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Return to First Page ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY, Volume 50(Autumn 1999), p. 266
After receiving news of the initial clash at Hoop Spur, public officials, local businessmen, and plantation owners in Helena organized a campaign to crush the black union. Their efforts, aided by the intervention of more than five hundred federal troops, marked the bloodiest clash of a tumultuous year of racial violence and labor strife in the United States (2). Joining armed posses from three states, the troops raided homes, chased sharecroppers into the woods, jailed and interrogated hundreds of black men and women, and forced hundreds more back to work in the fields and sawmills. Army reports acknowledged twenty-five African Americans were killed. Unofficial reports place the death toll much higher (3). In the aftermath of the "Elaine Race Riot," sixty-seven African Americans were hurriedly sentenced to prison terms for their participation in a purported rebellion and twelve were condemned to death for the murder of five white people who died in the fighting. All the sentences were overturned after a highly-publicized five-year legal battle that reached the United States Supreme Court (4).
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(2) At least twenty-five U. S. towns or cities experienced violent racial conflicts during 1919, including Washington, Chicago, Omaha, Baltimore, and Millen, Georgia. Violent labor disputes affected dozens of other cities.
(3) Walter White, investigating for the NAACP, reported that as many as one hundred African Americans may have been killed (White, "'Massacring Whites' in Arkansas," The Nation, December 6, 1919, 715-716). Arkansas writer L. S. Dunaway suggested an even more shocking figure of 856 (Dunaway, What a Preacher Saw Through a Key-Hole in Arkansas [Little Rock: Parke-Harper, 1925], 102, 108-109). While a strong case can be made that the events represented more of a white rout than a riot, the latter term is not entirely inappropriate considering the evidence of black resistance, however limited in the face of the U. S. Army.
(4) Richard Cortner's A Mob Intent on Death: The NAACP and the Arkansas Riot Cases (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988) offers a thorough account of the NAACP-led legal battle to free the sharecroppers and the case's importance in the development of American criminal law.