congress hopes to make a substantial start in this direction on Sunday afternoon.
[Newsclip and emphasis added.]
From the Kansas Trades Unionist of November 21, 1919:
ARKANSAS RACE RIOTS COME WHEN NEGROS ASK
JUSTICE IN LAND LEASES FROM COURT
Not Insurrection But Attempt to
Bring Test Case Into Court.
(By A. B. Gilbert)
St. Paul, Minn.-Investigation of the Elaine (Ark.) race riots by a correspondent of the Chicago Daily News brings out facts more noteworthy than the severity of punishment meted out to the alleged negro revolutionists.
Back of the outbreak is the report that two white men opened fire on a peaceable negro meeting. Back of the meeting is an attempt of some negroes to organize and collect funds to bring a lease-testing case into the courts. Back of this desire to bring a court case is the plantation store system [debt peonage system] found in many parts of the South.
The negro rents the land he works on the half-share basis, and he has to buy his supplies from the owner of the plantation or from a store designated by the owner. It is the store system which enables the landlord to exploit the tenant.
At the end of the crop year, when the tenant is ready to sell his crop, he gets en unitemized bill from the storekeeper, who has previously found out about what the tenant will get for his crops. The storekeeper has to know this so as to know how high to make the bill for supplies.
“There are thousands of cases easily found,” says the Chicago News correspondent, “where negroes took up during the year goods valued at not over $200, made a crop of which their share was $1,000 or more, and when the time came for a settlement were told that their bill for the years supplies was $1,200, leaving them in debt the next year to the extent of $200.”
The negro is prevented by an unwritten law from leaving the land of an owner so long as he is in debt The owner is thus assured of having his land worked on these unfair terms a long as he juggles the store accounts.
The system is widely used by Arkansas plantation owners and little effort is made to conceal it. Rather it is justified as being necessary to “keep the niggers from owning the country.”
In the district where the rioting broke out the negroes formed a fraternal organization known as the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. Each male member was to pay $1.50 and each female member 50 cents. Incorporation papers were drawn up by Williamson & Williamson, white attorneys of Winchester, Ark. The announced purpose of the organization was court action to force proper settlements from owners of the land, and there appears to be no evidence of revolutionary purpose unless such action through the courts could be so regarded.
In the rioting which followed the first shooting at the negro church, 25 negroes and 5 whites are said to have been killed. News dispatches from Helena, Ark., indicate that already 48 negroes have been convicted on murder charges, of whom 11 are sentenced to death, and 122 more negroes are to come up for trial.
The plantation store system is undoubtedly safe in that section of America for the time being. But its evil results go on there and throughout the South and in time must lead to other serious disturbances. There is no substitute for democracy and fair dealing between man and man. Race differences do not justify taking from the worker the product of his toil.
Unfortunately, too, the store landlords do not make distinctions between the negro and the white tenant. A white skin does not protect the white tenant from the store gouge any more than the negro’s black skin makes him liable to it. It is the desire to profit at the expense of the worker that makes the vicious system and it is the political power of the landowner which protects them and it from the operation of the law. Thousands of white farmers of Texas, for instance, live in numbered houses on great plantations, have to trade at the plantation store, and never get out of debt.
[Emphasis added.]
From The New York Age of November 22, 1919:
VIEWS and REVIEWS
By James Weldon Johnson, Contributing Editor
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THE CONTEMPLATED MURDERS BY
THE STATE OF ARKANSAS.
For the crime of organizing themselves into a Farmers’ Union [Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America] and hiring a lawyer to secure a the cotton crops which they raised, scores of colored men in Arkansas have been indicted on a charge of “insurrection” and a dozen or more condemned to die.
The white men in Arkansas who are doing this thing know deep down in their hearts that they are committing a crime against justice and humanity. They know well that, the Farmer’s’ Union was an organization formed by the colored farmers for the purpose of bettering their economic condition. They know well that its papers of incorporation and its charter were secured by a reputable firm of Southern white lawyers in the city of Little Rock. They know well that these colored farmers had hired another reputable firm of Southern white lawyers solely for the purpose of bringing suit to secure a fair settlement from their landlords. They know well that the meeting at Elaine was a meeting being held by another body of colored farmers to raise money so that they might go in with the sixty-eight farmers who were to meet with their lawyers the next day at Ratio. They know that the white deputy sheriff who was killed fired into this meeting, perhaps only to frighten those inside the church, and that the fire was returned and he was killed. They know that after this incident all hell broke loose, and armed white men came even from Mississippi to scour the country and hunt down Negroes. Deep down in their hearts they know that what they are doing is being done for the sole purpose of crushing the Negro into submission.
Now, if the white men in Arkansas who are doing this terrible thing have any intelligence at all can they not see that it is impossible for it to have the effect that they are aiming at? If they go ahead and commit legalized murder on these dozen or twenty colored men, do they think it is going to have the affect of crushing out the determination of the Negroes of Arkansas, of the South and of the whole country to have justice? If they do they are worse than fools. It will only have the effect of fanning their hatred against the Arkansas breed of white men and increasing their contempt for his loud claims to higher civilization.
The white man in Arkansas and the state of Arkansa are going to suffer more from the results of this great injustice than the Negro. One of the first results will be that many colored people will leave Arkansas. That will be good. Let as many as can do so leave the bloody soil of the state. Let them leave the cotton to rot in the fields. And let them leave the lazy scoundrels who have for so long lived on their sweat and battened on their blood to rot also; for rot they certainly will if the Negro is not their to work for them.
And yet, the white people of Arkansas should not be left to feel that they have only to reckon with the colored people of the southern counties of their state. They should be made to feel that they have the colored people of the whole South and the entire United States to reckon with on this matter.
The colored men who have been indicted are being convicted as rapidly as possible. Six of them were convicted in seven minutes. We read that the secretary of the Farmers’ Union was convicted in four minutes. Five of these men have been sentenced to die on December 27 and six to die on January 2 [Emphasis in original]. An effort should be made by the colored people of the whole country to do all that is possible in behalf of these men. It may not be possible to save them, but the effort should be made.
There is only one practical way in which this can be done, and that is through money. If these convicted men were Jews, the Jews of this country would raise a million dollars if necessary for their defense. [Emphasis in original.] Money should be raised not only for hiring lawyers to defend these men, but to buy space by the page in the biggest daily papers in the country in order to put the truth of the whole matter before the entire people of the United States and the world. That would mean big money, for space in important dailies costs from one to three thousand dollars a page for a single issue.
We have yet to learn that this is the sort of thing that we must do. We have yet to learn that our rights will cost us not only faith and determination and courage and work, but also money [emphasis in original].
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is trying to raise a general defense fund of Fifty Thousand Dollars; the colored people alone ought to contribute that amount for such a purpose in a week. If fifty thousand gave a dollar a piece, if a hundred thousand gave fifty cents a piece, if a million gave five cents a piece, the amount would be raised. When we think of the fact that there are, perhaps, fifteen millions of us in this country, all suffering more or less the same injustices, the raising of fifty thousand dollars for a general defense fund ought to be a matter of small effort.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal”
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel
Since God is marching on
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