The Elaine Massacre Memorial stands in Court Square Park at 350 Perry Street in downtown Helena. It was dedicated on September 29, 2019, the day before the hundredth anniversary of the massacre. Its builders chose Helena over the small town of Elaine because the trials that followed were held here and more people would see it. It carries no individual names; in 2018 co-chair David Solomon said only ten of the dead were known by name.
On the night of September 30, 1919, about 100 Black sharecroppers met at a church at Hoop Spur to organize for fair payment for their cotton from white planters. Shots were exchanged outside, and accounts still dispute who fired first; a white railroad security officer was killed. An estimated 500 to 1,000 armed white men then came from nearby counties and Mississippi, and white mobs killed Black people in and around Elaine. Troops from Camp Pike arrived on October 2. Their commander recorded two Black people killed by soldiers; a Memphis reporter wrote that many were reported killed by them. Five white people died. Estimates of the Black dead run from about 20 to 800. Four brothers, David Augustine Elihue, Gibson Allen, Lewis Harrison and Leroy Johnston, were killed on October 2 returning from a hunting trip.
Twelve Black men were convicted of murder in Helena in November 1919 and sentenced to death. Scipio Africanus Jones led their defense, and in Moore v. Dempsey the U.S. Supreme Court found the Helena proceedings had been a "mask." The last of the twelve were released in 1925.
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