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Hellraisers Journal – Friday February 20, 1920
Phillips County, Arkansas – White Landlords Terrorize Negro Tenants, Part II
From the Appeal to Reason of February 14, 1920:
White Landlords, Robbing Negro Tenants,
Let Loose Arkansas Reign of Terror[Part II of II.]
Early in 1919, some of the young negroes who had returned from the army began an organization of the negro share croppers, under the name of “Farmers’ and Householders’ Progressive Union of America,” for the purpose of getting relief from the abuses their people were made to suffer. The charter and constitution of the organization was drawn up by two prominent white lawyers at Winchester, Ark. The organization was looked upon with much disfavor from the start by the land owners. So the plans of the organization had to be carried on in secret, but it met with instantaneous approval of the negro laborers. The organization arranged that friendly and trustworthy counsel was furnished the negroes who would bring suit and force the land owners to make a settlement with the negroes and in many instances they were forced to pay back to them hundreds, and some instances, thousands of dollars that they were stealing from their tenants.
These negroes had grown a bumper crop this season, some families making as much as fifty bales of cotton, twenty-five of which was theirs. Cotton this season in this locality was selling at from fifty to seventy-five cents per pound, or $250 to $300 per five hundred pound bale, or over $5,000 for the tenant’s share of the crop, while everything they purchased at the land owner’s store was sold at 50 to 100 per cent higher than at cash stores in nearby towns. These negro tenants were due to have several thousand dollars as their share of the crop for their work. This the land owners could not allow for various reasons. If the negroes got out of debt, they might leave the farm, then they would not trade at their stores if they had the cash to buy from mail order houses or the cash stores in the towns.
The land owners began to make arrangements to again ship the negro’s cotton without asking his consent or rendering him a statement of his store account. The negroes went to their organization for aid and counsel. A representative of their organization went to a prominent white attorney for counsel [Ulysses S. Bratton], who they knew was a friend to all labor organizations. This attorney was not in his office at the time the delegation called, but his son [O. S. Bratton], who was in charge of the office in his father’s absence, advised the delegation to get their members together and he would come out and meet them, and investigate their claims. The representatives of the negroes returned and called a meeting in one of their churches, to advise their members.
Evidently the land owners had spies in the negro organization, for soon after the negroes began to congregate at the church. A car from Helena, the county seat of Phillips county, stopped near the church and a deputy sheriff and a special agent or railroad detective, ran up to the church and began to fire into the church and put out the lights. No violence had been contemplated or thought of by the negroes, but some of the younger men had revolvers on their persons from which they returned the fire, killing the detective and wounding the deputy sheriff.
The killing of a white man, a railroad detective, spread like wild fire. A slanderous report was put into circulation that the negroes had planned an insurrection, and had marked twenty-six prominent white men for assassination. White men began pouring into Elaine from all nearby towns, and began to hunt down the negroes, and question them. Any negro who did not answer as they desired was arrested or shot down in cold blood, in many instances. The negroes hurriedly armed themselves with such arms as they could secure and prepared to defend themselves from attack. As a result, five white men were killed and twenty negroes were officially acknowledged killed, but many of the prominent white citizens of Helena boast that over one hundred negroes were killed.
Several hundred soldiers were sent from Camp Pike to restore order, and hundreds of negroes were placed under arrest and huddled together in a stockade where they were denied the right of counsel, or the right to communicate with friends or relatives, where they were tortured and beat and threatened with death until they gave the evidence that the authorities in charge wanted, to convict the several union officials of murder.
The young white lawyer who at the negroes’ request came to make an investigation was arrested, chained between two negroes and made to suffer every humiliation known to their fiendish minds, taken to Helena, and kept in jail for a month, and finally released on his own recognizance on a charge of barratry (soliciting litigation).
Another young Socialist lawyer who had represented negro tenants in the courts was forced to flea for his life. An armed mob broke into his office and private room and seized all his private papers. After the excitement had somewhat died down, he returned and was also indicted on a charge of barratry and was released on a $200 bond.
Six of the negroes were jointly indicted for murder in the first degree and placed on trial. None of them was allowed to make any defense, as counsel was assigned to them by the court, then the negro defendants were brought into court and placed on trial. Their counsel did not consult with them, no witnesses were allowed to testify for their defense, the jury, composed of white land owners or agents, was not challenged, no defense was made, the testimony forced from some of the negroes was introduced, the whole trial was over in fifteen minutes, and the court sentenced the defendants to death by electrocution. In all twelve negroes were sentenced to death and eighty were given prison terms varying from one year to life. The father and brother of the young attorney who was arrested were not allowed to come to Helena nor to assist him under threat of assassination.
Certain public spirited and liberty loving citizens of this state, have taken up the matter of a defense fund. Competent legal counsel is now in charge of their defense and appeals of all the cases are being prosecuted. The attorneys feel sure of success if the proper publicity can be had. Every paper in the state is dominated by the same powers that are trying to railroad these poor negroes to death.
[Photograph and emphasis added.]
Note: The names of the twelve union men sentenced to death are: Ed Ware, Albert Giles, Joe Fox, Alf Banks Jr., Will Wordlow, John Martin, Frank Hicks, Ed Hicks, Frank Moore, J. E. Knox, Ed Coleman, Paul Hall. Sadly, we have not been able to match the names to individuals in photograph above.
“IN UNION IS STRENGTH”
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SOURCES
Quote Claude McKay, Fighting Back, Messenger p4, Sept 1919
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c2904887&view=2up&seq=270
Appeal to Reason
(Girard, Kansas),
-Feb 14, 1920
https://www.newspapers.com/image/612854902/
For source for names of 12 Union Men sentenced to death, see:
N.A.A.C.P. Annual Report
Twelfth Annual Report of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for the Year 1921
NAACP, January 1922
https://books.google.com/books?id=SRo_AQAAMAAJ
II. Legal Defense, The Arkansas Cases
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=SRo_AQAAMAAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA20
For more on Attorneys Bratton & Bratton, see:
We Return Fighting
The Civil Rights Movement in the Jazz Age
-by Mark Robert Schneider
UPNE, 2002
(search: bratton)
https://books.google.com/books?id=jZOGZpiBfWs
IMAGE
Arkansas Elaine Massacre, 12 Union Men Condemned to Die, IB Wells Barnett p2, 1920
https://archive.org/details/TheArkansasRaceRiot/page/n1
Arkansas Elaine Massacre, Union is Strength, IB Wells Barnett p48, 1920
https://archive.org/details/TheArkansasRaceRiot/page/n47/mode/2up
See also:
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday February 19, 1920
Phillips County, Arkansas – White Landlords Terrorize Negro Tenants, Part I
Tag: Elaine Massacre of 1919
https://weneverforget.org/tag/elaine-massacre-of-1919/
Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Farmers_and_Household_Union_of_America
Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America (PFHUA)
https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/progressive-farmers-and-household-union-of-america-3027/
The Arkansas Race Riot
-by Mrs. Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Chg, 1920
https://archive.org/details/TheArkansasRaceRiot
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Battle Hymn of the Republic – Odetta
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