Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta

Essays to Mark the Centennial of the Elaine Massacre

Michael Pierce, Calvin White, Michael Pierce, Calvin White, Calvin White, Jr.

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781682262061, 9781682262054
• eBook ISBN: 9781610757751
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta examines the history of labor relations and racial conflict in the Mississippi Valley from the Civil War into the late twentieth century. This essay collection grew out of a conference marking the hundredth anniversary of one of the nation's deadliest labor conflicts—the 1919 Elaine Massacre, during which white mobs ruthlessly slaughtered over two hundred African Americans across Phillips County, Arkansas, in response to a meeting of unionized Black sharecroppers. The essays here demonstrate that the brutality that unfolded in Phillips County was characteristic of the culture of race- and labor-based violence that prevailed in the century after the Civil War. They detail how Delta landowners began seeking cheap labor as soon as the slave system ended—securing a workforce by inflicting racial terror, eroding the Reconstruction Amendments in the courts, and obstructing federal financial-relief efforts. The result was a system of peonage that continued to exploit Blacks and poor whites for their labor, sometimes fatally. In response, laborers devised their own methods for sustaining themselves and their communities: forming unions, calling strikes, relocating, and occasionally operating outside the law. By shedding light on the broader context of the Elaine Massacre, Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta reveals that the fight against white supremacy in the Delta was necessarily a fight for better working conditions, fair labor practices, and economic justice.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Black Agricultural Labor Activism and White Oppression in the Arkansas Delta: The Cotton Pickers’ Strike of 1891
• Chapter 2. “Night Riding Must Not Be Tolerated in Arkansas”: One State’s Uneven War against Economic Vigilantism
• Chapter 3. Black Workers, White Nightriders, and the Supreme Court’s Changing View of the Thirteenth Amendment
• Chapter 4. Henry Lowery Lynching: A Legacy of the Elaine Massacre?
• Chapter 5. Black Women, Violence, and Criminality in Post–World War I Arkansas, 1919–1922
• Chapter 6. Steadily Holding Our Heads above Water: The Flood of 1927, White Violence, and Black Resistance to Labor Exploitation in the Mississippi Delta
• Chapter 7. “Boss Man Tell Us to Get North”: Mexican Labor and Black Migration in Lincoln County, Arkansas, 1948–1955
• Chapter 8. Sweet Willie Wine’s 1969 Walk against Fear: Black Activism and White Response in East Arkansas Fifty Years after the Elaine Massacre
• Chapter 9. “Sick and Sinister”: Intersections of Violence and the Struggle for Economic Justice in the Late Twentieth Century
• Epilogue. Evil in the Delta
• Notes
• Contributors
• Index