The Lattimer Massacre Inspired the Spread of the United Mine Workers

 

A sheriff's posse of 100 men opened fire on an orderly march of Slavic miners at Lattimer, Pennsylvania shooting most of them in the back as they fled 120 years ago today. 

Regular readers of this blog may be getting sick of the accounts of labor massacres and atrocities that fill these daily missives far too often.  And Lord knows I get tired of writing about them, especially about the ones from various coal fields across the country and spanning decade after decade with numbing monotony.  But someone must tell the stories of all of those who died and sacrificed, just as those of us living today need to make sure those sacrifices were not in vain.

So here is another one.  Not the oldest by far, but from way back before the turn of the 20th Century the memory of which has been dimmed in the light of subsequent celebrated battles.  But it was key to opening up some of America’s oldest anthracite fields to unionization and the dawning of justice.

By the 1890’s the coal fields of Pennsylvania had been providing the fuel for the Industrial Revolution in the Northeast for decades—fuel for the vast and expanding network of railroads tying the nation together, for iron and steel blast furnaces, for the generators that were illuminating the great cities, even for the homes of many residents, rich or poor. The battle between miners and bosses over wages, hours, safety, and clean and affordable housing for mine families was equally intense.  Native born coal diggers and colliers from England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland had gradually overcome their mutual suspicions and increasingly united with a strong sense of solidarity and militancy.

Workers organized locally at first.  Sometimes they simply struck with no permanent organization, with predictably disastrous results.  Later they would walk out as Knights of Labor lodges or skilled workers would down tools as members of craft unions.  Irish miners had organized in the secret society known as the Molly Maguires which they had brought with them from the old country and waged a guerilla war of bombings and assassinations against mine bosses in the 1870’s that was finally smashed by the infiltration of Pinkerton spies into their midst.

There were major strikes across the state in 1875, walkouts in conjunction with the nationwide uprising of the laboring classes remembered as the Great Railway Strike of 1877, and another major strike wave in 1887.  Each time they were facing the use of the company thugs known as the Pennsylvania Coal and Iron Police, as well as local law enforcement, and the State Militia, the strikes had been broken and the miners had to return to work.

In the face of rising demand for coal and the rising militancy of their English speaking workforce, coal operators turned increasingly to recent immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe.  Displaced and illiterate German, Polish, and other Slavic peasants were hired in large numbers and assigned the hardest and most dangerous jobs in the mines.  These greenhorns, disparaged universally as Bohunks, were used as scabs to break strikes.  Naturally English speaking miners resented them and the bosses did everything they could to keep their workers squabbling among themselves for scraps and crumbs.

Then one of the reoccurring national panics and depressions of the early 1890’s actually made things worse than ever.  Thousands lost their jobs, bosses cut wages as much as 25% across the board, and increased rents in company owned housing.  Corners were cut in an already dangerous industry.  More than 30,000 miners had been killed outright in Pennsylvania alone since 1870, not counting those who escaped immediate death only to linger with what became known as Black Lung in the 20th Century. 

 

Underground anthracite mining in Pennsylvania was the most dangerous job in the US.  Thousands had been killed in cave-ins, explosions, and other accidents since 1870.  By 1897 German, Slavic, and other Eastern European miners had taken most of the most dangerous jobs. 

By 1897 much of the nation recovered from the Panic and wages were generally once again on the rise.  But not in the coal fields.  Instead the bosses, acting in concert, conspired to impose a new round of wage cuts along with rent increases and price boosts at company stores where most miners were compelled to buy their necessities.   The bosses were confident that no matter what action militant English speakers might take, that their loyal and passive immigrant work force would, as before, willingly break any strike.

But two things were different this time.  First the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had somewhat reluctantly given the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) permission to ignore craft divisions and enroll all mine workers, skilled and unskilled alike into one union similar to the inclusive lodges of the fading Knights of Labor.  Secondly those Bohunks were just as fed up as English speakers and were ready to overcome their resentments at second class treatment and even persecution to support them.  UMWA organizers in the field like John Mitchel encouraged and welcomed them. Under the circumstances, it did not take much of a spark to set off a conflagration.  

    

 UMWA organizer John Mitchell made his mark in Pennslyania.

Things were tense around the region due to the latest rounds of wage cuts in early August of 1897 when the Honey Brook Division of the Lehigh & Wilkes-Barre Coal Company laid off its mostly English speaking workers at its strip mines, cut the pay of the remaining workers, and raised rent for housing in company towns.  Then the company consolidated several mule barns causing most teamsters a much longer and uncompensated commute, usually on foot.  It was the straw that broke the camel’s back for about 35 teenage mule skinners who walked off the job on August 14.  By the next day most of the strip mine workers joined them.  Then, to the astonishment of everyone, the Bohunks who were mostly confined to dangerous jobs as underground miners joined the effort instead of providing scabs. 

Within two days the strike had spread to more than 2,000 workers and near-by operations.  The UMWA, which had been organizing in the area for years with few members to show for it, suddenly swelled when the strikers joined in mass.  Unable to break the strike, owners capitulated on August 23 and agreed to several concessions including payment for overtime, bringing wages up to the regional average, allowing miners to see their own doctors when injured, and no longer forcing miners to live in company-owned housing.  It seemed like a sweeping victory.

Naturally, such success spawned other actions.  On August 35 youthful breaker boys at the A.S. Van Wickle Co. in Colerain struck for higher wages as well.  When the company attempted to use Slavs as scabs, they joined the strike instead. The strike spread to two other nearby coal works and the company quickly agreed to raise wages ending the walk out after only three days. 

Workers were emboldened by the new spirit of solidarity in the field which was bridging old hostilities and grudges.  And the bosses were just as alarmed by the new developments.  Determining among themselves not to continue to allow workers to “extort” wage boosts and concessions from them, employers began to beef up their forces of mine guards—plug-uglies and petty criminals swept up from the streets of Pittsburgh—and plan for a new round of battle.

It did not take them long to get what they wanted.  Van Wickle and other companies soon reneged on the promises they had made.  On September 1 they announced that pay raises would go to only a few skilled workers—English speakers—and made vague promises to the Slavs to treat them better in the future.  Neither set of miners were inclined to accept the greatly reduced offer.  The strike resumed on September 3 when 3,000 miners marched on mass to four operations shutting them down.  Day by day there were more marches and more closures as the strike spread.

 

Luzerne County Sheriff James F. Martin organized a heavily armed posse. 

The Coal and Iron Police and mine guards were ineffectual at stopping the marches.  The companies turned to Luzerne County Sheriff James F. Martin who established a posse of about 100 English and Irish citizens—businessmen, clerks, middle class citizens—to prevent any further marches from occurring.  Still, day by day the strike spread and by September 8 nearly 10,000 were out and growing daily.  Owners attempted to convince the Sheriff of Schuylkill County to arrest several thousand miners who had assembled near Pottsville and had forced a mine to shut down, but that officer refused.

Sheriff Martin, however, was made of sterner stuff.  He had a public proclamation printed in the local papers warning against “unlawful assembly, tumult, and interference with the peaceful operation of any mines or mining equipment.”  He even signed it as High Sheriff, an old country designation sure to inflame the passions of English and Irish miners.

On Friday September 10 400-500 Slavic and German miners assembled for a march on the mine owned by Calvin Pardee at Lattimer.  Martin knew they were coming and deployed his posse around the entrance to the mine, including posting sharp shooters on high ground and behind a line of coal cars.  Witnesses later testified that the special deputies were joking about the number of strikers they would kill.

 

Orderly marches of several hundred men behind the Stars and Stripes called out men working in the mines and were effective in spreading and enforcing the strike.  Mine owners were determined to stop the marches and Sheriff Martin was their man to do it. 

Un-armed and marching in an orderly fashion behind a color bearer with the Stars and Stripes, the march arrived at the gates at 3:45 pm.  Sheriff Martin stepped into the road to confront them.  He ordered the men to disburse then attempted to grab the flag from the color bearer.  A struggle ensued and the marchers surged forward. The posse opened fire.  Marchers immediately turned to flee, but firing continued for several minutes.  And not just random fire but carefully aimed shots meant to bring down individuals.  Nineteen strikers died on the scene.  Fleeing marchers dragged as many of the wounded as possible with them, but some were left on the ground and at least some of these may have been executed where they lay.  Virtually all of the dead and wounded—who numbered anywhere from twenty to nearly fifty—were shot in the back, some multiple times.  Many of the wounded were afraid to seek medical help.

The shooting set off a round of rioting by strikers and their families in the area.  Martin called for the assistance of the Pennsylvania National Guard and on September 11 2,500 troops of the Third Brigade, including artillery were deployed.  A mass meeting of Slavic leaders was held on September 12 urging restraint.  But tempers were too short to be easily assuaged.

 

Families wait to receive the bodies of their men.  But the Coroner refused to release many bodies and others were unidentified.  Most victims were buried in an unmarked slit trench whose location was kept secret and has never been found. 

On the 12th miners went hunting for Wilkes-Barre Coal Company Mine Superintendent Gomer Jones and destroyed his home when they could not locate him.  On the 20th women armed with rolling pins led about 150 boys on a charge on the gate of the McAdoo works but were turned back by the guard.

Slowly, the strike and marches petered out.  By September 29 the Guard was withdrawn.  Miners drifted back to work.  It seemed that the owners, once again, had won by the application of brute force under the color of law.

But there was plenty of public indignation at Sheriff Martin and his goons.  The Sheriff and 73 of his deputies were indicted and placed on trial in conjunction with the shooting.  The Sheriff and his witnesses testified that his men shot in self-defense when a mob attacked him.  This was contradicted by numerous victims, and witnesses who asserted that there was no attack and that victims had been shot while trying to flee or disburse.  Even a key defense witness let slip that the shooting began not because of an attack but because “we were afraid that they would attack.”

To the surprise of virtually no one, the men were all acquitted.

Despite the temporary setback, outrage over the shooting helped UMWA organizers like John Mitchel to sign up more than 10,000 new members in Pennsylvania over the next three years.  In epic strikes in 1900-’01 the UMWA was able to win and enforce major concessions across the Keystone State coal fields.  Mitchel, the advocate of uniting miners across ethnic divisions, rose to the Presidency of the union in 1897.  The Pennsylvania fields became the bedrock upon which the union was built, soon challenging bosses from West Virginia and other Appalachian states, to Illinois and far off Colorado.  

 

 The Lattimer Massacre Memorial and adjacent Pennsylvania State Historical Marker. 

A handsome monument to Mitchel inscribed, “Champion of Labor, Defender of Human Rights” has long stood outside of the Lackawanna County Courthouse in Scranton, Pennsylvania.  But for many years there was no monument to the dead miners, whose bodies were unceremoniously dumped in an unmarked slit trench, the location of which has been lost.  It wasn’t until 1972 that the United Labor Council of Lower Luzerne and Carbon Counties and the UMWA finally erected a small memorial on the site of the shooting.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

 

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.”