The Elaine Race Massacre
Essay and poetry by J. Chester Johnson | April 1, 2020
Presented by Green Mountains Review
GMR, Honoring History
In February, 2013, Green Mountains Review (GMR) serialized in four installments my article of nearly 10,000 words, “Evanescence: The Elaine Race Massacre”, and by that step, disclosure about the racial conflagration that occurred in the rich cotton fields of Phillips County, Arkansas along the Mississippi River Delta began to take hold. The GMR article was extensively circulated and seemed to serve an analogous purpose that pamphlets and pamphleteers rendered during earlier times.
As author, I can safely say that the GMR article functioned as an introduction to the Massacre for writers, poets, theologians, priests, opinion-influencers, historians, and the like. One especially crucial reader of the piece happened to be David P. Solomon, former classmate of mine at Harvard College. David was a scion of a prominent, Jewish family that had resided in Phillips County for several generations. As a result of our common interests in and somewhat, similar family connections to the Massacre and our mutual residence in New York City, we shared numerous lunches together following the publication of “Evanescence”, as intrigue and racial attention unexpectedly swelled in many quarters about the century-old conflagration.
Approximately eighteen months after the serialized article surfaced through GMR, David, with his two brothers in attendance, committed, at a symposium on the Elaine Race Massacre held in September, 2014 at the iconic St. Paul’s Chapel of Trinity Wall Street in downtown Manhattan in New York City, to a memorial for the Massacre. Over the nearly one hundred years since Elaine had happened, no permanent, physical memorial had ever been erected in commemoration of the Massacre. Ultimately, the Solomon project included not only the design and construction of a magnificent Elaine Massacre Memorial, but also an educational and cultural program established in conjunction with the physical structure.
As engagement with Elaine continued to burgeon over time locally and beyond Phillips County, the GMR article would be employed for elucidating the event’s history and associated ramifications, including the seminal and precedent-setting judicial decision by the U. S. Supreme Court that rose out of the Massacre in Moore v. Dempsey, essential to future, federal equal protection decisions and, more generally, to the entire Civil Rights Movement.
In advance of the centennial, held on September 29, 2019 in Phillips County, the GMR piece was used to inform and educate members of the national and local press and other important parties who had known little about the Elaine Race Massacre, but who were critical players for accessing a national audience. Actually, some of the press accounts surrounding the centennial appeared internationally – in India and Bulgaria, for instance.
One must wonder whether local and national consciousness about the Elaine Race Massacre would have actually occurred in the absence of the GMR determination to serialize “Evanescence”. Would the story have been limited to hearsay or more fulsome explanations through books and less immediately accessible means? Once the broader story of the Massacre and its aftermath could be appreciated, relevant heroes occupied parts of the narrative, such as the black attorney from Little Rock, Scipio Africanus Jones, who devised and implemented the legal stratagems that ultimately won the day locally and at the U. S. Supreme Court – a genuine hero yet to be placed on America’s Pantheon.
The lesson for the publishing and literary community should be clear by virtue of GMR’s courageous example: the audience that read Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and caused an American Revolution and the audience that read the Abolitionist Pamphlet Campaign and gave spiritual meaning to the Civil War and to the Emancipation Proclamation still remain today.
Note: The following is a summary of Chapter 1, “A Changing of America”, from the book, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation, by J. Chester Johnson. Damaged Heritage will be published in May, 2020 by Pegasus. The Elaine Race Massacre of 1919, which occurred one county removed from where the author grew up white in southeast Arkansas, serves as a backdrop for much of the book’s commentary. The following also serves as an introduction to the first ten poems, which appear immediately after this summary, of a cycle of fifty poems Johnson composed about the Massacre. It should be noted that in 2013, Green Mountains Review brought attention to the Elaine Race Massacre when it published a long article on the event entitled “Evanescence: The Elaine Race Massacre” by Johnson.
Remarkably, the Elaine Race Massacre of 1919 in Phillips County, Arkansas could have been completely forgotten. Why? Remote location of the conflagration? Concerted efforts to conceal a race massacre? Disinterest by the State of Arkansas and nation? Normalized and embedded racism? How had this monumental, historic event fallen so easily away from public consciousness for so very long? One of the acknowledged icons for black liberation, Ida B. Wells, even wrote a treatise about the Massacre, and yet this conflagration was effectively discarded for the better part of a hundred years. Can it happen again?
On the evening of Tuesday, September 30, 1919, the local Hoop Spur lodge of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union met in Hoop Spur Church, along rural Highway 44 and a short distance north of the hamlet, Elaine, Arkansas. Approximately one hundred African-Americans had eagerly attended the meeting to talk about ways and means to negotiate with white planters for better cotton prices black sharecroppers and their families received, for other financial and debt arrangements, and for better living conditions. The church, nestled within blooming cotton rows, almost ready for harvest, stood nearby and just west of the Mississippi River. The lodge had appointed guards for that evening to protect the meeting in case interlopers tried to interfere or break up the proceedings.
Around 11:00PM, a Model T Ford, carrying two white men – a deputy sheriff of Phillips County and a security agent of the Missouri-Pacific Railroad (MoPac) – and a trusted black man serving time in the County jail for murder pulled up within a short distance from the church. Almost immediately, bullets crackled through the crisp, autumn night air and through the church, creating panic inside with bodies tumbling over each other to reach any possible egress for safety. W. A. Adkins, the MoPac security agent, lay dead from bullet wounds in his stomach, and Charles Pratt, the deputy sheriff, struggled to stand or walk, having been shot in the knee. The black trustee, Kid Collins, strode away unharmed to a neighboring community. Thus began the Elaine Race Massacre of 1919.
Whites, starting with law enforcement officers of the County and security agents with MoPac, believed a black insurrection had flared. After all, a number of black sharecroppers only recently returned as veterans from World War I and knew how to take care of themselves with or without firearms. Moreover, blacks had already shown they were tired of being treated unfairly by white planters and landowners in Phillips County and grew increasingly incensed about payments for their cotton at prices the sharecroppers felt to be well below fair market. The price for cotton had recently soared, and black sharecroppers wanted their rightful measure, but whites harbored no intention of changing the manner blacks were treated in Phillips County.
White posses were deputized and sent to Hoop Spur early the following morning. Neighboring communities and whites in Tennessee and Mississippi were also called to supply assistance in putting down the reported black insurrection. At the end of the first full day, October 1st, fifteen to twenty blacks had been killed by the local posses. Two whites also perished the first day, although there is reason to think that in each of those cases, the victims might have been killed by friendly fire. With the total tally of white deaths so far at three, a call went out from Phillips County to Arkansas Governor Charles Hillman Brough for help. In turn, Brough sent a message to the nation’s war department indicating that whites had been killed and that African-Americans were ready to mass an attack. Specifically, the Governor requested authorization to use federal troops from nearby Camp Pike at Little Rock. The war department quickly consented to the request, and within hours, federal troops, joined by Governor Brough, were on their way by train to Phillips County, arriving early in the morning on Thursday, October 2nd.
Notwithstanding the arrival of federal troops, the local white narrative on African-American deaths from the Massacre ends at this point. That account, of course, supposes federal troops did, in fact, come to Phillips County to restore order, and that’s what the military did, according to the white narrative – restore order in an orderly way. However, factual information illustrates that the deadliest killers in the Massacre weren’t the posses or the vigilante groups from Tennessee or Mississippi, but rather the troops with their machine guns. According to Robert Whitaker, author of On The Laps Of Gods, a comprehensive study of the Massacre, stated in an email to me, dated December 19, 2012, “One of the military reports said that the military alone had killed 60 or so. . .It is the documentation for the killing by the military. . .that is the best evidence, in my opinion, that the total number {of African-Americans} killed was above 100.”
After all, in addition to the fifteen to twenty blacks murdered by the white posses the morning of October 1st and the killing of sixty or so African-Americans by the military with its machine gun weaponry, there were other deaths inflicted by the white posses on October 2nd, including the four Johnston brothers returning from a hunting trip, plus the killings of blacks by groups that came from out-of-state. While the number of more than a hundred African-American deaths in the Massacre is clearly justified, it is noteworthy to point out that a security agent with MoPac at the time of the killings and others have suggested that “hundreds” of African-Americans died in the Massacre.
By Friday, October 3rd, a very large number of African-Americans had been impounded in Phillips County, and with the encouragement of the Arkansas Governor, white plutocrats and County officials turned their attention to the prosecution of the black sharecroppers. The white narrative blamed the deadly events of the past several days on blacks, who had, according to this version, planned both an insurrection and the murder of white planters. Despite this accusation, investigators from the U. S. Department of Justice had traveled to Phillips County upon the outbreak of the conflagration and found no plans for either a black insurrection or the murder of white planters. Nonetheless, the racist policies of the Woodrow Wilson Administration allowed these findings to be filed away, leaving the untrue white narrative to dominate local court proceedings.
Moreover, to make sure that the white version did indeed thoroughly permeate the local court’s conduct and outcome, the plutocrats and County officials determined who would serve as counsel for the African-Americans, what charges would apply to which black sharecropper, and who would serve on the juries. In addition, County law enforcement officers and personnel from MoPac proceeded to torture black prisoners and witnesses until most agreed to describe, in court, events of the Massacre to support and concur with the white account, although there were blacks, even with torture, who refused to fabricate facts about the origin, purpose, and outcome of the Elaine Race Massacre. Verdicts by the all-white juries against the African-Americans were delivered rapidly, sometimes within two minutes. This entire illicit and racist process against the African-American sharecroppers was adopted, in part, to satisfy the desires of numerous white men in Phillips County that organized themselves into a mob, which threatened to conduct large-scale lynchings of black sharecroppers held in the County jail unless mob members received assurances that “guilty” African-Americans would be summarily executed. The convictions of the Elaine 12 who would go to The Walls penitentiary for execution constituted a huge step in the fulfillment of that pledge.
On November 21, 1919, less than two months after the Elaine Race Massacre began, sixty-two black sharecroppers were sent to Cummins State Farm for various lesser crimes, and twelve to The Walls penitentiary, outside of Little Rock, to be electrocuted for murder. At this point, a brilliant black attorney from Little Rock, Scipio Africanus Jones, with assistance of the National Association for The Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), enters the picture, and no one could have, at that moment, predicted the unusual and historic results to follow.
Scipio Africanus Jones was likely born in late 1863, son of a black woman and probably the white man who owned Jones’ mother. Named for the famous Roman General, Scipio Africanus, who defeated Hannibal at Zama (near Carthage) in 202 BCE and who was, in turn, celebrated for conquering Africa, Jones worked as a farmhand in Tulip, Arkansas until the early 1880s when he left for Little Rock, where he passed his oral bar exams in June, 1889 before three white attorneys.
By the time of the Elaine Race Massacre, Jones, then known as “Judge Jones” by both blacks and whites, had become a legendary attorney among African-Americans in Little Rock with black families often naming their sons after him. A little over five years following the trials and imprisonment of the seventy-four African-American sharecroppers who encountered unfair prosecutions for crimes associated with the Massacre, ranging from first degree murder to “night riding,” all those convicted were free, principally as a result of Jones’ legal achievements in an extremely hostile environment.
As the convicted sharecroppers were being delivered toward the end of November to Cummins State Farm and The Walls penitentiary, Jones decided to focus his attention on those prisoners who received death sentences from the rapid, wrongful trials in Phillips County. To save the twelve sharecroppers, the so-called Elaine Twelve, from execution, he needed to move quickly, for six were to be electrocuted the end of December with the remaining six scheduled to die in the electric chair by early January. As a first step, Jones pled for a new trial, arguing that the sharecroppers’ equal protection rights had been violated, a position rejected by the local presiding judge, who nonetheless stayed the executions.
Upon review of the local verdicts for the Elaine Twelve, Jones determined that the County, in six of those cases, failed to specify whether the convictions had been for first or second degree murder – this group of cases would thereafter be known as the “Ware Six”. In fact, the Arkansas Supreme Court did then rule that the Ware Six convictions were fatally flawed and ordered new trials. For the remaining six, the so-called “Moore Six”, the Court decided they had received fair and impartial trials, but also ordered that until the results of the retrials for the Ware Six occurred, the execution dates for the Moore Six would be postponed.
As the retrial of the Ware Six progressed, Jones succeeded in altering the story the juries had heard during the first trials. Black witnesses recanted and told the court they had been tortured to give the testimony relayed at the earlier trials. While the Ware Six were predictably once again found guilty of murder by an all-white jury, Jones had set a trap for the local judge that would make this retrial also appealable to the State’s Supreme Court.
On the evening of Tuesday, September 30, 1919, the local Hoop Spur lodge of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union met in Hoop Spur Church, along rural Highway 44 and a short distance north of the hamlet, Elaine, Arkansas. Approximately one hundred African-Americans had eagerly attended the meeting to talk about ways and means to negotiate with white planters for better cotton prices black sharecroppers and their families received, for other financial and debt arrangements, and for better living conditions. The church, nestled within blooming cotton rows, almost ready for harvest, stood nearby and just west of the Mississippi River. The lodge had appointed guards for that evening to protect the meeting in case interlopers tried to interfere or break up the proceedings.
Around 11:00PM, a Model T Ford, carrying two white men – a deputy sheriff of Phillips County and a security agent of the Missouri-Pacific Railroad (MoPac) – and a trusted black man serving time in the County jail for murder pulled up within a short distance from the church. Almost immediately, bullets crackled through the crisp, autumn night air and through the church, creating panic inside with bodies tumbling over each other to reach any possible egress for safety. W. A. Adkins, the MoPac security agent, lay dead from bullet wounds in his stomach, and Charles Pratt, the deputy sheriff, struggled to stand or walk, having been shot in the knee. The black trustee, Kid Collins, strode away unharmed to a neighboring community. Thus began the Elaine Race Massacre of 1919.
Whites, starting with law enforcement officers of the County and security agents with MoPac, believed a black insurrection had flared. After all, a number of black sharecroppers only recently returned as veterans from World War I and knew how to take care of themselves with or without firearms. Moreover, blacks had already shown they were tired of being treated unfairly by white planters and landowners in Phillips County and grew increasingly incensed about payments for their cotton at prices the sharecroppers felt to be well below fair market. The price for cotton had recently soared, and black sharecroppers wanted their rightful measure, but whites harbored no intention of changing the manner blacks were treated in Phillips County.
White posses were deputized and sent to Hoop Spur early the following morning. Neighboring communities and whites in Tennessee and Mississippi were also called to supply assistance in putting down the reported black insurrection. At the end of the first full day, October 1st, fifteen to twenty blacks had been killed by the local posses. Two whites also perished the first day, although there is reason to think that in each of those cases, the victims might have been killed by friendly fire. With the total tally of white deaths so far at three, a call went out from Phillips County to Arkansas Governor Charles Hillman Brough for help. In turn, Brough sent a message to the nation’s war department indicating that whites had been killed and that African-Americans were ready to mass an attack. Specifically, the Governor requested authorization to use federal troops from nearby Camp Pike at Little Rock. The war department quickly consented to the request, and within hours, federal troops, joined by Governor Brough, were on their way by train to Phillips County, arriving early in the morning on Thursday, October 2nd.
Notwithstanding the arrival of federal troops, the local white narrative on African-American deaths from the Massacre ends at this point. That account, of course, supposes federal troops did, in fact, come to Phillips County to restore order, and that’s what the military did, according to the white narrative – restore order in an orderly way. However, factual information illustrates that the deadliest killers in the Massacre weren’t the posses or the vigilante groups from Tennessee or Mississippi, but rather the troops with their machine guns. According to Robert Whitaker, author of On The Laps Of Gods, a comprehensive study of the Massacre, stated in an email to me, dated December 19, 2012, “One of the military reports said that the military alone had killed 60 or so. . .It is the documentation for the killing by the military. . .that is the best evidence, in my opinion, that the total number {of African-Americans} killed was above 100.”
After all, in addition to the fifteen to twenty blacks murdered by the white posses the morning of October 1st and the killing of sixty or so African-Americans by the military with its machine gun weaponry, there were other deaths inflicted by the white posses on October 2nd, including the four Johnston brothers returning from a hunting trip, plus the killings of blacks by groups that came from out-of-state. While the number of more than a hundred African-American deaths in the Massacre is clearly justified, it is noteworthy to point out that a security agent with MoPac at the time of the killings and others have suggested that “hundreds” of African-Americans died in the Massacre.
By Friday, October 3rd, a very large number of African-Americans had been impounded in Phillips County, and with the encouragement of the Arkansas Governor, white plutocrats and County officials turned their attention to the prosecution of the black sharecroppers. The white narrative blamed the deadly events of the past several days on blacks, who had, according to this version, planned both an insurrection and the murder of white planters. Despite this accusation, investigators from the U. S. Department of Justice had traveled to Phillips County upon the outbreak of the conflagration and found no plans for either a black insurrection or the murder of white planters. Nonetheless, the racist policies of the Woodrow Wilson Administration allowed these findings to be filed away, leaving the untrue white narrative to dominate local court proceedings.
Moreover, to make sure that the white version did indeed thoroughly permeate the local court’s conduct and outcome, the plutocrats and County officials determined who would serve as counsel for the African-Americans, what charges would apply to which black sharecropper, and who would serve on the juries. In addition, County law enforcement officers and personnel from MoPac proceeded to torture black prisoners and witnesses until most agreed to describe, in court, events of the Massacre to support and concur with the white account, although there were blacks, even with torture, who refused to fabricate facts about the origin, purpose, and outcome of the Elaine Race Massacre. Verdicts by the all-white juries against the African-Americans were delivered rapidly, sometimes within two minutes. This entire illicit and racist process against the African-American sharecroppers was adopted, in part, to satisfy the desires of numerous white men in Phillips County that organized themselves into a mob, which threatened to conduct large-scale lynchings of black sharecroppers held in the County jail unless mob members received assurances that “guilty” African-Americans would be summarily executed. The convictions of the Elaine 12 who would go to The Walls penitentiary for execution constituted a huge step in the fulfillment of that pledge.
On November 21, 1919, less than two months after the Elaine Race Massacre began, sixty-two black sharecroppers were sent to Cummins State Farm for various lesser crimes, and twelve to The Walls penitentiary, outside of Little Rock, to be electrocuted for murder. At this point, a brilliant black attorney from Little Rock, Scipio Africanus Jones, with assistance of the National Association for The Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), enters the picture, and no one could have, at that moment, predicted the unusual and historic results to follow.
Scipio Africanus Jones was likely born in late 1863, son of a black woman and probably the white man who owned Jones’ mother. Named for the famous Roman General, Scipio Africanus, who defeated Hannibal at Zama (near Carthage) in 202 BCE and who was, in turn, celebrated for conquering Africa, Jones worked as a farmhand in Tulip, Arkansas until the early 1880s when he left for Little Rock, where he passed his oral bar exams in June, 1889 before three white attorneys.
By the time of the Elaine Race Massacre, Jones, then known as “Judge Jones” by both blacks and whites, had become a legendary attorney among African-Americans in Little Rock with black families often naming their sons after him. A little over five years following the trials and imprisonment of the seventy-four African-American sharecroppers who encountered unfair prosecutions for crimes associated with the Massacre, ranging from first degree murder to “night riding,” all those convicted were free, principally as a result of Jones’ legal achievements in an extremely hostile environment.
As the convicted sharecroppers were being delivered toward the end of November to Cummins State Farm and The Walls penitentiary, Jones decided to focus his attention on those prisoners who received death sentences from the rapid, wrongful trials in Phillips County. To save the twelve sharecroppers, the so-called Elaine Twelve, from execution, he needed to move quickly, for six were to be electrocuted the end of December with the remaining six scheduled to die in the electric chair by early January. As a first step, Jones pled for a new trial, arguing that the sharecroppers’ equal protection rights had been violated, a position rejected by the local presiding judge, who nonetheless stayed the executions.
Upon review of the local verdicts for the Elaine Twelve, Jones determined that the County, in six of those cases, failed to specify whether the convictions had been for first or second degree murder – this group of cases would thereafter be known as the “Ware Six”. In fact, the Arkansas Supreme Court did then rule that the Ware Six convictions were fatally flawed and ordered new trials. For the remaining six, the so-called “Moore Six”, the Court decided they had received fair and impartial trials, but also ordered that until the results of the retrials for the Ware Six occurred, the execution dates for the Moore Six would be postponed.
As the retrial of the Ware Six progressed, Jones succeeded in altering the story the juries had heard during the first trials. Black witnesses recanted and told the court they had been tortured to give the testimony relayed at the earlier trials. While the Ware Six were predictably once again found guilty of murder by an all-white jury, Jones had set a trap for the local judge that would make this retrial also appealable to the State’s Supreme Court.
With the new guilty verdicts, an execution date of July 23, 1920 was established for the Elaine Twelve. However, as a result of the legal trap Jones employed for the Phillips County judge for the retrial, the Arkansas Supreme Court also invalidated the second convictions of the Ware Six, and yet another new trial was ordered with the threat of imminent electrocutions again removed. It had been assumed by Jones and the Moore Six that until legal proceedings for the Ware Six were finally concluded, the Moore Six would not receive a separate execution date. Surprisingly, the plutocrats and officials in Phillips County then applied pressure to sever the timing for the execution of the Moore Six from the Ware Six, and the new governor, Thomas McRae, replacing Governor Brough, fixed a date of June 10, 1921 for the electrocution of the Moore Six. When the Arkansas Supreme Court set aside the second trial for the Ware Six, Jones asked the local judge for a change in venue from Phillips County, but the judge deferred ruling on the request until after the execution date for the Moore Six. Coffins were ordered, and the promise to the Phillips County mob by County fathers nearly two years previously now appeared likely to come to pass for six of the African-American sharecroppers.
Soon after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution was enacted. The Amendment, in addition to making all former slaves citizens of the United States, stated, in part, that “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” In addition, Congress had passed a Habeas Corpus Act in 1867, which provided state prisoners access to federal courts to ensure that due process could be realized. Notwithstanding these two legal pillars, the U. S. Supreme Court had, following passage of both, undercut their intended purposes over the next fifty years by determining that states alone, not the federal government, were responsible for the civil rights of their citizens.
Jones now found himself with few options to save the Moore Six from electrocution. On the afternoon of Wednesday, June 8th, less than forty hours before the scheduled executions, an appeal was made, relying on the tenets of the 14th Amendment, before an Arkansas judge with dubious authority to hear the criminal case, and yet, upon hearing facts for the petition, the judge ruled in favor of the request and stayed the executions. This action put in motion a series of judicial steps that ultimately placed the petition by the Moore Six for 14th Amendment relief before the U. S. Supreme Court.
Within days, the Arkansas Supreme Court decided against the judge’s order with a new date for execution set by Governor McRae for late September, 1921. The only remedy for Jones at this point was an appeal to the U. S. Supreme Court.
In late August, two white, former security agents for MoPac, key witnesses in the first trials, were now recanting their stories and telling the truth. Through affidavits from these former security agents for the railroad, combined with affidavits from African-Americans who had also recanted earlier testimony, the story of injustice in Phillips County to be told in federal court had become much more credible and compelling. At the same time, the State of Arkansas clung to a “demurrer” legal approach, meaning precedent and not the facts in the case mattered, and, to this point, the federal district court ruled in late September against the Moore Six.
Jones now had thirty days to burnish an appeal in Moore v. Dempsey to the U. S. Supreme Court. The true story of the Elaine Race Massacre was now well-publicized and legally not challenged by the State; it was clear the State did not wish to return to a local courtroom to re-try again the Ware Six, so, before proceeding with a new Ware Six trial, the State would first simply let the U. S. Supreme Court decide on the Moore Six – after all, precedent stood with the State of Arkansas.
Moore v. Dempsey would not be heard by the U. S. Supreme Court until January, 1923, and Jones would not have the opportunity to present the case in the nation’s capital. Rather, a distinguished Boston brahmin and the first president of the NAACP, who had considerable experience before the Supreme Court, was selected by the NAACP, which had provided a crucial funding source for Jones’ legal efforts, to argue for the appellants in Moore v. Dempsey. In addition to his efforts on behalf of the Moore Six, Jones had been active in pursuing freedom for the other prisoners found guilty in the aftermath of the Elaine Race Massacre; in October, 1922, he successfully arranged to have all but fifteen of the sharecroppers released from Cummins State Farm.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, the eminent Supreme Court jurist, believed firmly in the proposition that the federal court had a duty to provide relief to state prisoners convicted in state proceedings that had been blatantly unfair. For the famous Leo Frank case, also involving a conviction by a local court influenced by mob-like conditions, Holmes had, in 1915, failed to convince his colleagues on the Supreme Court of his viewpoint. Nonetheless, changes in membership and attitude on the Court gave him a better opportunity to prevail for the Moore Six; moreover, in advance of the Moore v. Dempsey arguments, the nation continued to experience lynchings and the burnings of African-Americans alive.
In a 6-2 decision, released on February 19, 1923, which ruled in favor of the Moore Six, Holmes wrote for the majority that:
“If the case is that the whole procedure is a mask – that counsel, jury, and judge were swept to the fatal end by an irresistible wave of public passion”. . .then, the Court cannot be prevented “from securing to the petitioners their constitutional rights.”
The Crisis, opinion outlet for the NAACP, called the U. S. Supreme Court decision in Moore v. Dempsey “. . .an achievement that is as important as any event since the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation”.
The Moore Six, the Ware Six, and those at Cummins State Farm remained in prison. The favorable decision in Moore v. Dempsey by the U. S. Supreme Court, though precedent setting and historic, had not set the Moore Six free; rather, the ruling sent the case back to the federal district court for retrial. Jones knew that the Moore Six and Ware Six were still inextricably linked, and he could now implement part of a strategy leading to freedom for all the sharecroppers.
Having previously set another momentous trap for the prosecution, which failed to comply with Arkansas state law for the Ware Six defendants when Jones declared in court, in response to postponements by the prosecution, that he was ready for trial, Jones petitioned the Arkansas Supreme Court for the immediate freeing of those defendants. Upon the filing by Jones of a “motion for discharge” in mid-April, the Arkansas Supreme Court ordered the Ware Six free in late June, 1923. With the liberation of the Ware Six, only twenty-one of the original seventy-four sharecroppers found guilty were still incarcerated.
Since neither the State nor Phillips County wished to go back to court with proceedings that would disclose and reprise the manner by which the first trials had been conducted, Jones began to secure pertinent signatures for release of the Moore Six. By late September, 1923, leaders and officials in Phillips County petitioned Governor McRae to commute the sentences of the Moore Six and effectively reduce the sentences to time served. A little over a month later, Jones constructed a compromise with the State for the Moore Six; without pleading guilty to any charge, they had their sentences commuted to twelve years (being immediately eligible for parole) and were promised to be released within twelve months.
Then, Jones and the Moore Six waited. A few months after the compromise had been struck, seven of the fifteen men remaining at Cummins were released, but not the Moore Six. More than a year passed, and the governor had released the last sharecroppers at Cummins, but not the Moore Six. Jones then understood that the Governor had reneged on the agreement. With only a few weeks remaining in the term for Governor McRae, to be replaced by a politician who won the gubernatorial election with the backing of the Ku Klux Klan, Jones knew he had to act quickly. He returned to Phillips County and secured the signatures of leading citizens throughout the County in support of the release of the Moore Six. On Christmas Eve, Jones delivered to the Governor a petition of hundreds of names from prominent citizens throughout the State, including Phillips County. Still, nothing happened. On January 13, 1925, Jones visited Governor McRae and left with the assurance the Moore Six would be released. Later that day, as his final act as Governor, McRae gave the Moore Six “indefinite furloughs”. All the black prisoners, who had been unfairly convicted in 1919 by the local courts following the Elaine Race Massacre, were now free.
Not only were all the sharecroppers free, but Scipio Africanus Jones, African-American, former field hand, had also engineered a legal strategy that established a limit on states’ rights in legal proceedings against individuals and created a new, forceful precedent for federal protection in due process of law, as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.
For a hundred years, no permanent, physical memorial existed for the Elaine Race Massacre. On September 29, 2019, however, one day in advance of the Massacre’s centennial, the Elaine Massacre Memorial was dedicated – a most fitting, commemorative, and impressive structure – located immediately in front of the Phillips County Courthouse, an appropriate placement to punctuate remembrance of torture and unfair, accelerated trials performed in that building against African-American sharecroppers soon after the cessation of the violence. The Solomon family, having long-term roots in the County, provided the inspiration, courage, and generosity that resulted in the Elaine Massacre Memorial.
While creation of and observance for the Memorial may logically suggest a conclusion, nothing could be further from the truth. It is only the beginning, which begs us all to a long, personal journey for racial reconciliation that will, in so many ways, have no end in sight.
Poetry
Part I: AT THE FALL
About the Author
J. Chester Johnson
J. Chester Johnson is a well-known poet, essayist, and translator, who grew up one county removed from the Elaine Race Massacre site in southeast Arkansas along the Mississippi River Delta. He has written extensively on race and civil rights, composing the Litany for the national Day of Repentance (October 4, 2008) when the Episcopal Church formally apologized for its role in transatlantic slavery and related evils. At the height of the Civil Rights Movement and following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, Johnson returned to the town of his youth to teach in the all African-American public school before integration of the local education system. Several of his writings are part of the J. Chester Johnson Collection in the Civil Rights Archives at Queens College, the alma mater for Andrew Goodman, one of three martyrs murdered by white supremacists in Mississippi during Freedom Summer. His three most recent books are St. Paul’s Chapel & Selected Shorter Poems (2010), Now And Then: Selected Longer Poems (2017), and Auden, the Psalms, and Me (2017), the story of the retranslation of the psalms in the Book of Common Prayer for which W. H. Auden (1968-1971) and Johnson (1971-1979) were the poets on the drafting committee; published in 1979, this version became a standard. Johnson, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U. S. Treasury in the Carter Administration, owned and ran, for several decades, an independent consulting firm for large domestic governments and non-profit organizations on capital finance and debt management. His poem about the iconic St. Paul’s Chapel, relief center for the recovery workers at Ground Zero, has been the Chapel’s memento card since soon after the 9/11 terrorists’ attacks (1.5 million cards distributed); American Book Review said of the poem: “Johnson’s ‘St. Paul’s Chapel’ is one of the most widely distributed, lauded, and translated poems of the current century”. One of fifteen writers selected to be showcased for the inaugural Harvard Alumni Authors’ Book Fair in 2019, he was educated at Harvard College and the University of Arkansas (Distinguished Alumnus Award, 2010).