Elaine Massacre: Mass lynchings of blacks led Supreme Court to end racial disparities in US justice system

George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was killed at the hands of Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, and a viral video taken at the incident spurred one of the biggest nationwide protests against police brutality. While the country fought for justice for not only Floyd but other fallen brethren of the black community who had succumbed to a similar fate, the Black Lives Matter movement also took the center stage. In the weeks since the protests broke out, people have been signing petitions, donating to causes, writing to their elected leaders, and doing everything in their power to make their voices heard. The demands for justice are now also a demand for equality and the end to systemic racism, a horror that has plagued African-American history for centuries.

Historically, the black community has been subjected to oppression under the whites and even police brutality. Slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynching, false imprisonment and sentencing, race riots, and more, the African-Americans community has been repeatedly subjected to an onslaught of pain and suffering.  As the BLM movement gained momentum, the most heinous crimes committed against the black community came to the spotlight, stressing on the fact that no other community has ever been meted out such cruelty. One of the most barbarous crimes to have been committed against the blacks was the Elaine Massacre of 1919, a mass lynching that killed hundreds of black sharecrop farmers in Arkansas. 

Just as the Red Summer, a period of racial violence that transpired in nearly two dozen counties across the US, came to an end, the largest lynching massacre took place in Elaine between September 30, 1919, and October 7, 1919. According to a report by the Equal Justice Initiative, the massacre was instigated by the whites and claimed the lives of 237 African-Americans. While the fatalities were unusually high, the use of racial violence to subdue blacks at the time was not something unordinary. “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 African American community, not merely punishment of an alleged perpetrator for a crime," the Equal Justice Initiative wrote. 

Robert Lee Hill, a sharecropper, formed the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America (PFHUA) in 1918, in Winchester, Drew County, Arkansas, to help members obtain fair wages and treatment within the sharecropping system. The black members who joined the union hoped to combine their financial resources so they could afford to hire a legal representative to file a lawsuit against their plantation owners for stolen wages and bogus accounting of their debts. They enlisted the help of Ulysses Bratton, a prominent white attorney from Little Rock. Shortly after it was formed, however, the plantation owners were tipped about the union and its intentions. As the union members met at the Hoops Spur Church, on the outskirts of Elain, their discussion was interrupted by the arrival of a group of local white men, some of whom had affiliations with the law. Suddenly shots were fired in the church, chaos ensued and one officer was killed, while another was severely wounded in the process. One of the members of the mob, a black man, escaped from the shootout, unharmed and reported the incident to the local authorities.

Law enforcement in neighboring towns, as well as the governor's office, was contacted and within mere hours, mobs of hundreds of white men had swarmed the county to nip an alleged black insurgence against the whites, in the bud. The governor contacted the Department of War and asked if US soldiers could be deployed to the scene and suppress the alleged revolution. The Secretary of war directed more than 500 soldiers to Elaine and as the Arkansas Democrat report dated October 2, 1919, said, they were to "round up" the "heavily armed negroes", and were "under order to kill any negro who refused to surrender immediately."

The white mobs, aided by federal troops and local vigilantes like the Ku Klux Klan, went on a bloody rampage killing more than 200 African-Americans. The killings were entirely indiscriminate with men, women, and children in the vicinity being slaughtered. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas observed that "the Elaine Massacre was by far the deadliest racial confrontation in Arkansas history and possibly the bloodiest racial conflict in the history of the United States." In the midst of the violence, five whites perished, and someone had to be held accountable for those deaths. Despite it being the white Arkansans who took violent action, it was the black victims that stood for trial. 

After the massacre, the state officials planned an elaborate cover-up and falsely stated in the official records that the violence was incited by blacks that were planning a revolt. Furthermore, the forged statement also said that eleven black men and five white men were killed. The cover-up, however, was a success to the point that national newspapers used the falsified information in their reports. New York Times published an article under the headline, "Planned Massacre of Whites Today," and the Arkansas Gazette deemed Elaine was "a zone of negro insurrection." Following the publishing of these reports, more than 100 African-Americans were indicted and became defendants standing in hastily convened murder trials with 12 being sentenced to a death penalty on the electric chair. The testimonies were incriminating and coerced through torture, and jury deliberations only lasted moments. 

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People intervened in the case and launched a series of appeals to the Arkansas state courts and the federal courts for the next three years. The process was rather arduous comprising both hard-fought victories and discouraging setbacks that resonated with previous attempts at legal redressal for black Americans. Finally, in Moore vs Dempsey 261 US 86 (1923), the US Supreme court acquitted the men on the grounds that the mob-dominated atmosphere of the trial couple by coerced testimonies, denied the defendants due process as stated in the Fourteenth Amendment in the United States Constitution.

The decision upended years of court-sanctioned justice against the blacks, and secured rights of due process for those who find themselves in impossible circumstances. In September 2019, an Elaine Massacre Memorial was installed and unveiled, 100 years after the tragedy took place.