Thread by @DrinkSolaPop, ELAINE, ARKANSAS MASSACRE OF 1919 *THREAD* I'm just doing this thread because [...]

ELAINE, ARKANSAS MASSACRE OF 1919 *THREAD*

I'm just doing this thread because it's a story that needs to be told....just like the 1921 riots in Tulsa.

World War I just ended. Black vets had been exposed to better treatment by Europeans due to their American status, and demanded better treatment in America as well. Farmers in Arkansas felt the same way. Ida B Wells explains what these farmers did, which started everything.

Elaine, Arkansas was a section of Phillips County which was almost 80% Black, consisting of mainly farmers. They weren't happy w the exploitative economic system against them and proceeded to organize. Walter White, a white-passing NAACP worker, visited AK to speak to residents.

After the Civil War, lots of Black ppl in the south became sharecroppers. Tenant farming was basically renting land for a share of the crop, then they'd be coerced to sell the rest to the landowner for less than market price. It put Black farmers in perpetual debt & poverty.

About 100 Black sharecroppers came to a farmer's union meeting. They wanted to demand what they discussed amongst each other: unionizing and more $$ for their cotton crops from white landowners. They brung armed ppl to guard the Church while at the meeting.

A shootout occured during the meeting btwn the guards and three white men, resulting in the wounding of a deputy sheriff and the death of a railroad officer.

Whites interpreted the unionization of these tenant farmers as some sort of insurrection. The organizing of Black farmers threatened their system of exploitation. So newspapers painted the organizing as an uprising.

The following morning, the Phillips County sheriff sent a group of 500-1,000 whites from both Arkansas and Mississippi into the Black section of Phillips county to put down this so-called "insurrection". The Governor called in troops, who arrived the next day.

A makeshift jail was made to detain Elaine residents, verifying if they were members of the farmer's union. their landowners had to come vouch for them to be released. If released, they were given a pass showing their nonmembership when demanded, and ordered to return to work.

The estimate of Black deaths is uncertain: ranges btwn 100-237. Three white ppl died, two of which were friendly fire. However, 122 Black ppl were arrested during the massacre, 12 of them for those murders. They were sentenced to 12 yr terms, after an overturned death sentence.