b'BODY OF CHRIST NEWS MAGAZINEAMERICAS FORGOTTEN MASS MURDERS: WHEN 237 PEOPLE WERE MURDERED IN ARKANSAS Excerpts from the Daily Beast (12/17/17)In 1919, in the wake of World War I, black sharecroppers unionized inand that the Southern men can handle the negroes all right and peaceably. Arkansas, unleashing a wave of white vigilantism and mass murderThere was nothing peaceable about the methods used to demolish the that left 237 people dead.sharecroppers union. Late on the night of September 30, 1919, the planters dispatched three men to break up a union meeting in a rough hewn black The visits began in the fall of 1918, just as World War I ended. At his office in Littlechurch at Hoop Spur, a crossroads three miles three miles north of Elaine. Rock, Arkansas, attorney Ulysses S. Bratton listened as Black sharecroppersPrepared for trouble, the sharecroppers had assigned six men to patrol from the Delta told stories of theft, exploitation, and endless debt. A man namedoutside the church. A verbal confrontation led to gunfire that fatally wounded Carter had tended 90 acres of cotton, only to have his landlord seize the entireone of the attackers. The union men dispersed, but not for long. Bracing for crop and his possessions. From the town of Ratio, in Phillips County, Arkansas, areprisals from their landlords, they rousted fellow sharecroppers from bed black farmer reported that a plantation manager refused to give sharecroppersand formed self-defense forces.The planters also mobilized. Sheriff Frank an itemized account for their crop. Another sharecropper told of a landlordKitchens deputized a massive white posse, even setting up a headquarters trying to starve the people into selling the cotton at his own price. They aintat the courthouse in the county seat of Helena to organize his recruits. allowing us down there room to move our feet except to go to the field. No one could know it at the time, but within a year these inauspicious meetingsHundreds of white veterans, recently returned from military service in would lead to one of the worst episodes of racial violence (at that time) in U.S.France, flocked to the courthouse. Dividing into small groups, the armed history. Initiated by whites, the violence-by any measure, a massacre-claimedwhite men set out into the countryside to search for the sharecroppers. the lives of 237 Black Americans, according to a just released report from theCont. on page 8Equal Justice Initiative. The death toll was unusually high, but the use of racial violence to subjugate blacks during this time was not uncommon. As the Equal Justice Initiative observes, Racial terror lynching was a tool used to enforce Jim Crow laws and racial segregation-a tactic for maintaining racial control by victimizing the entire Black American community, not merely punishment of an allegeded perpetrator for a crime. This was certainly true of the massacre in Phillips County, Arkansas. Bratton agreed to represent the cheated sharecroppers, who also joined a new union, the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. Its founder, a black Delta native named Robert Hill, had no prior organizing experience but plenty of ambition. The union wants to know why it is that the laborers cannot control their just earnings which they work for, Hill announced as he urged black sharecroppers to each recruit 25 prospective members to form a lodge. Hill was especially successful in Phillips County, where seven lodges were established in 1919. It took a lot of courage to defy the Arkansas Deltas white elite. Men such as E.M. Mort Allen controlled the local economy, government, law enforcement, and courts. Allen was a latter-day carpetbagger, a Northerner who had come to Arkansas in 1906 to make his fortune. He married well and formed a partnership with a wealthy businessman. Together they developed the town of Elaine, a hub for the thriving lumber industry. Allen and the countys white landowners understood that their continued prosperity depended on the exploitation of black sharecroppers and laborers. In a country where more than 75 percent of the population was Black, this wasnt a task to be taken lightly. InFebruary1919,theplantersagreedtoreducetheacreageofcottonin cultivationinanticipationofapostwardropindemand.Iftheygavetheir tenants a fair settlement, their profits would shrink further. Allen spoke for the planters when he declared that the old Southern methods are much the best, 7 BOCNEWS.COM'