Damaged Heritage

The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation

J. Chester Johnson

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781643134666
• eBook ISBN: 9781643134673
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Biografie nell'ambito delle scienze sociali

An illuminating journey to racial reconciliation experienced by two Americans—one black and one white. The 1919 Elaine Race Massacre, arguably the worst in our country's history, has been widely unknown for the better part of a century, thanks to the whitewashing of history. In 2008, Johnson was asked to write the Litany of Offense and Apology for a National Day of Repentance, where the Episcopal Church formally apologized for its role in transatlantic slavery and related evils. In his research, Johnson happened upon a treatise by historian and anti-lynching advocate Ida B. Wells on the Elaine Massacre, where more than a hundred and possibly hundreds of African-American men, women, and children perished at the hands of white posses, vigilantes, and federal troops in rural Phillips County, Arkansas. Johnson would discover that his beloved grandfather had been a member of the KKK and participated in the massacre. The discovery shook him to his core. Thereafter, he met Sheila L. Walker, a descendant of African-American victims of the massacre, and she and Johnson committed themselves to reconciliation. Damaged Heritage brings to light a deliberately erased chapter in American history, and offers a blueprint for how our pluralistic society can at last acknowledge—and repudiate—our collective damaged heritage and begin a path towards true healing.

1 A CHANGING OF AMERICA

Across the sweeping canvas of American history, two markers, inherited and ineluctable, from the Elaine Race Massacre of 1919 in Phillips County, Arkansas, invite a degree of attention yet to be fully received from the country’s public consciousness. First, the sheer number of persons who died in the Massacre—more particularly, the countless African-Americans who perished—would certainly cause this massacre to be judged one of the deadliest racial conflicts, perhaps the deadliest racial conflagration, in the history of the nation. Second, the American Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and 1960s drew constantly from the wellspring of the 1923 U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Moore v. Dempsey that emerged out of the legal proceedings in Phillips County against African-American defendants, charged with the murders of whites allegedly committed during the Massacre. The ruling in Moore v. Dempsey broke a long chain of Supreme Court decisions brutally adverse to the safety and rights of African-Americans.

Two heroes whose individual backgrounds could not have been more dissimilar share in this saga of a changing of America. Most apparent, Scipio Africanus Jones, African-American lawyer, who began work in Arkansas’ fields to become a twentieth-century Moses, climbed, through brilliance and tenacity, to forensic heights to free the black sharecroppers, unjustly found guilty of crimes in the aftermath of the Massacre. At the same time, he developed the legal strategy that ultimately, through the intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court, gave life to the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to guard the individual rights of and due process for American citizens. The other hero, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Boston patrician and distinguished jurist, who wrote the majority opinion for Moore v. Dempsey, not only opened the door to freedom for wrongfully convicted Arkansas sharecroppers, but also articulated a new judicial precedent and principle under which the federal government would more forcefully thereafter engage in the constitutional protection of all its citizens.

Portrait of Scipio Africanus Jones. Courtesy of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, Central Arkansas Library System

Notwithstanding the historical and legal significance of the Elaine Race Massacre, outside a handful of advocates and a somewhat wider audience that those advocates engendered, the Massacre and its aftermath have been largely ignored. Whether this inattention can be explained by the Massacre’s remote location, by the desire of many blacks and whites in Phillips County and throughout Arkansas to keep quiet about the conflagration, or by the rush of other affairs affecting the state and the nation, we just don’t know. It is certainly time for more airing of those days at the end of September and early October, 1919, and subsequent, associated, and gravid moments, if, for no other reason, than to debunk the erstwhile success of silence and avoidance.

By the time of my birth in 1944, my maternal grandparents, Alonzo Birch, known as “Lonnie,” and Hattie, had moved to Little Rock from McGehee when he was transferred by the Missouri Pacific Railroad (MoPac) from the company’s southeastern Arkansas hub to its larger transportation center. Lonnie was thin, not tall, not short, white, and a native of the Arkansas Delta. Bespectacled with large pale frames, he had thick, often unmanageable gray hair. An inveterate smoker and a proud agnostic, Lonnie bore a tranquil demeanor, and for me, remained always available. At the time Lonnie became my principal caretaker, he was retired from MoPac, which had an indelible and indisputable part in the Elaine Race Massacre. For several years following my father’s death in 1946, before I had reached the age of two, I lived with Lonnie and Hattie until my mother brought my older brother and me together under one roof in Monticello, one of the many small towns in southeast Arkansas. Upon our father’s death, my brother spent much more of his time with the paternal side of the family. Soon after I left Lonnie for Monticello, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage, but even today, I reminisce over the love and sensibility we shared with each other. I can recall times I sat in his lap on the front porch of my grandparents’ home in Little Rock, when Lonnie and I watched cars and people go by, and I played with a porch chair that could be overturned and magically—soon after the end of World War II—become a fighter pilot’s cockpit. Lonnie and I celebrated birthdays and other holidays together. When I fell down, he picked me up and gently assuaged my scrapes and bruises.

Out of the blue—I must have been in junior high school—without provocation or for any apparent reason, except that the integration of Little Rock Central High School had just begun, Mother casually mentioned that before she became a teenager, Lonnie participated in a “well-known” race riot while in the employ of MoPac. Later on, she editorialized about it now and then: how he traveled on a MoPac train from McGehee to the battle between the races, how the place of bloody engagement with the blacks had been close to the railroad tracks and among cotton rows. Looking back at the time that followed the end of World War I, when the Elaine Race Massacre occurred, what other race massacre or so-called race riot had there been near McGehee, except for Elaine? There wasn’t one. History did disclose lynchings or the burning alive of African-Americans around that time in Star City, Monticello, McGehee, and Lake Village within southeast Arkansas, but no massacre or riot, except for Elaine. Whenever she mentioned the race riot, Mother frequently referred to Lonnie, in a matter-of-fact tone, as a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

At the time of the Elaine Race Massacre in 1919, Lonnie worked as a railroad engineer for MoPac. The Birch family, pioneer residents of Desha County, immediately south of Phillips County, consisted of planters, but, unlike other male family members who chose to farm, Lonnie instead took a job with MoPac in McGehee, only a few miles from the Birch farms. Home for Hattie, Lonnie, and their several children and a relatively short train ride to and from Elaine, McGehee had become MoPac’s regional center for southeast Arkansas. If anyone in that part of the country found it necessary to get to Phillips County by railroad, the easiest mode of non-local land travel in the early part of the twentieth century, the path generally led through McGehee. Arkansas Governor Charles Hillman Brough brought federal troops from Little Rock to Elaine via McGehee to “restore” order, and except for those coming through Memphis, outside contributors or witnesses to the Elaine Race Massacre, if they came by rail, were likely to pass through Lonnie’s hometown.

Much later, I made the simple connection that the race riot to which Mother alluded and the Elaine Race Massacre were one and the same. It was not very difficult to conflate the related factors leading to Lonnie’s participation in the Massacre: his employment with MoPac; the routine, quasi-police role MoPac undertook during that time in that region of the state; Lonnie’s chthonic views about race, evidenced by his membership in the Ku Klux Klan; and the history, conveyed by Mother’s verbal remembrances. I had learned that Lonnie, though employed by MoPac, kept in contact, for kinship and financial reasons, with his brothers who farmed the family lands, and would have therefore undoubtedly known of the rumored threats of unionization by African-American sharecroppers in the Arkansas Delta to negotiate for higher cotton prices with the white planters. After all, Robert Hill, the black organizer of black sharecroppers, and his Progressive Farmers and Household Union, both being indivisibly bound to the Massacre in Phillips County, resided in Winchester, a small hamlet only a handful of miles north of the family farm.

I can indeed link the convincing pieces that led to the conclusion Lonnie took part in the Elaine Race Massacre, but I cannot reconcile my love for Lonnie and his apparent views about and contributions to racism, as practiced in the Arkansas Delta by whites during the first part of the twentieth century. In my readings that dealt with the period, I recollect references to the Arkansas Delta as the heart of darkness for African-Americans, and it may have been—with my own grandfather’s propensity adding, in goodly supply, no doubt, to the pool of darkness that spread murderously and perniciously over the land. Yet, he was always kind to me, much kinder than virtually anyone else. So, I will not try to reconcile the two—it would be false, serpentine, and artificial. But maybe he couldn’t reconcile the two either. He was who he was, and now that he is dead, I can only ponder the questions with the answers secluded and forever distant. Still, I know unreservedly my own path to Elaine was, in part, to uncover a slice of him that eludes my memory and baffles my personal conscience.

In 2008, as I was writing the “Litany of Offense and Apology” in poetry and prose for the national Day of Repentance when the Episcopal Church formally apologized for its role in transatlantic slavery and associated evils, I dove headlong into research to refine my recollection of and familiarity with consequential African-American writers and leaders. As I re-read or read fresh various books, letters, essays, and sundry materials by such notables as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Ida B. Wells, and numerous others, I occasionally came across references to and comments about the Elaine Race Massacre of 1919. Although reared—a white male—during the 1950s and early 1960s in southeast Arkansas, some sixty miles or so from Elaine (as the crow flies), except for episodic and somewhat abstruse and brief allusions about Lonnie’s participation, as relayed by my mother, which I later employed to make connections to the Massacre, I could recount nothing I’d heard or read in those earlier years about the event.

I never learned about the Elaine Race Massacre during my school days in history classes, even in Arkansas history instruction; I never heard it discussed in family circles or in casual conversations at local restaurants or coffee shops or at church and social gatherings. A small number of whites died, but many more African-Americans lost their lives—several writers say hundreds, others say less—mostly in “the killing fields” north of Elaine. Ida B. Wells, the fervid lynching critic, traveled from Chicago to Arkansas in early 1920 to hear about the white attacks up close and to interview African-American prisoners at The Walls penitentiary outside of Little Rock, when she posed as a family member of one of the prisoners to gain access to the Elaine Twelve, who were repeatedly scheduled for execution, convicted of murdering whites during the Massacre. After her time at The Walls, Ida B. Wells wrote about the incident in a short volume of some seventy pages, The Arkansas Race Riot. But I had known nothing. I contacted several friends from Monticello High School with whom I’ve continued a rather close relationship; they likewise had no or little information to bear on the matter. A void, the silence, evanescence, if you will, of neglected history.

During the course of my research, which grew in intensity, I learned the Massacre had gradually crept into the public consciousness among some Arkansans, as, over time, information and transmitted recollections seeped into the open air. Indeed, I eventually discovered that a symposium had been held a few years previously in Phillips County, allowing African-Americans and whites to combine information that people gleaned over the years about the Massacre and its immediate aftermath. I also learned that three excellent books, which discussed the Massacre, had been published since 2000: Robert Whitaker’s On the Laps of Gods and Grif Stockley’s two books: Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919 and Ruled by Race. These books built on earlier information about and studies of the Massacre.

Notwithstanding these books, the silence of neglected history prevailed. I soon contacted, on several occasions, the Arkansas branch of a national African-American organization to ascertain whether it had plans, even preliminary ones, for a centennial observance of the Massacre. After all, if there were a significant set of programs, memorials, or general reflections to be scheduled for the centennial in 2019 for commemoration of the event, initial planning and fundraising should soon begin. No return calls, no letters written in response to my inquiries. In additional instances, outreach to others met with similar silence. On the other hand, I did find interest by some Arkansans for giving more attention to the Massacre through public forums or other public acknowledgments. I’ve nonetheless had to conclude there was an unwritten agreement, among many blacks and whites, for silence about or only modest recognition of the Massacre and associated, unsettling history. Indeed, in her book, One With Others, published in 2010, both a poetic and investigative account of the 1969 March Against Fear, a march for racial freedom and justice, from West Memphis, Arkansas to Little Rock, Arkansas, C. D. Wright altered or omitted true names nearly a half century after the actual march, presumably as a result of vicinal responses to various inquiries Wright pursued about the past epoch. I guess I’m forced to consider seriously the cynical words of one elder, white Arkansan, who told me a few years ago: “We should have learned that racism is a scab that never heals. If you poke at it enough, it’ll start to bleed, and we’ve had more than enough blood spilling out of that wound.”

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A new, threatening world gripped the white planter class in the Arkansas Delta at the conclusion of World War I. African-American men, returning in consequential numbers from Europe, were different than those who left the shores of the United States to fight. Europe had shown respect for black Americans, and many were decorated heroes. After risking their lives for this country, these African-Americans expected to be treated with greater fairness and equity upon their return. As an immediate concern to the white planters, these African-American veterans knew how to take care of themselves and how to use firearms. Nevertheless, as soon as these blacks set their feet back on home soil, whites were determined to make it clear that nothing at all had changed; maybe, it had even gotten worse in early 1919 with lynchings, shootings, or the burning alive of African-American veterans and other blacks in places like Star City and El Dorado, Arkansas, and in the near-by states of Louisiana and Mississippi.¹

At the same time, communism had recently swept Russia and promoted a world-wide conquest; in the United States, did this mean vigorous unionization of farm workers among African-Americans, who tilled the Arkansas Delta cotton fields? Fear of the radicalization of the African-American in the United States, assumed to be inspired by Bolshevist agitation, became rampant.²

Racial confrontations broke out everywhere in the country during the summer of 1919: Chicago, South Carolina, Washington, D.C., Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Nebraska, and as far west as Arizona—prompting the black poet, James Weldon Johnson, to coin a double entendre for the nation’s upheaval, “Red Summer of 1919.” Numerous journalists, in and out of the United States, believed the internal American conflict, at that time, constituted a race war.

Throughout the months leading up to the fall of 1919, rumors and tense times pervaded the white citizens of Phillips County, Arkansas, home to many substantial cotton farms along the Mississippi River. Indeed, a committee, composed of County officials and plutocrats, most of whom lived in Helena, the county seat, had formed to monitor any potential problems that might surface among African-Americans. In fact, white planters heard from “spies” and other sources that a certain Robert Hill, a newly returned African-American veteran, residing outside of Phillips Cou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Map of Major Sites for Damaged Heritage
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: A Changing of America
• Chapter 2: The Genuinely Human
• Chapter 3: First Stories
• Chapter 4: March 15, 2014
• Chapter 5: Monticello, Arkansas
• Chapter 6: After Freedom Summer
• Chapter 7: Drew School
• Chapter 8: In Memoriam
• Chapter 9: A Reconciliation In Phillips County
• Afterword
• On Dedicating the Elaine Massacre Memorial
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Endnotes
• Copyright