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ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY, Volume 58(Autumn 1999), p. 285
Low Villains and Wickedness in High Places: Race and Class in Elaine Race Riots
By JEANNIE M. WHAYNE
PERHAPS NO EVENT IN THE HISTORY of the Arkansas delta has received as much attention and been the subject of more speculation than the Elaine Race Riot of 1919. Historians, struggling with a mass of rich but contradictory and even tainted evidence, have failed to arrive at a common narrative of events. One noted account amounts to little more than propaganda for the planter elite of Phillips County, while another, a contemporary essay written by a future black leader, focused on exposing the evils of the plantation system (1). As varied as their interpretations have been, however, virtually all share a common shortcoming. The only exception is to be found in a novel based on the Elaine riot by an Arkansas protégé of Norman Mailer -- and that book failed to find an American publisher (2).
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Jeannie M. Whayne is chair of the Department of History at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Secretary-Treasurer of the Arkansas Historical Association, and editor of this journal. She is greatly indebted to several individuals for assistance with this essay. Willard Gatewood read and critiqued an early draft. David Sloan pointed out the Francis Irby Gwaltney novel and the existence of the Gwaltney papers. Michael Dabrishus, Andrea Cantrell, and the staff at the Special Collections Division of the University of Arkansas Libraries were extraordinarily helpful. Special thanks go to students who assisted in entering at from the Phillips County manuscript census of population: Katie Anderson, Carrie Eubanks, Robert Evenson, Jason Goodnight, Bill Horton, Susan Huntsman, Wade Huntsman, Melissa King, Christy McCollough, Lisa Matthew, William Maxwell, Melissa Moody, Saint Thomas Nelson, Robert Seibert, Eric Soller, and Brent Swearingin. Discussions with Ms. Huntsman, together with a careful reading of her excellent honor thesis on Phillips County, led the author to enter the historiographical debate.
1 For the pro-planter perspective, see J. W. Butts and Dorothy James, "The Underlying Causes of the Elaine Riot of 1919," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 20 (Spring 1961): 95-104. For a black perspective, see Walter White, "Massacring Whites in Arkansas," The Nation, December 6, 1919, 715-716. Other important accounts include Arthur I. Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-In, 1919 and the 1960s: A Study in the Connections between Conflict and Violence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1966); O. A. Rogers, Jr., "The Elaine Race Riots of 1919," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 19 (Summer 1960): 142-150; B. Boren McCool, Union, Reaction, and Riot: A Biography of a Race Riot (Memphis: Bureau of Social Research, Division of Urban and Regional Studies Memphis State University, June 1970), 23-52; Richard C. Cortner, A Mob Intent on Death: TheNAACP and the Arkansas Riot Case (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988); Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, "African American Struggles for Citizenship in the Arkansas and Mississippi Detas in the Age of Jim Crow," Radical History Review 55 (1993): 33-51; and Carl H. Moneyhon, Arkansas and the New South: 1874-1929 (Fayetteville: Universty of Arkansas Press, (1997), 107-108.
2 Francis I. Gwaltney, The Quicksand Years (London: Seker & Warburg, 1965).