For a tenant farmer in Phillips County, the year ended at settlement, when the landlord totaled the cotton against the charges for seed, supplies and advances and said what the family was owed. Tenants said they were paid far below market price and carried balances into the next year; asked for itemized accounts, landlords refused. Cotton had sold for 11 cents a pound in 1915 and 40 cents in 1919.
In 1918 Robert L. Hill, a young man from Dermott who had worked for a planting company in Winchester, and a physician, V. E. Powell, incorporated the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. Its constitution promised to advance "the interests of the Negro, morally and intellectually." Members bought $1 shares in a joint-stock company meant to buy land. In 1919 lodges opened at Ratio, Hoop Spur, Elaine, Old Town, Ferguson and Mellwood, and members hired the Little Rock firm of Bratton, Bratton and Casey to press for a fair accounting. Many members were World War I veterans, and historians say planters saw a threat to their control of labor.
Hoop Spur
On the night of September 30, 1919, about 100 people met at the church at Hoop Spur, three miles north of Elaine, with armed guards outside. A car carrying white men stopped in front. Shots were fired, and accounts conflict over who fired first. W. A. Adkins, a Missouri Pacific security officer, was killed, and Deputy Sheriff Charles Pratt was wounded.
The week after
An estimated 500 to 1,000 armed white men gathered from Arkansas and Mississippi. Governor Charles Brough asked for troops, and more than 500 soldiers from Camp Pike, under Colonel Isaac Jenks, arrived on October 2. Jenks recorded two Black people killed by soldiers; a Memphis reporter wrote that many more were.
No one counted the dead. Early reports said about two dozen, Black reporters said more than 100, and historians now commonly say 200 or more. Five white people died. Among the Black dead the record names four brothers, Dr. David Augustine Elihue Johnston, Gibson Allen, Lewis Harrison and Leroy Johnston, killed on October 2 as they came home from a hunting trip.
Hundreds of Black men and women were held in stockades, and 285 in a Helena jail built for 48. On October 31 a grand jury charged 122; 65 took pleas with sentences of up to 21 years. By November 5 twelve men, Ed Ware and Frank Moore among them, had been sentenced to death. In Moore v. Dempsey the Supreme Court recounted a trial of about three-quarters of an hour and a verdict in under five minutes, and Justice Holmes wrote of a proceeding that was "a mask."
Afterward
Hill left Arkansas. Arrested in Topeka in January 1920, he stayed jailed until Kansas Governor Henry Allen refused extradition that March. From 1922 to 1962 he worked for the Santa Fe Railway. The union dissolved quickly. The last of the twelve were released in 1925.
The Elaine Massacre Memorial in Court Square Park in Helena, dedicated on September 29, 2019, carries no individual names. The trials were held in Helena, and the Delta Cultural Center in town tells the wider region's history.