A century ago next month, on Sept. 30, 1919, one of the darkest, most secretive mass murders of African Americans in Arkansas, began, as armed men as strikebreakers, sought to break up a meeting of farm laborers at the Hoop Spur Church three miles north of the tiny hamlet of Elaine in rural Phillips County.
Gunfire was exchanged at a church meeting, and the result was a virtual three-week massacre so broad and violent in scope that, for almost a century, little was said or written of this event.
The area of our state where this action occurred was in some of the most profitable tillage acreages in the Arkansas Delta. Indeed, it was farming which was the subject of controversy and the wages paid for labor in the fields that sparked the event.
At the end of World War I, the resistance to authority came as many of the local laborers, earlier conscripted for military service and for the first time being outside their homes in the Arkansas Delta for long periods of time, saw a more free and tolerant America.
Many of these former soldiers were back home in the Arkansas Delta, where things were certainly now the same as the North or abroad.
Changes were needed, but local resistance to the sharecropping formula which suited the Delta land barons only fueled suspicion, mistrust and hatred.
The events that occurred in Phillips County during the next three to four weeks, as well as subsequent trials, lawsuits over the next several years have seldom been talked or written about over the years.
The phrases "beyond historical inquiry" and "searching for the truth" of those events will seem to domino over all logic in the state's long and torturous dark history of race and individual freedoms.
Over the next 60 days, there will be symposiums, forums, speeches and talks given by many modern-day experts trying to explain or, in some fashion, give the details as known and proven by the historical record of this truly horrific event.
Politicians of today will try to soothe this awful story, calling out the atrocities found in the historical record, by the use of excuses of personal panic, fear of economic collapse and dread of the upsetting of the social order of the day.
A son of the Delta, Grif Stockley, writing in the preface of "The Elaine Massacre and Arkansas: A Century of Atrocity and Resistance, 1819-1919," edited by Guy Lancaster, says Lancaster, perhaps makes the soundest reasoning of these events.
"Lancaster cogently explains that the massacre in Phillips County in 1919 must be understood as representing a "continuum of history," and remain in its proper context -- "that it be presented not as singular, not as unique, not as an atrocity sui generis without equal in the legacy of white supremacy in the United States," Stockley wrote.
Today, most Arkansans have little knowledge and probably less interest in seeing and hearing of these events in the Delta a century ago.
There is no doubt of the plethora of unknowns, such as the of the number of people killed, where the bodies are buried, or even how the then governor of the state of Arkansas was able to call out military units for the capture and execution of these minority citizens.
What good does all this examination and re-examination of this dark hour in Arkansas' history profit us today?
Take a good, long look at the nation.
Take a good, long, hard look at ourselves today.
Is there room in America today for such wanton bloodshed perpetrated over a bias, or a hatred that seems to transcend mankind and social order.
The people, this past week in El Paso, Texas, maybe a century from today will still be trying to answer the same questions of their tragedy as we in Arkansas ask about the Elaine Massacre of 1919.
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Maylon Rice is a former journalist who worked for several northwest Arkansas publications. He can be reached via email at [email protected]. Opinions expressed are those of the author.
Editorial on 08/14/2019