The Dark Side--When Was Minnesota Not So Nice

 

Jubilant Whites celebrate the beating, torture, and lynching of three Black circus roustabouts in Duluth, Minnesota in 1920.  This image was printed on postcards and sold briskly for years after the lynching, as described by Minnesotan Bob Dylan in the openings verse of Desolation Row.

Note--This blog has sung the praises of heroic action and determined Resistance of Minnesotans this year.  But despite the popular progressive traditions, there has been a dark history as well.

Ida B. Wells and the Black press including W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Crisis and the Chicago Daily Defender  long exposed lynching as a brutal tool of oppression in the Jim Crow South.  Later Billie Holiday sang about the Strange Fruit she witnessed dangling from lamp posts and bridges on her tours of the South.  Lynchings were a terrible thing, civilized people agreed, but they were a Southern thing.

That’s why much of the nation was shocked to learn that on June 15, 1920 that three Black circus workers were dragged from a Duluth, Minnesota jail, beaten, and hung by a howling mob of as many as 1,500 citizens. 

The busy Lake Superior port and principal city of the Iron Range, with a tiny Black population of its own, seemed like the last place in the country to expect such an outrage.  It was a city of hard-working immigrants, most of them Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, and German.  Many of them, especially the Finns, were Socialists, Wobblies, and now Communists with roots in the labor and union movements.  It was not that violence itself was unexpected, it was just that it was associated with the epic labor battles that had long raged across the Iron Range.

During the World War “decent citizens” were worked up into a frenzy of patriotism and came to view the immigrant radicals, most of them opposed to the war, as threats.  The refusal of workers to abide by patriotic calls for labor peace and keep up the flow of vital taconite ore to the freighters and down to the steel mills of Gary and Chicago stoked more outrage.

In September of 1919 a young Finish immigrant, Olli Kinkkonen, thought by a mob to be a Draft dodger, was beaten, tarred, and feathered, and lynched in a downtown park.  No one was ever charged or tried for that murder.  So violence and lynching were not unknown in Duluth.

1919 was also a year when race riots erupted in Chicago and in other Midwestern cities where waves of Blacks from the South poured into to take war time jobs.  Although Duluth, with only a handful of Blacks residents, escaped the rioting, it did not escape the national hysteria that followed.

So, the stage was set for the unexpected.

Lured by advertising like this for the John Robinson Circus, two young people were drawn to the grounds to watch the set up--and maybe for a romantic rendezvous.

The circus was in town.  On June 14 the John Robinson Circus, a mid-sized traveling show, rolled into town.  As always, the arrival of the circus stirred local excitement.  Two young people, Irene Tusken, 19, and James Sullivan, 18 were among the many who came down to the grounds where the show was being set up to watch the excitement.  The Circus encouraged that—it was good for ticket sales.  By design or otherwise Tusken and Sullivan, who arrived separately, got together on the grounds.  They drifted around to the relative isolation of an area behind the big top.  A gang of Black roustabouts was unloading the menagerie tent nearby.

What happened next is a matter of confusion and controversy.  There may—or may not—have been some kind of confrontation between Sullivan and some of the roustabouts.  Later that evening police received a call from Sullivan’s father claiming that his son had been attacked and robbed.  The boy was questioned and told police that five or six of the workers attacked and robbed him and then raped Tusken as he was held at gun point.  Tusken seemed frightened and confused, but generally went along with Sullivan’s story.

All 150 Black workers from the circus were rounded up and lined up against the railroad tracks.  Sullivan was brought there to identify the alleged assailants.  He identified six and said a few others might have been involved.  The six were taken to jail.

Overnight rumors flew around town, including reports that Tusken had been murdered.  In fact, the story of the rape fell apart almost immediately.  A doctor examining her the next morning found no physical evidence of assault—bruising, scratches, abrasions—or of semen.

The respectable press of Duluth reported the mob action but also fanned the flames by publishing exaggerated claims and rumors.

Local newspaper reports sensationalized the charges, rumors ran rampant.  Through the day of the 15th a crowd grew around the jail until it became a mob of more than 1,000.  An attack on the jail was expected.  Authorities ordered deputies, guards, and police on the scene not to resist an attack with firearms.

When the mob moved on to the jail, police fought back as best they could with fire hoses and truncheons.  But they were vastly outnumbered and after a vicious melee in which men on both sides were injured, they were overwhelmed.  In fact, the resistance had only inflamed the mob who managed to seize three men—Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie.  They were beaten inside the jail and then hauled to the street where they were put on sham trial.

They were taken to the center of town, the corner of 1st Street and 2nd Avenue East where they were beaten again and hung from a lamp pole.  The mob posed for pictures with the bodies which were published in the press and later sold as souvenir post cards.

The three other men suspected in the rape were still in the jail.  A shifting mob kept up a presence outside, threatening a new attack.  But it was not until the next morning that National Guard troops arrived to secure the jail and its prisoners who were moved to the St. Louis County Jail under heavy guard.

As the rape case against the victims evaporated over the next few days, the mob action drew national headlines.  Most were condemning.  Some Southern papers, however, openly gloated that Yankees were now awakening to the threat to White womanhood and were taking vigorous “corrective action.”

But next door in Superior, Wisconsin the local police chief pledged that, “We are going to run all idle Negroes out of Superior and they’re going to stay out.”  How many were actually rousted and deported is not certain, but all of the Blacks employed by a carnival visiting the city were fired and told to leave the city.

A Grand Jury was empaneled on June 17, but despite loads of evidence including photographs and the open boasts of ringleaders, the jury had a hard time bringing indictments.  After a struggle, 37 were indicted for participating in the lynching, 25 for rioting, and 12 for first degree murder.  Several were indicted on multiple charges.  In the end only three were convicted of rioting.

Of the Blacks suspected in the alleged rape and assault, the three survivors from the jail and four others were indicted for rape, but the charges against all but two were dropped.   William Miller was acquitted, and Max Mason was convicted and sentenced to serve seven to thirty years in prison.  Amid growing public outrage, Mason was released from prison after only four years on the proviso that he leave Minnesota and never return.  Somehow, I suspect he was never tempted to violate that provision.

Like many places after such a shameful atrocity, Duluth tried hard to forget it ever happened.  Willful amnesia it’s called.  But nagging reminders kept popping up.

Young Minnesotan Bob Dylan wrote of the lynchings in his classic 1965 song Desolation Row..

In 1965 Duluth born Bob Dylan, whose father was five years old and living two blocks from the lynching in 1920 opened his song Desolation Row with a reference to that awful night:

They’re selling postcards of the hanging

They’re painting the passports brown

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors

The circus is in town.  

In 2003, after a long public campaign, a stunning monument to the three lynching victims was unveiled—a plaza including three seven-foot-tall bronze statues across the street from the site of the lynching. The Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial was designed and sculpted by Carla J. Stetson, in collaboration with Anthony Peyton-Porter, a California-based Black writer who had taken an interest in the case.

Bas relief images of the three lynching victims over look a downtown Duluth plaza near the scene of their murders.

At the dedication Warren Read, the great-grandson of one of the most prominent leaders of the lynch mob told the crowd:

It was a long held family secret, and its deeply buried shame was brought to the surface and unraveled. We will never know the destinies and legacies these men would have chosen for themselves if they had been allowed to make that choice. But I know this: their existence, however brief and cruelly interrupted, is forever woven into the fabric of my own life. My son will continue to be raised in an environment of tolerance, understanding and humility, now with even more pertinence than before.

Read has since written The Lyncher in Me, a memoir of his family and of his own search for reconciliation with the decedents of Elmer Jackson.

When Was Minnesota Not So Nice—Strange Fruit Hung from Northern Trees

Jubilant Whites celebrate the beating, torture, and lynching of three Black circus roustabouts in Duluth, Minnesota in 1920.  This image was printed on postcards and sold briskly for years after the lynching, as described by Minnesotan Bob Dylan in the openings verse of Desolation Row.

Ida B. Wells and the Black press including W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Crisis and the Chicago Daily Defender had long exposed lynching as a brutal tool of oppression in the Jim Crow South.  Later Billie Holiday would sing about the Strange Fruit she witnessed dangling from lamp posts and bridges on her tours of the South.  Lynchings were a terrible thing, civilized people agreed, but they were a Southern thing.

That’s why much of the nation was shocked to learn that on June 15, 1920 that three Black circus workers were dragged from a Duluth, Minnesota jail, beaten, and hung by a howling mob of as many as 1,500 citizens. 

The busy Lake Superior port and principal city of the Iron Range, with a tiny Black population of its own, seemed like the last place in the country to expect such an outrage.  It was a city of hard working immigrants, most of them Finnish, Norwegian Swedish, and German.  Many of them, especially the Finns, were Socialists, Wobblies, and now Communists with roots in the labor and union movements.  It was not that violence itself was unexpected there, it was just that it was associated with the epic labor battles that had long raged across the Iron range.

During the World War “decent citizens” had been worked up into a frenzy of patriotism and had come to view the immigrant radicals, most of them opposed to the war, as threats.  The refusal of workers to abide by patriotic calls for labor peace and keep up the flow of vital taconite ore to the freighters and down to the steel mills of Gary and Chicago stoked more outrage.

In September of 1919 a young Finish immigrant, Olli Kinkkonen, thought by a mob to be a Draft dodger, was beaten, tarred, and feathered, and lynched in a downtown park.  No one was ever charged or tried for that murder.  So violence and lynching were not unknown in Duluth.

1919 had also been a year when race riots erupted in Chicago and in other Midwestern cities where waves of Blacks from the South had poured into the cities to take war time jobs.  Although Duluth, with only a handful of Blacks residents, had escaped the rioting, they had not escaped the national hysteria that followed.

So the stage was set for the unexpected.

Lured by advertising like this for the John Robinson Circus, two young people were drawn to the grounds to watch the set up--and maybe for a romantic rendezvous.

The circus was in town.  On June 14 the John Robinson Circus, a mid-sized traveling show, rolled into town.  As always, the arrival of the circus stirred local excitement.  Two young people, Irene Tusken, 19, and James Sullivan, 18 were among the many who came down to the grounds where the show was being set up to watch the excitement.  The Circus encouraged that—it was good for ticket sales.  By design or otherwise Tusken and Sullivan, who had arrived separately, got together on the grounds.  They drifted around to the relative isolation of an area behind the big top.  A gang of Black roustabouts was unloading the menagerie tent nearby.

What happened next is a matter of confusion and controversy.  There may—or may not—have been some kind of confrontation between Sullivan and some of the roustabouts.  Later that evening police received a call from Sullivan’s father claiming that his son had been attacked and robbed.  The boy was questioned and told police that five or six of the workers attacked and robbed him and then raped Tusken as he was held at gun point.  Tusken seemed frightened and confused, but generally went along with Sullivan’s story.

All 150 Black workers from the circus were rounded up and lined up against the railroad tracks.  Sullivan was brought there to identify the alleged assailants.  He identified six and said a few others might have been involved.  The six were taken to jail.

Overnight rumors flew around town, including reports that Tusken had been murdered.  In fact the story of the rape fell apart almost immediately.  A doctor examining her the next morning found no physical evidence of assault—bruising, scratches, abrasions—or of semen.

The respectable press of Duluth reported the mob action but also fanned the flames by publishing exaggerated claims and rumors.

Local newspaper reports sensationalized the charges, rumors ran rampant.  Through the day of the 15th a crowd grew around the jail until it became a mob of more than 1,000.  An attack on the jail was expected.  Authorities ordered deputies, guards, and police on the scene not to resist an attack with firearms.

When the mob moved on to the jail, police fought back as best they could with fire hoses and truncheons.  But they were vastly outnumbered and after a vicious melee in which men on both sides were injured they were overwhelmed.  In fact the resistance had only inflamed the mob who managed to seize three men—Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie.  They were beaten inside the jail and then hauled to the street where they were put on sham trial.

They were taken to the center of town, the corner of 1st Street and 2nd Avenue East where they were beaten again and hung from a lamp pole.  The mob posed for pictures with the bodies which were published in the press and later sold as souvenir post cards.

The three other men suspected in the rape were still in the jail.  A shifting mob kept up a presence outside, threatening a new attack.  But it was not until the next morning that National Guard troops arrived to secure the jail and its prisoners who were moved to the St. Louis County Jail under heavy guard.

As the rape case against the victims evaporated over the next few days, the mob action drew national headlines.  Most were condemning.  Some Southern papers, however, openly gloated that Yankees were now awakening to the threat to white womanhood and were taking vigorous “corrective action.”

But next door in Superior, Wisconsin the local police chief pledged that, “We are going to run all idle Negroes out of Superior and they’re going to stay out.”  How many were actually rousted and deported is not certain, but all of the Blacks employed by a carnival visiting the city were fired and told to leave the city.

A Grand Jury was empaneled on June 17, but despite loads of evidence including photographs and the open boasts of ringleaders, the jury had a hard time bringing indictments.  After a struggle, 37 were indicted for participating in the lynching, 25 for rioting, and 12 for first degree murder.  Several were indicted on multiple charges.  In the end only three were convicted of rioting.

Of the Blacks suspected in the alleged rape and assault, the three survivors from the jail and four others were indicted for rape, but the charges against all but two were dropped.   William Miller was acquitted, and Max Mason was convicted and sentenced to serve seven to thirty years in prison.  Amid growing public outrage, Mason was released from prison after only four years on the proviso that he leave Minnesota and never return.  Somehow I suspect he was never tempted to violate that provision.

Like many places after such a shameful atrocity, Duluth tried hard to forget it ever happened.  Willful amnesia it’s called.  But nagging reminders kept popping up.

Young Minnesotan Bob Dylan wrote of the lynchings in his classic 1965 song Desolation Row..

In 1965 Duluth born Bob Dylan, whose father was five years old and living two blocks from the lynching in 1920 opened his song Desolation Row with a reference to that awful night:

They’re selling postcards of the hanging

They’re painting the passports brown

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors

The circus is in town.  

In 2003, after a long public campaign, a stunning monument to the three lynching victims was unveiled—a plaza including three seven-foot-tall bronze statues across the street from the site of the lynching. The Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial was designed and sculpted by Carla J. Stetson, in collaboration with Anthony Peyton-Porter, a California-based Black writer who had taken an interest in the case.

Bas relief images of the three lynching victims over look a downtown Duluth plaza near the scene of their murders.

At the dedication Warren Read, the great-grandson of one of the most prominent leaders of the lynch mob told the crowd:

It was a long held family secret, and its deeply buried shame was brought to the surface and unraveled. We will never know the destinies and legacies these men would have chosen for themselves if they had been allowed to make that choice. But I know this: their existence, however brief and cruelly interrupted, is forever woven into the fabric of my own life. My son will continue to be raised in an environment of tolerance, understanding and humility, now with even more pertinence than before.

Read has since written The Lyncher in Me, a memoir of his family and of his own search for reconciliation with the decedents of Elmer Jackson.

 

 

Bullets and Nooses for Sharecroppers in 1919 Elaine Massacre

 

In 1919 Black sharecroppers in Arkansas who dared to start a union were attacked by posies and mobs.  Some of those rounded up were lynched, others were hunted down and shot.  Hundreds died.

1919 was a hell of a year in America.  In the wake of World War I long pent up tensions boiled to the surface from coast to coast.  The decades long open class war between the employing class and workers who demanded justice and equity through their labor unions which had been on partial abatement during war effort, reignited with a vengeance.  Bloody strikes erupted across the country—in the steel industry of the Northeast and Midwest; Chicago streetcar operators; harbor workers, tailors, tobacco workers, painters, streetcar operators in New York City; Western miners and lumberjacks, even Boston Police.  The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) despite being suppressed during the War and subject to nation-wide raids that summer was spreading a revolutionary brand of unionism, but even the stodgy American Federation of Labor (AFL) under pressure from their members was assuming a startling new militancy.  Many workers took heart from the revolution in Russia—a General Strike closed Seattle and unions formed a Soviet to manage it.

Employers, government, and the press reacted with predictable hysteria and a heavy hand.  The great Red Scare on and with it the greatest repression of dissent, personal, and civil rights in American history conducted by every level of government and law enforcement from the fledgling Bureau of Investigation of the U.S. Justice Department, through state police and militia, down to municipal police, and county sheriff’s posses—all frequently working hand in glove with company gun thugs and vigilante mobs.  Workers were shot, beaten, and tear gassed.  They were locked out of jobs and fired en masse, replaced with scabs.  They were kidnapped and forced to run gauntlets. Thousands were rounded up and jailed.   Hundreds deported.

At the same time long suppressed racial tensions exploded.  In cities like Chicago, Knoxville, and Washington, DC where Southern Blacks had flocked to find war work, the post-war recession pitted the new arrivals against White workers.  Deadly race riots broke out with White mobs attacking any Black they could find, burning neighborhoods and businesses.  In the South there was a resurgence of resistance to the imposition of Jim Crow laws which had been restricting every aspect of black civic and economic life since the end of Reconstruction.  When thousands of Black combat veterans of the Great War arrived back home they were less willing to bow down to White supremacy and many became leaders of resistance in their communities.  This terrified the Southern White establishment.  Lynching and night riding were on the rise as were wild rumors of Black insurrections that planned to kill all whites.

Wealth for the landowners, starvation for sharecroppers.  The porch of tenant farmer's porch shack groans under a day's worth of picked cotton.  But they they might not be paid for their crop for months and had no way of either confirming the price it was sold for or the fair and accurate weight of the crop.

All of these forces came together in an Arkansas back water, a rural Delta cotton belt enclave where Black sharecroppers out-numbered the White farmers who employed them 40-1.  On October 1, 1919 hundreds of members of a hastily raised posse and unorganized mobs from surrounding counties and from across the River in Mississippi began roaming the country around Elaine in Phillips County hunting and shooting down Blacks of all ages and sexes.  The hunt continued for three days.  Battle hardened Federal Troops called in to quell a “Black Insurrection” and separate and disarm both sides, joined in the general mayhem, adding a touch of military efficiency to the operation. 

The total Black death toll remains unknown but was at least 100 and local accounts put it at closer to 250 based on those who disappeared and were never found.  Hundreds more were arrested, held in a virtual concentration camp until 122 were indicted.  Twelve of these were sentenced to death by hanging.

Things had always been tough for sharecroppers in the Delta.  But they were getting worse.  The main problem was getting the settlements due them for the crops they raised for their landlords.  The landowners took the cotton to market without the sharecroppers present.  They sold it when convenient—often delaying months hoping for prices to rise—and would not pay their tenants until after that, or when convenient.  Meanwhile tenants with no other source of income borrowed against their crop to make purchases of necessities at stores that accepted script, often owned by the farmers themselves.  By Arkansas law a sharecropper could not leave his land until this debt was paid. 

The 1918 crops had generally gone to market in October.  Most sharecroppers in the area were not paid until the following July meaning extra months of borrowing.  Also, the plantation owners generally did not provide either proof of the price paid on delivery, or itemized bills of what was owned from the stores.  Sharecroppers were at the mercy of their landlords and held in something very close to slavery.

Local sharecroppers, spurred on by recently returned veterans began meeting secretly in the area during the late summer to discuss their options.  They boiled down to two:  a class action lawsuit against the owners or the formation of some kind of union.  A lawsuit—even if the poor sharecroppers could find a lawyer—would be expensive, take a longtime to resolve exposing the plaintiffs to retaliation by the landlords, and have little chance of success in Arkansas courts.  Organizing a union would be dangerous, but solidarity might offer some protection from retribution.  They hoped.

Robert L. Hill of Winchester, Arkansas, himself a Black tenant farmer, had organized the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America.  Several lodges were secretly formed that summer in the Elaine area.  In addition to representing the tenant farmers, it also sought to represent their wives and daughters who worked as cooks, maids, wet nurses, and “mammies” in plantation homes and in the homes of other local Whites.

The meeting called at Hoop Spur Church three miles from Elaine on September 29 was just the latest of the meetings.  About 100 sharecroppers crowded into the remote church building.  Organizers were aware that by now the Plantation owners had gotten wind of what was afoot.  As a precaution against nightriders, armed guards were posted outside the building.

As the meeting was going on inside three men, Deputy Sheriff Charles Pratt; W. A. Adkins, a Missouri-Pacific Railroad detective, and a Black trustee from the Phillips County Jail, pulled up in a car outside the church.   Some sort of confrontation occurred between the White men and the Black armed guards.  A gunfight erupted.  Who fired the first shot is unknown.  In the end it didn’t even make a difference. When it was over Pratt was dead, Adkins was wounded, and the trustee was fleeing on foot to the County Seat at Helena.  Knowing what was inevitably coming, the meeting quickly broke up and attendees scattered to their homes, many preparing to flee the area.

                          Lurid headlines whipped Whites into a frenzy of blood lust.

By the next morning the Phillips County Sheriff organized a posse to arrest or kill anyone involved in the meeting and shooting.  The core posse was made up of local plantation owners, their overseers and White employees, local businessmen, and what lay-a-bouts could be quickly rounded up.  As the day wore on, fueled by wild rumors and lurid newspaper headlines, hundreds more armed men poured into the area from surrounding counties and nearby Mississippi.  If the posse had ever truly been a law enforcement body under the control of the Sheriff, it quickly deteriorated into a raving mob.

White throng to join the official posse or just set out in mobs of their own to hunt Blacks.

It was a hunting party.  Blacks were shot down in their homes, whole families murdered.  Many more were chased down as they tried to escape on foot.  Some were armed and there was occasional resistance.  Five members of the mob were killed, but some of those were apparently struck by shots from their friends, many of whom had been drinking heavily through the day and following night.

County authorities wired Governor Charles Hillman Brough for troops to help suppress a supposed insurrection.  Brough was a Wilson progressive and like the President a former college professor with a PhD.  He also echoed the Wilson administration’s near hysteria over the Red menace.  In a speech in St. Louis during the War he said, “there existed no twilight zone in American patriotism” and called Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollete, who opposed the war, a Bolshevik leader.  And he was an unabashed supporter of the Jim Crow system.

Brough pressed the War Department for troops, which somewhat reluctantly agreed to dispatch 500 men from Camp Pike near Little Rock.  Most were Arkansas men awaiting discharge thus they were rather loosely organized for camp life, not in the cohesive units they were used to in France and serving under officers with whom they were unfamiliar and whom, as we shall see, soon lost control of the men.

Army Col. Isaak Jenks and Arkansas Governor Charles Hillman Brough arrive in Elaine with Federal troops as members of the mob look on.  The Army was supposed to disarm both side.  Instead troops simply joined the hunt.

The troops arrived on the scene during the day of October 2.  Their official mission was to disarm and separate both sides and assist in the arrest of the perpetrators of a riot and members of an insurrectionary cabal.  Many members of the mob were exhausted anyway and began to drift home, but others continued to arrive and join in the hunt.  The troops, who were fed frightening rumors, joined the hunt themselves.  Colonel Isaac Jenks, commander of the U.S. troops at Elaine, officially reported two Blacks killed by his troops, but the Memphis Press on reported that “Many Negroes are reported killed by the soldiers….”

This was later confirmed by an account by Sharpe Dunaway, of the Arkansas Gazette in 1925 who recalled that soldiers, “committed one murder after another with all the calm deliberation in the world, either too heartless to realize the enormity of their crimes, or too drunk on moonshine to give a continental darn.”

At least the troops were more efficient than the posse/mob in making arrests.  Over the next few days, they rounded up hundreds of men, just about every still breathing Black man they could find and placed them in an improvised bull pen near Helena.  The troops conducted “intense interrogation of the suspects” which often amounted to beatings, torture, and threats to family members.

Meanwhile the Southern press was having a field day passing on the wildest of rumors.  A headline in the Arkansas Gazette on October 3 screamed, “Negros Plan to Kill All Whites:  Slaughter was to Begin with 21 Prominent Men.”  E. M. Allen, a planter and real estate developer who became the spokesman for Phillips County’s white power structure, told the Helena World on October 7, “The present trouble with the Negroes in Phillips County is not a race riot. It is a deliberately planned insurrection of the Negroes against the whites directed by an organization known as the ‘Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America,’ established for the purpose of banding Negroes together for the killing of white people.”

Even the New York Times was not immune from the hysteria.  Under a headline that in part read, “Trouble traced to Socialist Agitators,” the paper breathlessly reported, “Additional evidence has been obtained of the activities of propagandists among the Negroes, and it is thought that a plot existed for a general uprising against the whites.” A white man had been arrested, the article added, and was “alleged to have been preaching social equality among the Negroes.”  Of course, no such White man was arrested—or ever existed.

The idea sprang from the assumption that Blacks were naturally too content with their lot and too stupid to organize themselves unless led astray and directed by devious revolutionists.

Governor Brough arrived personally on the scene in the company of the Federal troops.  He consulted with a group of local leaders designated the Committee of Seven who passed on every rumor that they heard or made up.  The Governor appointed the same men to lead his own “investigation” not into what happened or the response to it, but on how to prevent future insurrections.  The Governor told the press, “The situation at Elaine has been well handled and is absolutely under control. There is no danger of any lynching…. The white citizens of the county deserve unstinting praise for their actions in preventing mob violence.”

Violence wound down after three days, although there were sporadic shootings later, and more men were arrested when found in hiding.  Official estimates of the number of Blacks killed hovered around 100.  Local residents believed that the number was two to three times that.  No one will ever know for sure.  Most of the dead were buried quietly by their families, by whoever found their bodies, or mass unmarked graves dug by the troops.

Over the next few days some men who were vouched for by their employers were released from the bullpen.  285 were then transferred to the county jail, which had a capacity of only 40.  More torture was conducted, according to sworn affidavits by two posse members, T. K. Jones and H. F. Smiddy, in 1921, to extract confessions.

The original Elaine 12 were all sentenced to die in the electric chair before being split into two groups of six for re-trial.

October 31, 1919, the Phillips County Grand Jury indicted 122 of the prisoners on charges ranging from murder to, without apparent irony, night riding, a hang-over statue from the Reconstruction Era, aimed at the Ku Klux Klan. The trials began the next week. White attorneys from Helena were appointed by Circuit Judge J. M. Jackson to represent the first twelve black men to go to trial. Attorney Jacob Fink, who was appointed to represent Frank Hicks, admitted to the jury that he had not interviewed any witnesses. He made no motion for a change of venue, nor did he challenge a single prospective juror, taking the first twelve called. By November 5, 1919, the first twelve black men given trials had been convicted of murder and sentenced to die in the electric chair. As a result, sixty-five others quickly entered plea-bargains and accepted sentences of up to twenty-one years for second-degree murder. Others had their charges dismissed or ultimately were not prosecuted.

Meanwhile the case had stirred the attention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, NAACP, the leading, and almost only, national civil rights organization.  Field Secretary Walter White came to Elaine personally to investigate, at great risk to himself.  

NAACP Field Secretary Walter White, who could pass for white, went undercover at great risk to investigate the rampage and its aftermath.

White was mixed race with pale skin, blue eyes, and light hair.  He easily passed as a White man.  In this guise he interviewed local leaders and members of the posse and then met secretly with the families of those in jail and with some men in hiding.  Word leaked out that there was a High Yellow from up North snooping around.  White was warned and got on a train where a conductor confided in him about a, “damned yellow nigger passing for white and the boys are going to get him…when they get through with him he won’t pass for white no more!”

As soon as he was safely in the North, White wrote articles which were published in the Chicago Daily News, which had provided him with the press credentials he used to interview White leaders; the Chicago Defender, the nation’s leading Black newspaper; The Nation, and the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis.  It was the first time the sharecroppers’s side of the story was told along with revelations of the bloody massacre and persecution.  Local authorities tried to have both the Defender and The Crisis banned from the mails.

Journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett also investigated the case and wrote a widely circulated pamphlet about it.

Black journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett secretly interviewed members of the Elaine Twelve in jail and wrote a detailed account in her 1920 pamphlet Arkansas Race Riot.

The NAACP launched a massive drive for a defense fund to handle appeals of the convicted men.  They obtained as co-counsel Scipio Africanus Jones, Arkansas’s leading Black attorney and eighty year old Colonel George W. Murphy, a Confederate veteran, former Arkansas Attorney General, and unsuccessful candidate for Governor on the Progressive Party ticket.  Despite his age Murphy was considered still one of the most able men at the state Bar.

Both lawyers performed heroically through a highly complex set of appeals in both state and Federal courts which dragged on for years. They won a reversal of the verdicts by the Arkansas Supreme Court in six of the twelve death penalty cases on the grounds that the jury had failed to specify whether the defendants were guilty of murder in the first or second degree.  Those cases were accordingly sent back for retrial.  These six became known as the Ware defendants.

                    Scipio Africanus Jones defended the convicted men.

The Supreme Court upheld the convictions of the other six who became known as the Moore defendants.  In those cases, the defense lawyers had argued that the convictions should be set aside because the use of torture and intimidation violated due process.

Several appeals were filed in various courts for both sets of defendants.  Appeals in the state courts were uniformly unsuccessful.  The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that “the defendants’ evidence of torture used to obtain confessions or mob intimidation, but the state simply argued that, even if true, this did not amount to a denial of due process.”  Even a Federal Appeals court agreed.

The re-trial of the Ware defendants finally began on May 3, 1920. During the trials, Murphy became ill, and Jones became the principal counsel. Jones faced enormous hostility, including court room packed with armed White men.  He had to sleep secretly at a different black family’s house every night during the trials. Not unexpectedly despite his best efforts all six were convicted again and once more sentenced to death.  However, Gov. Brough stayed their executions until the Arkansas Supreme Court could again review the cases. Ultimately, the Ware defendants were freed by the Arkansas Supreme Court after two terms of court had passed.  No attempt was made to retry the men. 

Meanwhile the case of the Moore defendants finally landed in the United States Supreme Court which ruled that the original proceedings had been a mask, and that the state of Arkansas had not provided a corrective process that would have allowed the defendants to vindicate their constitutional right to due process of law on appeal. The High Court sent the case back to the State for a new hearing taking due process into account.

Beyond the immediate effect on the case, the Court decision was a landmark—for the first time it held that the Federal Constitutional protection of due process applied to the States as well and that Federal courts had jurisdiction to enforce it.  Almost all subsequent civil rights cases before the court and many criminal cases were heard under this new standard.

Back in Arkansas Jones concluded that even with the order, a fair trial could not be obtained.  But the State itself was growing weary of the complicated and expensive litigation and of mounting criticism from around the country.  Jones elected to save his remaining clients by making a deal.  In March of 1923 the men pled guilty to second-degree murder and were sentenced to five years from the date they were first incarcerated in the Arkansas State Penitentiary. 

Finally, on January 14, 1925, Governor Thomas McRae in his last hours in office before a sworn member of the Ku Klux Klan would take his place ordered the release of the Moore defendants by granting them indefinite furloughs.  Jones arranged for them to be released under cover of darkness and immediately taken out of state, safely away from expected lynch mobs,

Within a month, Jones also obtained the release of the other defendants who had pleaded guilty or been convicted of lesser offenses.

Unlike other famous racial atrocities like the Tulsa race riot.  Attempts to reconcile the Black and White communities around Elaine have failed.  Many, if not most, local White residents, descendants of participants in the posses, mob, and trials, still believe that there was going to be a bloody resurrection and that their forbearers acted nobly and bravely to save their community.

A 2000 a conference on held at the Delta Cultural Center in Helena was acrimonious and bitter.

An Elaine Massacre Memorial was dedicated in 2019 on the centennial of the massacre.

An Elaine Massacre Memorial was finally dedicated in Helena on Sunday in time for the centennial of the tragedy but was marked by controversy.  Many Black residents and activists thought that any memorial belonged in Elaine around which most of the victims were killed, not near the courthouse where the Elaine 12 were placed on trial for their lives.  Some local whites continue to bitterly resent “digging up the past”  and “stirring up trouble.”