The Elaine massacre occurred on September 30 – October 2, 1919, at Hoop Spur in the vicinity of Elaine in rural Phillips County, Arkansas, where African Americans were organizing against peonage and abuses in tenant farming. As many as several hundred African Americans were murdered and five white men were killed. The white mobs were aided by federal troops (requested by Arkansas governor Charles Hillman Brough) and local terrorist organizations. Gov. Brough led a contingent of 583 US soldiers from Camp Pike, with a 12-gun machine-gun battalion.
After the massacre, state officials concocted an elaborate cover-up, claiming that Black folks were planning an insurrection. National newspapers repeated the falsehood that Black community members in Arkansas were staging an insurrection. A New York Times headline read, "Planned Massacre of Whites Today", and the Arkansas Gazette (the leading newspaper in Arkansas) wrote that Elaine was "a zone of negro insurrection". Subsequent to this reporting, more than 100 African Americans were indicted, with 12 being sentenced to death by electrocution. After a years-long legal battle by the NAACP, the 12 men were acquitted.
Estimates of deaths made in the immediate aftermath of the Elaine Massacre by eyewitnesses range from 50 to "more than a hundred". Walter Francis White, an NAACP attorney who visited Elaine shortly after the incident, stated "... twenty-five Negroes killed, although some place the Negro fatalities as high as one hundred". More recent estimates in the 21st century of the number of Black people murdered during this violence are higher than estimates provided by the eyewitnesses, and have ranged into the hundreds. According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, "the Elaine Massacre was by far the deadliest racial confrontation in Arkansas history and possibly the bloodiest racial conflict in the history of the United States". Because of the widespread racial violence during the Red Summer of 1919, the Equal Justice Initiative of Montgomery, Alabama, classified the Black murders at Elaine as lynchings in its 2015 report on the lynching of African Americans in the South.
Located in the Arkansas Delta, Phillips County had historically been developed for cotton plantations, and its land was worked by enslaved African-Americans before the Civil War. In the early 20th century the county's population was still predominantly Black because most freedmen and their descendants had stayed on the land as farm workers and sharecroppers.
African Americans outnumbered Whites in the area around Elaine by a ten-to-one ratio, and by three-to-one in the county overall. White landowners controlled the economy, selling cotton on their own schedule, running high-priced plantation stores where farmers had to buy seed and supplies, and settling accounts with sharecroppers in lump sums, without listing items.
The all-White legislature had disenfranchised most blacks and many poor Whites in the 1890s by creating barriers to voter registration. It excluded them from the political system via the more complicated Election Law of 1891 and a poll tax amendment passed in 1892. The white-dominated legislature enacted Jim Crow laws that established racial segregation and institutionalized efforts to impose white supremacy. The decades around the turn of the century were the period of the highest rate of lynchings across the South.
White landowners often underpaid sharecroppers for their crops and paid when they saw fit. Between the prices of goods purchased from the plantation store and the crop underpayments, the white landowners kept many sharecroppers in debt.
At the time of settlement, landowners generally never gave an itemized statement to the Black sharecroppers of accounts owed, nor details of the money received for cotton and seed. The farmers faced discrimination without much recourse as many had been kept illiterate by Jim Crow laws. It was an unwritten law of the cotton country that the sharecroppers could not quit and leave a plantation until their debts were paid. The period of the year around accounts settlement was frequently the time of most lynchings of Black people throughout the South, especially if times were poor economically. As an example, many Black sharecroppers in Phillips County, whose cotton was sold in October 1918, did not get a settlement before July of the following year. They often amassed considerable debt at the plantation store before that time, as they had to buy supplies, including seed, to start the next season.
Black farmers began to organize in 1919 to try to negotiate better conditions, including fair accounting and timely payment of monies due them by White landowners. Robert L. Hill, a Black farmer from Winchester, Arkansas, had founded the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America (PFHUA). He worked with farmers throughout Phillips County. Its purpose was "to obtain better payments for their cotton crops from the White plantation owners who dominated the area during the Jim Crow era. Black sharecroppers were often exploited in their efforts to collect payment for their cotton crops."
Whites tried to disrupt such organizing and threatened farmers. The PFHUA retained a White law firm based in Little Rock to represent the Black farmers in getting fair settlements for their labors during the 1919 cotton harvest. The firm was headed by Ulysses S. Bratton, a native of Searcy County and former assistant federal district attorney.
The postwar summer of 1919, also known as Red Summer, had already been marked by deadly massacres targeting African-Americans in more than three dozen cities across the country, (including Chicago, Knoxville, Washington, D.C., and Omaha, Nebraska) being targeted by White mobs. Competition for jobs and housing in crowded markets following World War I as veterans returned to the work force, stirring racial tensions. Having served their country in the Great War, many African-American veterans were no longer willing to tolerate racial discrimination and were now prepared to use violence in self-defense against White mobs and terrorism. In 1919, African-Americans vigorously fought back when their communities came under attack. Labor unrest and strikes took place in several cities as workers tried to organize. Industries often intentionally hired Black workers as strikebreakers, increasing or creating resentment against them by White workers.
The Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America had organized chapters in the Elaine area in 1918–19. On September 29, representatives met with about 100 Black farmers at a church near Elaine to discuss how to obtain fairer settlements from landowners. Whites had resisted union organizing by the farmers and often spied on or disrupted such meetings. Approximately 100 African-American farmers, led by Robert L. Hill, the founder of the union, met at a church in Hoop Spur, near Elaine in Phillips County. Union advocates brought armed guards to protect the meeting. When two deputized white men and a black trustee arrived at the church, shots were exchanged. Railroad Policeman W.D. Adkins, employed by the Missouri Pacific Railroad, was killed and the other white man wounded; it was never determined who shot first.
According to Revolution in the Land: Southern Agriculture in the 20th Century (2002), in a section called "The Changing Face of Sharecropping and Tenancy":
The black trustee raced back to Helena, the county seat of Phillips County, and alerted officials. A posse was dispatched and within a few hours hundreds of white men, many of them the "low down" variety, began to comb the area for blacks they believed were launching an insurrection. In the end, over a hundred African Americans and five white men were killed. Some estimates of the black death toll range in the hundreds. Allegations surfaced that the white posse and even U.S. soldiers who were brought in to put down the so-called "rebellion" had massacred defenseless black men, women and children.