Return to First Page ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY, Volume 37 (Autumn 1978)

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Farmers' and Household Union of America."(48) Legal action against the white planters was an immediate goal of the union when the Elaine riots broke out on October 1, 1919.(49)

Violence initially burst out at a church near Hoop Spur when gunfire claimed the life of W. D. Adkins, a special agent of the Missouri Pacific Railroad, and wounded Deputy Sheriff Charles Pratt. Each side, of course, claimed the other fired first. Members of the black Farmers' Union, a fraternal organization modeled after the Masons, had been arming themselves in anticipation of opposition from whites over proposed cotton prices and fair settlements. Consequently, once the shooting started, fighting spread to Elaine where white posses fought black union members in the streets and outlying areas of the small community. Though the fighting eventually spread to the entire southern part of Phillips County, it was quickly brought under control by some 500 federal troops from Camp Pike accompanied by Governor Brough. Reports put the number of slain whites at five and estimated the count for blacks from between twenty-five and a hundred.(50)

The Elaine race riot was one of twenty-five racial conflicts throughout the nation referred to collectively as the "Red Summer" of 1919. Yet the only real connection with the Red Scare in the Elaine riot was in rather dubious rumors about socialistic literature supposedly found in the office of Ulysses S. Bratton, the Little Rock lawyer initially engaged by tenant farmers from nearby Ratio, Arkansas.(51) Undoubtedly the key to the riots was racial conflict and not ideological threat. In the two principal versions of the riot the Red Scare was not mentioned.(52) Walter

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48 Rogers, "The Elaine Race Riots," 143-144.

49 J. W. and Dorothy J. Butts maintain the real motive for the Union was nothing more than greed in their article, "The Underlying Causes of the Elaine Riot of 1919," Arkansas Historical Quarterly, XX (Spring 1961), 95-104.

50 Rogers, "The Elaine Race Riots," 144-148; Walter E. White, "Massacring Whites' in Arkansas," Nation, CIX (Dec. 6, 1919), 715.

51 Arthur I. Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-in, 1919 and the 1960's: A Study in the Connections Between Conflict and Violence (Garden City, N.Y., 1966), 127.

52 The citizens of Helena saw the riots as a planned insurrection to massacre white citizens and overthrow the white power structure. The opposing version plays up threatened legal action by Negro tenant farmers against white planters. E. M. Allen on the Elaine riot in Brough Scrapbook, Film 272; Arkansas: A Guide to the State, 354; U. S. Bratton to David Y. Thomas, Sept. 15, 1921, David Y. Thomas Papers, Box 1.