ELAINE -- "Nobody owns the story of Elaine," Grif Stockley, the author of a comprehensive account of the 1919 Elaine massacre, told people gathered Saturday on the city's Main Street.
Stockley and folks from across the state were there to memorialize the killings of hundreds of black sharecroppers at the hands of white landowners 97 years ago. Saturday's opening of Turning Point Park marked the first physical commemoration of the massacre after it was largely ignored, covered up and nearly forgotten over the past century, said Stockley, author of the book Blood in Their Eyes.
"Hopefully this is just a start," he said. "This is something that's absolutely necessary if we are ever going to begin to come to terms with our history of our race relations."
Three miles north of Elaine, in a small now-vanished community called Hoop Spur, about 100 unionized black sharecroppers met Sept. 30, 1919, to debate how to collect better payment for their crops. It was the Jim Crow era, when black farmers often fell into cycles of indentured servitude.
It was the year of the so-called Red Summer, when racial and labor conflicts were breaking out across the country. Tensions were high, and a confrontation escalated into a shootout that killed one white man, according to Stockley's account.
The next morning, the Phillips County sheriff led a militia of up to 1,000 armed men to quell the unrest. With the assistance of hundreds of military troops sent by Gov. Charles Hillman Brough, white mobs commenced a "slaughter," Stockley writes. The number of those killed is still disputed, but many historians have reported estimates around 250.
"This event didn't happen in isolation, these events are happening across the country. Elaine is kind of unique in some ways because many of these events don't happen in rural areas, many of them are a more urban phenomenon," said John Kirk, a professor at the Institute of Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. "It's also slightly different in that it's also on a much larger scale. Elaine is the worst in terms of casualty rates among these Red Summer occurrences of 1919."
It was an event that some say the community had suppressed for reasons of guilt or shame.
"They don't really want the publicity. They want to keep it a secret, their own dark secret -- they want to let it stay that way," said Thomas Brown, an older black man who serves on the Elaine City Council.
"To the older generation, it's embarrassing. It's a scar," he said. "They are the ones that really don't want to open it up, whereas the young curious people would really like to know, because this is like the third or fourth generation, and they're not as close to it. I want my children to know about it, and I want to tell them. I don't want them finding out about it in a book."
Sitting near the isolating confluence of the White and Mississippi rivers, the town has been reshaped by the mechanized agricultural economy.
What was once a thriving agrarian society has been whittled down to a population of roughly 600. Restaurants and grocery stores stand shuttered. Hollowed-out storefronts -- many with only a single standing wall -- line the small downtown. And like an old artifact of segregation, the city's Main Street separates the black and white neighborhoods.
Only in recent decades has the massacre slowly begun to gain more attention from historians and academics.
The story, as told by people such as Stockley and Robert Whitaker, author of On the Laps of Gods, eventually reached Sheila Walker, whose family had long since moved from Arkansas to Chicago. She discovered that the story of the Elaine massacre was in part her own.
Walker's great-grandmother, Sally Giles, was at that sharecroppers' gathering in 1919.
"In '73, my great-grandmother started talking about something that happened to her when she was a girl," Walker recalled. "She said she had a premonition, she said that she knew that something was going to happen. And then they started shooting, she said 'I started seeing people getting killed, I took a group of kids and ran out the back door to the woods.' And then she goes into hysterics. Cannot continue with the story."
"Later I learned it was post-traumatic stress," she said.
Subsequent attempts to hear her great-grandmother's story also proved fruitless, and it wasn't until Walker found Stockley's book that she pieced it together.
"There's a lot of shame and guilt behind what happened here," Walker said before Saturday's small crowd. "But you can flip the script on it. Embrace what happened here, talk about it. It may be the way to join a community, to connect the black and the white community together."
"Let this community be the model for what should be happening in America today," she said.
Metro on 10/02/2016