Occasionally I am asked by scholars, journalists, teachers, and students of varying grades to comment on the Elaine Massacre of 1919. While many of the questions are repetitive, from time to time a novel idea or question emerges from the inquiries.
Often the questions deal with the names of those killed in the massacre, while others have dealt with the lives of the men put on death row, the "Elaine 12" after they were released from prison.
However, questions around one subject area seem to be popping up with increasing frequency. Those questions center upon the idea that the massacre was an attempt to cover up a massive theft of land from African American farmers.
I first heard the narrative of ostensible land theft soon after I began researching the massacre, during my first trip to Elaine. Shortly after arriving, I was introduced to several descendants of massacre survivors. When I asked what the descendants had been told about the massacre, several recounted that their families had owned vast holdings of land in the area and that their ancestors' land had been stolen after the massacre.
Having read all the books, academic articles, and newspaper reports I could find, I had never encountered a single source that had explored this as a possible motive for the violence.
In nearly every source that I read, the members of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America were described as tenant farmers and sharecroppers--people who did not own land. Too, after reviewing the 1910 and 1920 decennial census, I did not see the large community of Black landowners described by the descendants.
On my second trip to Elaine, I asked more questions and even requested that the descendants provide the names of their landowning ancestors or that they identify where their ancestors' homes had been. I received no names or locations. What I did receive were more requests that I continue researching their land claims and that I share everything that I found with them.
When I asked additional questions, the descendants maintained that the records were likely destroyed or discarded as part of an elaborate scheme to defraud them. I tried in vain to explain that land records are some of the most abundant and best maintained records in our nation. Land sales were recorded in newspapers, notarial offices, deeds, tax records, insurance maps, city directories, local enumerations, and in the federal census. Land records are kept on the city, county, state, and on the federal level.
I never found the large Black-owned farms described by the descendants. I found no records that African Americans owned most of the town and the farms around it, contrary to the claims of descendants now being presented to a broader audience in the documentary "We Have Just Begun," which has been screening around the state.
The search for records was not a complete failure. My research revealed it was virtually impossible to break free of the system of debt peonage created by Southern planters. Debt made it impossible for them to accumulate wealth, and white landowners were not willing to sell them land.
Ida Barnett-Wells explained the system clearly and succinctly in "The Arkansas Race Riot" (1920): "The terrible crime these men had committed was to organize their members into a union for the purpose of getting the market price for their cotton, to buy land of their own and to employ a lawyer to get settlements of their accounts with their white landlords. Cotton was selling for more than ever before in their lives. These Negroes believed their chance had come to make some money for themselves and get out from under the white landlord's thumb."
When a student once asked me just why the descendants would believe that poor sharecroppers owned huge farms, I began to imagine how traumatizing the massacre must have been for the children who survived the event--hiding in the swamps, seeing your neighbors hunted and slaughtered, and being thrown off a plantation for being the son or daughter of a union member; returning to your family's sharecropping shack and discovering that your home had been ransacked and anything of value had been stolen by the members of the mob; seeing your stolen furniture and clothing in the home of your landlord, as did the wife of union leader Frank Moore wife did, and being unable to do or say anything about it; leaving with just the clothes on your back, and being told by the adults around you never to speak of the event.
A child's recollection of this event could be that they were driven from their farm instead of a sharecropper's smaller plot. They passed their trauma-saturated accounts to their children and grandchildren. In those accounts, they were run from their homes and their farms.
The failure of memory does nothing to diminish the transgressions to which they were subjected. Too, there have been plenty of massacres and race riots throughout American history during which Black landowners were dispossessed of land, businesses, and property.
However, those claims can in many cases be verified by reference to surviving documents, especially when violent mobs specifically drove away African Americans, who were then forced to forfeit their property. Just as white vigilantes posed happily for photographs with their lynching victims during the Jim Crow era, neither were they shy about openly stealing land or other property about African Americans, and where they did so they often left behind evidence of the fact.
The Elaine Massacre, one our nation's most heinous acts of racialized violence, is made no less grievous without the theft of land. There has been no accounting for the dead or reparative justice for the descendants of survivors.
What research has also shown is that land records, tax records, census records, and a litany of other sources provide researchers with a clear understanding of who benefited from the system of debt peonage, which has been described as "slavery by another name."
It was my hope that, as the nation approached the centennial commemoration of the event, the descendants of those that benefited from the theft of the sharecroppers' labor would come forward and attempt to improve the lives those that their fortunes were built upon. I guess that the memories of the planters' descendants have failed them as well.
Dr. Brian K. Mitchell is the Director of Research and Interpretation at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and the co-author, with Grif Stockley and Guy Lancaster, of the revised edition of "Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Massacre of 1919" (University of Arkansas Press, 2020).