Civil Wrongs is a collaboration between WKNO and the Institute for Public Service Reporting. For the complete podcasts of this and other Civil Wrongs' series, visit civil-wrongs.org
About an hour and 40 minutes Southwest of Memphis, in the Arkansas Delta, there’s a small town called Elaine.
Mayor Lisa Hicks Gilbert offers a quick tour of Main Street.
"This is our library. It's open two days a week," she says. Hovering above the mostly empty buildings is the town’s rusted water tower. "I can't even see Elaine on it anymore."
The slow erasure of Elaine may sound like a typical small-town story -- a victim of time and economy. But for Hicks Gilbert, Elaine seems lost for other reasons. Fixing those, she says, is about fixing history itself.
"I definitely believe in trans-generational trauma," she says. "That is a real thing."
That trauma, she says, has haunted her town for more than a century.
For years, the elders of Elaine had whispered about a massacre that happened here in 1919. Only in the last two decades, after a book was written, have locals turned up the volume.
"I was about 15 when I really got to know about it," says Charles Edward Brown, pointing visitors to the vacant lot where the old train depot once stood. "And that’s where they would bring the bodies out and put them on the boxcar and take them out. It was quite a few people got killed down there. You know, it was bad."
It was so bad that when Lisa Hicks Gilbert first read about the incident over 20 years ago, she asked her grandmother why no one in her family had mentioned it.
"She was afraid that even if anyone found out she was talking about this, or if I started talking about it, and you know, someone knew she had told me these stories, that someone was gonna retaliate against our family," says Hicks Gilbert.
The Elaine Massacre was a devastating mob attack that started September 30, 1919. Dr. David Krugler, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, says this one, like others from the period, was initially portrayed as a revolt.
"Anti-Black collective violence — organized mobs of whites going after African Americans for such purposes — became known as riots," he says.
More than eighty years after the event, historians lobbied for a more accurate narrative. There were hundreds -- not dozens -- of deaths. And nearly all were Black.
"And so it puts it in a new category," Krugler says. "And I think that’s a big shift we’ve seen in the last few years."
The Elaine Massacre is now recognized as one of the deadliest acts of racial terror in American history.
To better understand how an event more than a century ago could still affect a small town, we made the hour and 40 minute trip to Elaine last spring.
The isolated community is surrounded by farmland. In the early 1900s, Black farmers who had worked this land for generations were starting to make financial strides. But the system was still rigged against Black labor, says University of Memphis professor David Madlock.
"Blacks always got lower cotton prices," he says. "That means they could never get even enough in the sharecropping system where they could make a profit. They were constantly in debt, so they’re overworked, underpaid and, frankly, they’re not treated very well."
Black workers throughout the South started to unionize. White landowners saw a threat to both their power and pocketbooks.
"If you’re a white southerner, that’s not a good mix for everyday life," he says.
So they planted a new crop of rumors that unions were arming Black people for a hostile takeover.
On a Tuesday night, in an area called Hoop Spur, a union meeting in a local church attracted a hundred or so farmers. University of Arkansas historian Jeannie Whayne says they were interested in buying land and getting fair market prices for the recent cotton harvest. White landowners saw other intentions.
"They chose to believe, falsely of course, that African American sharecroppers through the union were organizing to rebel and kill planters and seize their lands," Whayne says.
A pair of armed guards outside the church saw a car pull up and the headlights go out. Two white men emerged, later identified as a county deputy and a railroad detective. It’s unclear who fired the first shot.
"All it needed was a match to light the fire and that was lit at the Hoop Spur church," she says.
The deputy was wounded, the detective killed. A headline in one Arkansas paper the next morning called it a “Negro Plot to rise against the white residents.”
"When you engage in the kind of racist diatribes and language and sort of get a crowd whipped up into a frenzy, you’re not in control of that crowd when it turns away from you," she says. "You’ve just created a monster you can’t control. And that’s what they created. A monster."
The next morning, hundreds of armed white men from Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee poured into Elaine to, in the words of one eyewitness, “hunt Negros.”
Some residents fought back. Political and business leaders asked Arkansas’s governor for military support. David Madlock says that’s when the wheels came off.
"Once the governor got involved that was it," he says. "The troops came down and the troops hunted people down and shot people."
For three days, more than 500 soldiers, under martial law, killed men, women and children, some with their hands in the air. About 400 Black people were taken into custody. Seventy-three were eventually charged with murder.
In the aftermath, the government officially reported just 20 deaths.
The new figure, as uncovered by researchers, is about 240.
How did so many bodies go uncounted? Given the number of friends and loved ones killed, why did this community suddenly go mute on the violence that occurred?
The current mayor of Elaine, Lisa Hicks Gilbert, says the silencing was so powerful it became part of the town’s DNA.
"That massacre left a community that is oppressed suppressed depressed and we're just in survival mode day in and day out," she says. "We're just trying to make it to the next day."
For her and other descendants, the time has come for that to change. But to heal, Elaine must first be heard.
In part two of this story, we look a how Elaine's history is being recovered, and how it could lead to change in the area.
