America's Forgotten Mass Lynching: When 237 People Were Murdered In Arkansas

[DonViejo]

David Krugler

In 1919, in the wake of World War I, African American sharecroppers unionized in Arkansas, unleashing a wave of white vigilantism and mass murder that left 237 people dead.

The visits began in the fall of 1918, just as World War I ended. At his office in Little Rock, Arkansas, attorney Ulysses S. Bratton listened as African American sharecroppers from the Delta told stories of theft, exploitation, and endless debt. A man named Carter had tended 90 acres of cotton, only to have his landlord seize the entire crop and his possessions. From the town of Ratio, in Phillips County, Arkansas, a black farmer reported that a plantation manager refused to give sharecroppers an itemized account for their crop. Another sharecropper told of a landlord trying “to starve the people into selling the cotton at his own price. They ain’t allowing us down there room to move our feet except to go to the field.”

No one could know it at the time, but within a year these inauspicious meetings would lead to one of the worst episodes of racial violence in U.S. history. Initiated by whites, the violence—by any measure, a massacre—claimed the lives of 237 African Americans, according to a just released report from the Equal Justice Initiative. The death toll was unusually high, but the use of racial violence to subjugate blacks during this time was not uncommon. As the Equal Justice Initiative observes, “Racial terror lynching was a tool used to enforce Jim Crow laws and racial segregation—a tactic for maintaining racial control by victimizing the entire African American community, not merely punishment of an alleged perpetrator for a crime.” This was certainly true of the massacre in Phillips County, Arkansas.

Bratton agreed to represent the cheated sharecroppers, who also joined a new union, the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. Its founder, a black Delta native named Robert Hill, had no prior organizing experience but plenty of ambition. “The union wants to know why it is that the laborers cannot control their just earnings which they work for,” Hill announced as he urged black sharecroppers to each recruit 25 prospective members to form a lodge. Hill was especially successful in Phillips County, where seven lodges were established in 1919.

It took a lot of courage to defy the Arkansas Delta’s white elite. Men such as E.M. “Mort” Allen controlled the local economy, government, law enforcement, and courts. Allen was a latter-day carpetbagger, a Northerner who had come to Arkansas in 1906 to make his fortune. He married well and formed a partnership with a wealthy businessman. Together they developed the town of Elaine, a hub for the thriving lumber industry. Allen and the county’s white landowners understood that their continued prosperity depended on the exploitation of black sharecroppers and laborers. In a county where more than 75 percent of the population was African American, this wasn’t a task to be taken lightly. In February 1919, the planters agreed to reduce the acreage of cotton in cultivation in anticipation of a postwar drop in demand. If they gave their tenants a fair settlement, their profits would shrink further. Allen spoke for the planters when he declared that “the old Southern methods are much the best,” and that the “Southern men can handle the negroes all right and peaceably.”

more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/16/america-s-forgotten-mass-lynching-when-237-people-were-murdered-in-arkansas.html

[Scuba]

1. Funny, this never was mentioned when I studied American History in high school.

[Baitball Blogger]

5. We have to wait for it to be played out on the silverscreen.

It's bad when only Hollywood can be depended on to document history.

[Fred Sanders]

2. But that is almost as long ago as the Crusades? What can we possibly learn from history in America?

Opening the eyes and ears of folks to reality versus make believe is tough work in America, both history and real news are passively censored.

That is what happens when the Brian Williams of America feed the country 3 minutes of carefully presented news, 10 minutes of hugely expensive commercials and 17 minutes of Pablum for the mind and call it a "national newscast".

If folks in America knew too much about the violent and murderous history there would be just too much focus on Justice and not enough on fear.

[mountain grammy]

7. God fearing white southerners just doing what they do,

torturing and murdering. Racism is over, dontcha know, it's in the past. So says our know nothing chief justice.

[Hestia]

3. As a result of this, blacks left on trains by the droves to the North, where it wasn't much better

but at least whites couldn't use the cover of crops to kill the blacks. The exodus was so bad for the plantations, white men would take over the trains and force the blacks off.

The first half of Land of Opportunity: One Family's Quest for the American Dream in the Age of Crack by William M. Adler really gets into this early history.

The second half of the book discusses the Chambers Brothers in Detroit and the first wave of money from crack after the shuttering of the auto factories in Detroit. Federal laws hadn't been enacted yet against crack so the Chambers brothers made millions and only got light sentences. I think New Jack City is based on their story.

Great book.

ETA: Land of Opportunity used to be the slogan of Ark. but even the lawmakers were aware that wasn't even close to being true in Ark. so they changed it to the Natural State, which the Kock Bros. are trying to prove untrue also.

[leveymg]

4. Similar to massacres of small farmers by Cattlemen Assoc. in Wyoming, as told in Heaven's Gate

Last edited Mon Feb 16, 2015, 12:54 PM - Edit history (1)

Across America during the late 19th and early 20 centuries, wealthy industrialists, planters and stockmen had similar ideas that they could simply do what they wanted with land and factories they controlled. Until the FDR Administration, they often killed or drove off anyone who dared stand up to them. This was the general practice in rural areas and places where captive political machines controlled local government. The rich were particularly violent with union organizers, recent immigrants, Indians, Mexicans and Black people.

Rarely did the federal government, the courts, or the local police stand in the way of large landowners and factory owners. Governors and State authorities, who had control over militias, were almost always in their back pockets. Those who stood their ground in the face of force were vilified as radicals and criminals, and systematically assassinated by death squads. Uprisings in Johnson Co., Wyoming were put down like those in the Philippines at the time, a model for counterinsurgency doctrine that was carried out in El Salvador during the Reagan Administration. Violent suppression of poor populations, and the use of terrorism and arbitrary police killings, is a largely untold history of America. We still see traces of this in places like Ferguson, MO.

By the way, Heaven's Gate was a modern masterpiece, albeit overly long and badly reedited. Cimino's film was a loose retelling of events in the 1890s in Johnson Co., Wyoming, where the poor actually fought back. It's commercial failure was largely due to hostility by a conservative press against its message of organized armed resistance to exploitation and murder in America.

[RoccoRyg]

18. That...

and Cimino's obsessive behavior during the filming that went way over budget. This led to film producers taking back control of the finances from directors, who were allowed more creative control during the New Hollywood era.

[StopTheNeoCons]

6. Right wing American white males are terrorists of the worst kind...nt

[glasshouses]

8. They were not allowed to own guns

[billh58]

10. Or anything else

for that matter.

[glasshouses]

11. If they had been staring down 300 rifle barrels stories like this wouldn't have happened

[billh58]

12. Maybe, but the North

had thousands of guns, and it was a long, hard fought war just to get to Jim Crow. There were more endemic problems than guns and violence in the Jim Crow segregated South. It would take fifty more years just to get rid of "back of the bus" laws.

And remember, the American Indians had guns. That didn't turn out too well either.

[glasshouses]

13. understood but I believe many of these stories in the early 1900's would have turned out

differently if Whites hadn't made it illegal for African Americans to own guns.

It's a lot easier for these jackasses
to ride to a home and drag people out when they knew there were no guns in the home.

[billh58]

14. I would agree that some

atrocities may not have happened, but it was not guns that eventually prevailed against Jim Crow segregation -- it was determination, courage, and great leadership from the likes of Martin Luther King and others. The same thing happened in South Africa, and again it was not guns that defeated apartheid, but will of the people.

Racism is a disease that is mainly cured by interaction, perseverance, and time.

[SunSeeker]

16. Exactly. Shooting at police would have only gotten them killed quicker.

And the police would have called in government troops to finish the rest of the "murderous rebellion" off. The protestors would have lost the moral authority in the fight.

Gandhi didn't pick peaceful resistance just because he thought it was nice. He picked this strategy because that is what works when fighting for change within your own country.

[Blue_Tires]

9. kick

[Spitfire of ATJ]

15. Seems every "race war" in the US has been where white people go on a rampage.

[DeSwiss]

17. K&R

- What is really bizarre here, is that one can so easily compile a list of the more significant 20th Race Riots Against Black Communities In America as if one were describing some rare stamps or butterflies in a collection, and nobody even blinks.....

1906 Atlanta riots
1917 East St. Louis riots
1919 Omaha riots
1919 Chicago riots
1921 Tulsa riots

[RoccoRyg]

19. The difference...

From what I've read about race riots in American history, I've noticed a pattern. Black people riot when one of them is killed or beaten by whites, but white people riot when one of them is mildly inconvenienced by blacks.

[billh58]

20. From the same EJI report:

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/fbi-probes-claim-suspects-in-1946-georgia-mass-lynching-may-be-alive/ar-BBhDjlo

A report by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) published last week found at least 700 more lynchings than had previously been recorded in southern states, renewing calls from campaigners for any suspects still at large to be brought to justice before it is too late.

The Moore’s Ford incident, widely described as America’s last mass lynching, stands out as a particularly brutal case even in Georgia, where more lynchings were recorded between 1877 and 1950 than in any other state, according to the EJI study. The report was the result of almost five years of investigations into lynchings in 12 southern states.

No one was ever prosecuted for the killings on 25 July 1946 of two black couples in their 20s: George and Mae Murray Dorsey, and Dorothy and Roger Malcom. According to unconfirmed claims from the time that are now asserted by campaigners, Dorothy Malcom was heavily pregnant and her unborn baby was cut from her body by the attackers.

There are no words to express the depth of the depravity that so-called "Americans" exhibited during this period. To think that the mindset that enabled these atrocities still exists is deplorable, but true.