"The Troubles in Arkansas" was a front-page headline in The New York Times 150 years ago this month. The story, printed on Dec. 27, 1871, told of racial violence in the Delta, an episode later labeled as "the Chicot County Race War" or "the Chicot County Massacre."
The news was emblematic of the times, as Reconstruction roiled Arkansas and other states of the former Confederacy, before white rule came roaring back after 1876 and Jim Crow laws began enforcing racial segregation once again.
The inflammatory events in and around the county seat of Lake Village seem startling in retrospect, because Black Arkansans were the main aggressors and whites were the main targets. That was the reverse of the period's normal equation as Black liberties won by the Civil War were squelched in sometimes brutal fashion by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists.
Today the Chicot County bloodshed flickers only dimly in history's annals. A search of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette archives finds not a single listing for "Chicot County Race War" or "Chicot
County Massacre" over the last quarter of a century. Nor do any articles show up in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly archive files.
The Central Arkansas Library System's indefatigable Encyclopedia of Arkansas does offer a summary of the turbulence. The sources it lists online are mostly stories printed in 1871 and 1872 by the Arkansas Gazette and other newspapers of that time.
The encyclopedia's account begins with a snapshot of events:
"In late 1871, Chicot County was taken over by several hundred African Americans. The murder of an African American lawyer prompted the area's Black citizens to kill the men jailed for their role in the murder and take over the area.
"Many white residents fled, escaping by steamboat to Memphis and other nearby river towns. ... The situation arose, in part, from the radical wing of the Republican Party exercising its power in choosing local officials. Both Mississippi and Chicot counties' populations were primarily Black, with Blacks outnumbering whites four to one in Chicot County."
Chicot County had ranked before the Civil War as one of the most prosperous in the state, thanks primarily to the slave labor on large plantations that grew cotton, corn and fruit around Lake Chicot, an offshoot of the Mississippi River. That antebellum economy dissolved after 1865. Reconstruction gave former slaves the rights to vote and hold office, while at least temporarily disenfranchising former Confederates.
Many Chicot County freedmen were active in the 1868 elections, which brought Republicans to power statewide, in large measure thanks to the new Black voters. The county's beleaguered planters backed Democratic candidates. But the county's population was predominantly Black, so Republicans swept the voting.
A key figure in the violence that broke out in 1871 was a well-educated Black Republican politician, James W. Mason, illegitimate son of a prominent prewar slaveholder. Under Reconstruction, Mason became the first documented Black postmaster in the United States, serving the town of Sunnyside. He later was elected to the state Senate.
"Mason's abilities, as well as his charismatic personality, made it possible for him to draw a large number of supporters for any cause he espoused," recounts the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. "This made many local whites blame him for the violence that erupted in 1871."
A prelude to the December strife began in April with separate appointments of Mason and rival Black politician E.D. Ragland as Chicot County probate judge. Mason managed to install himself in the profitable office, while Ragland was forced to leave the county. After more confrontations in the summer, Mason held his ground as tensions percolated.
The ensuing racial violence seems to have been sparked in December when Black lawyer Walthall G. Wynn, possibly Mason's brother-in-law, was fatally shot in a Lake Village general store that sold liquor.
In an era when newspapers regularly reprinted dispatches from other papers, part of The New York Times front-page coverage on Dec. 27, 1871, came from the Vicksburg (Miss.) Herald. Its headline: "Negroes in Armed Possession of a Village--Three White Murderers Lynched by Them--Other Lawless Acts."
The Vicksburg paper's account, peppered with inflammatory language regarding the Black actions, reported: "It appears that on Monday, John Sanders, Curtis Garrett and a Mr. Dugan became engaged in a political discussion with a Negro lawyer named G.W. Wynn in the barroom kept by Garrett. High words passed between Sanders and Wynn, when the former procured a bowie knife from Garrett and stabbed Wynn in the neck, killing him instantly.
"The three white men who took part in the quarrel were arrested at once and lodged in jail. The Negroes became very much infuriated and threatened vengeance, and for several days rumors of mob violence were rife, and yet the authorities took no steps whatsoever to prevent it.
"Friday last, a large crowd of armed Negroes assembled around the County Jail and demanded the keys of the sheriff. He at once surrendered them, when the fiends entered the jail, took out Sanders, Garrett and Dugan, and shot, beat and battered them in the most horrible manner, besmearing the walls and fences with their blood, and then striking their bodies with every imaginable weapon. The savages next repaired to the house in which Wynn was killed and tore it down and destroyed everything it contained.
"Intense excitement prevailed, and many of the white citizens were moving their families away to places of safety, the bloodthirsty mob having threatened to burn the town and kill every white person in it. The sheriff and other officers appeared unable to do anything with the mob, and no one could tell where the bloody work would end."
Also printed on The New York Times' Dec. 27 front page was a letter from Mason, seemingly written after the fatal shooting of Wynn but before the three white assailants were killed.
Mason wrote that Wynn "has fallen another victim to Ku Klux violence and of hatred to Republican principles, simply because he dared uphold the right, and to speak in behalf of the weak and needy. My heart is too full to write. The spirit of rebellion and hatred to the National Government is more bitter now than ever. ... Martial law ought to be declared throughout the entire South."
During the final week of 1871 and into 1872, newspapers printed dire descriptions of the situation, some exaggerated or wholly untrue. A paper in Bangor, Maine, quoted a report from Little Rock asserting that stores and homes had been looted. The dispatch said that after the three white men were killed, groups of Blacks went to the Saunders home demanding money. It was paid, according to the story, but the vigilantes then "killed all the stock of mules, horses and cows owned by large planters in the vicinity."
Many newspaper reports blamed the Radical Republicans for the trouble. According to the Jan. 4, 1872, Galveston Daily News, "The instructions and advice that the Radicals have been so long industriously instilling in the Negro mind are bearing their natural fruit. The outbreak at Chicot was the legitimate offspring of such advice."
Republican-backed newspapers disputed these accounts. One such paper, the Little Rock Journal, wrote: "We learn from the Governor [Ozro A. Hadley] that the reports of ravishing and various other excesses reported by the telegrams are not true. The mob have charge of the town and seem to be holding it under system. They have pressed prisoners and mules, etc., into use, but otherwise have not interfered with the rights of citizens."
The Encyclopedia of Arkansas notes that the governor sent his adjutant general Keyes Danforth to try to contain the situation. By then, Chicot County's sheriff had asked for federal troops. On Jan. 6, 15 members of the State Guard had been dispatched to Lake Village. Later in the month, 250 U.S. soldiers were sent from New Orleans.
Although these troops remained only a short time, they helped to bring an uneasy peace to the county. The governor's guards stayed until late April, by which time tensions seemed to have eased.
After all the tumult, Mason retained his political power. He was elected county sheriff in November 1872. Meanwhile, the days of Republican ascendancy were dwindling. In 1873, the General Assembly crafted a constitutional amendment that would grant political rights to all ex-Confederates. Voter approval led to the return of segregationist Democratic rule, which persisted for most of a century.
As white supremacy regained its hold on Arkansas, Chicot County became one of the last strongholds of Black authority. As late as 1883, almost all of the county's elective offices were still held by Blacks, before legalized segregation again took its grip statewide and prevailed until the Civil Rights Era.
Guy Lancaster, editor of the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, suggests that the paucity of information about the Chicot County troubles is "what I, for want of a better term, will call the 'exemplar problem.'
"That is, one particular event starts to stand out for a whole phenomenon," explains Lancaster, whose latest published book is "American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching" (University of Arkansas Press). "It attracts a lot of attention and research. And the more attention and research something attracts, the more it will attract in the future, because the addition of all that secondary literature makes the bar for additional work much lower."
He cites the example of the Central High School crisis of 1957-59: "There are a number of very interesting stories of desegregation, and opposition to it, all across Arkansas. But Central High has acquired enough mass that it's practically its own industry now.
"Especially if you have limited time and resources, it becomes easier to delve into the literature surrounding these exemplar events and perhaps offer a different interpretation than it is to tackle something unexplored. This is not to say that all new publications on Central High or Elaine or other subjects of equal stature are by any means redundant or unnecessary, because we always need new scholarship to refine our views of even the best-known events."
Lancaster believes "that we are going to see more research on some of these lesser-known events in the future. I think that the threshold is becoming lower for all kinds of research, especially with the advent of so many digital resources."
In today's Chicot County, elected officials make up a racially mixed group, while the county's population is no longer as overwhelmingly Black. Figures from the 2020 census include 53.1 percent Black, 38.7 percent white, 5.7 percent Latino and 2.5 percent other or unreported.
The mayor of Lake Village is among that 2.5-percent sliver. He is a second-generation Chinese American named Joe Dan Yee. A longtime Chicot County resident, Yee is still fluent in Chinese.
It's hard to imagine where or how his ethnicity might have fit into the racially fractured Chicot County of 1871. And that is a marker, perhaps, of at least some small advance in Arkansas Delta race relations over the past 150 years.
Jack Schnedler retired in 2011 as the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's deputy managing editor for Features.