Author to speak on Elaine massacre

In 2005, writer Robert Whitaker was researching a book on the rate of incarceration of black men in the United States when he came across information about the 1919 race massacre in Elaine.

"I was stunned," Whitaker says from Cambridge, Mass., where he works for the nonprofit Mad in America, a web magazine about mental health. "Why didn't I know about this? The second thing was that it was clear that this was unsettled history, and that attracted me."

The result was Whitaker's 2008 book, On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice that Remade a Nation. He will give a lecture on the book Sunday in Helena-West Helena, which is the Phillips County seat and is about 25 miles north of Elaine.

The lecture is part of a series presented by the Delta Cultural Center, which will culminate next September, 100 years after the massacre, with the unveiling of a monument in Helena-West Helena dedicated to those who were killed.

Whitaker's book investigates what happened on the night of Sept. 30, 1919 and the next few days near Elaine, when black sharecroppers were meeting to form a union and were attacked by a white mob, which eventually included federal troops from Little Rock.

There are estimates that more than 100 black men, women and children were killed, but some researchers say the number was much higher. Whitaker also explores the origins of the violence and the aftermath, which resulted in a landmark legal decision.

Among the dead in Phillips County were five white men. More than 100 black men were arrested, and 12 were tried and sentenced to be executed. Their attorney was Scipio Africanus Jones of Little Rock; in the 1923 U.S. Supreme Court case Moore v. Dempsey, he represented six of the 12.

"Every schoolchild in America should learn about Scipio Africanus Jones," Whitaker says. "What he did was extraordinary. He is the first great civil rights attorney in the United States."

The high court ruled that the men, whose trials were rushed affairs influenced by mobs, had been denied due process guaranteed by the 14th Amendment and overturned their sentences.

"When you start to understand that case, it really gives you a new understanding of American legal and constitutional history," Whitaker says. "I saw this as such a pivotal moment. It set the foundation for the civil rights movement and the incorporation of the Bill of Rights into constitutional guarantees."

For decades, details of the violence near Elaine were almost forgotten and what was told was often from a skewed, mostly white perspective.

"You really couldn't find that much about it in the larger public discussion," Whitaker says. "There was good work being done by Arkansas historians, and some legal historians had written about its importance, but as a larger story it really wasn't there. You don't really see much at all written about it until 1965."

The summer and early autumn of 1919 was a particularly turbulent time in America. Veterans were returning from World War I to a country divided over subjects such as labor issues and communism. Deadly race riots broke out in cities across the country, including Chicago and Washington.

"I see this as a national tragedy," Whitaker says. "It was not just a thing of the South or a thing of Arkansas."

Weekend on 09/20/2018