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
"Trans-Generational Trauma"
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.
"Amazing Grace"
Deep in the heart of the Arkansas Delta, a long stretch of abandoned railroad tracks has been turned into a gravel bike path. It’s a route that “transports you through time,” says the Arkansas Parks Service.
"Yeah, this is the Delta Heritage Bike Trail," says Lisa Hicks Gilbert at a trailhead, about 20 miles south of Helena. "This is where the old train depot was."
There’s a bathroom, water fountain, and an informational kiosk.
"And this is about the only place you’re gonna have any history of Elaine," she adds.
As the mayor of Elaine, an isolated town of about 500 people, Hicks Gilbert says this state-funded display is good for bikers.
But it does little to right a historic wrong that, she says, hasn’t been fully healed. A century ago, after 200 Black residents here were killed in a mob attack joined by federal troops, the incident was all but wiped from history: Victims silenced. Atrocities erased.
She and other descendants are speaking up. The slogan of her effort is on her t-shirt.
"It is called 'Silent No More,' she says. "I'm not gonna sit and wait on someone to tell me I can teach my black history or not."
Days after the bodies were hauled away in boxcars, officials posted warnings to Black residents, like this one: "All you have to do is remain at work just as if nothing had happened. Stop talking, Stay at home, go to work, don’t worry."
The Elaine Massacre of 1919, one of the deadliest racial attacks in American history, would be largely forgotten. Phillips County would finally honor the dead five years ago with the dedication of a memorial.
But it's in Helena. Mayor Lisa Hicks Gilbert says the town where the massacre happened is still without its own monument or museum. She says residents still need to have that conversation.
"And it’s something that’s painful, but we can’t get away from it," she says. "It is what it is."
While Hicks Gilbert works to educate, a separate nonprofit has broader goals. The Elaine Legacy Center, led by Rev. Mary Olson, a white Methodist minister, is working with descendants to build a museum. Olson says the group’s mission is to answer a question once posed by Richard Wright, the famous Black author who lived briefly in Elaine as a child. Why wasn’t anything done about the systemic violence against Black communities?
"And we think we’re answering that question for him so that we can say: we are doing something about it today," she says.
They believe some justice should come in the form of reparations to descendants. Jennifer Hadlock is an attorney and community researcher with a group called Fund for Reparations Now. She is working with the center to find evidence of land theft that many residents believe occurred after the massacre. While the historical documents haven’t proven outright theft, she says some land transfers look “suspicious.”
"There are many examples. At least in the dozens of examples of people losing land," Hadlock says.
Evidence does show a sudden decline in Black land ownership in Phillips County between 1910 and 1920. The Elaine Legacy Center hopes to connect the racial terror of 1919 to the racial disparities in Elaine today.
At a community meeting earlier this year, residents gathered to discuss a novel approach to restorative justice involving a major landowner in Phillips County.
Some of the biggest stakeholders in local agriculture are not farmers at all, but teachers and college professors. Their retirement portfolios are managed by one of the biggest corporate landowners in the country, the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America, or TIAA, which purchased large tracts of farmland in recent years around Elaine.
(Full disclosure: the University of Memphis and WKNO both have TIAA plans.)
"There needs to be a conversation about how to return land to local control and make reparations," says Abigayle Reese, a community organizer for TIAA Divest, a group of climate activists and professors pushing for changes in the company. "They can't just divest, they need to actually do the right thing."
They’re asking TIAA to convey about 33,000 acres of land to minority-owned food farms, fund billions in community repair, and curb pesticide usage that many in Phillips County believe is causing environmental harm.
"Have you felt any value added to your community since TIAA has purchased land here?" Reese asks the crowd. "No."
Some supporters say it’s a longshot. But with more than a trillion dollars in assets, TIAA could also be a powerful catalyst for change.
We reached out to TIAA for comment. In an emailed statement, the company noted it complies with all laws and regulations with regard to pesticide use. An annual sustainability report outlines the company’s climate and community initiatives. Phillips County is not among them.
Victor Zachary is one of the few Black farmers left near Elaine.
"All they can do is give us a good eulogy because Black farmers are practically gone," he says.
His family’s 700 acres is small in comparison to other landowners. Collectively, Black farmers today own less than one percent of the nation’s farmland. Many see that as a long-term effect of the racial terror that prompted Black families to flee the south.
For those who stayed, despite lynchings and massacres, farming remains a matter of pride. Zachary’s mother, 93-year-old Annie Zachary Pike, is so dedicated to this land, she put it in a trust.
"I do not plan to make my will out and leave it for my grandchildren to dance off of and probably wouldn’t even put a flower on my grave," Pike says. "So, I have it fixed so that cannot sell it."
For her, there’s still a lot of healing to be done. But it will take hard work -- and faith -- to realize a better future.
