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.
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday February 19, 1920
Phillips County, Arkansas – White Landlords Terrorize Negro Tenants, Part I
From the Appeal to Reason of February 14, 1920:
White Landlords, Robbing Negro Tenants,
Let Loose Arkansas Reign of Terror
[Part I of II.]
Headline from Arkansas Gazette of October 3, 1919
Repeated and strenuous strenuous efforts have been made to extradite Robert L Hill, a negro from the state of Kansas to Arkansas, where he is indicted for murder. He has not been delivered up to the Arkansas authorities, and his extradition would be a deep and shameful stain upon the state of Kansas. For Hill’s is no common murder case. The question of his fate is linked with the larger question of economic justice to an exploited race. It isn’t for murder, really, that Hill would be tried if he were sent back to Arkansas; the real charge against him is that he was active in helping to organize the negro tenant farmers of southern Arkansas that they might remove some of the burdens of landlordism and virtual slavery from which they have cruelly suffered.
Hill is the president and organizer of the Farmers’ and Householders’ Progressive Union of America—a union negro tenant farmers. The story this union and of the present effort to extradite Hill into Arkansas cannot be understood without explaining the general situation existing in Arkansas.
First let us recall the lurid excitement that prevailed in Phillips county, Arkansas, of which Helena is the county seat, in October, 1919. It will be recalled that the Associated Press sent out to the rest of the country stories of a formidable negro plot to terrify and exterminate the white race in Arkansas, with the news that negroes in Phillips county had uprisen and wantonly killed 21 white men. For several days Arkansas was crimsonly featured in riot stories, and the patriotic fashion in which the white men of Phillips county suppressed the uprising and upheld law and order was dramatically chronicled.
How can America hold up its hands
in hypocritical horror at foreign barbarism
while the red blood of the Negro
is clinging to those hands?
-Hubert H. Harrison
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Hellraisers Journal, Monday July 9, 1917
East St. Louis, Illinois – “Making the World Safe for Democracy”
From Ohio’s Piqua Daily Call of July 7, 1917:
From The Voice, “A Newspaper for the New Negro,” July 4, 1917:
The following article by Hubert H. Harrison addresses the disgraceful and murderous attacks of July 2nd, perpetrated by white citizens of East St. Louis against their fellow citizens of African descent. The massacre took many lives, and, in many cases, even the children were not spared.
The Voice is intended to be the “political voice” of the Liberty League. The issue of July 4th is it’s first.
The East St. Louis Horror
by Hubert H. Harrison
This nation is now at war to make the world “safe for democracy,” but the Negro’s contention in the court of public opinion is that until this nation itself is made safe for twelve million of its subjects the Negro, at least, will refuse to believe in the democratic assertions of the country. The East St. Louis pogrom gives point to this contention. Here, on the eve of the celebration of the Nation’s birthday of freedom and equality, the white people, who are denouncing the Germans as Huns and barbarians, break loose in an orgy of unprovoked and villainous barbarism which neither Germans nor any other civilized people have ever equalled.
How can America hold up its hands in hypocritical horror at foreign barbarism while the red blood of the Negro is clinging to those hands? So long as the President and Congress of the United States remain dumb in the presence of barbarities in their own land which would tip their tongues with righteous indignation if they had been done in Belgium, Ireland or Galicia?
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