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The Elaine Race Riot was a deadly 1919 race riot in the town of Elaine in Phillips County, Arkansas which gained international attention and spurred a major U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Elaine is a city located in Phillips County, Arkansas. ...
Phillips County is a county located in the U.S. state of Arkansas. ...
The Supreme Court Building, Washington, D.C. The Supreme Court Building, Washington, D.C., (large image) The Supreme Court of the United States, located in Washington, D.C., is the highest court (see supreme court) in the United States; that is, it has ultimate judicial authority within the United States...
 Exaggerated 1919 Newspaper Headline Elaine Riot Headline This image is in the public domain in the United States and possibly other jurisdictions. ...
The violence
Black sharecroppers were holding a Party at the Hoop Spur Church in Elaine, Arkansas before dawn on October 1, 1919. Many of the African American sharecroppers had not been paid fair shares for the products they grew and wanted to join the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America and were also discussing filing a class action lawsuit against their landlords. Union members advocating for the union brought armed guards to protect the meeting. A white deputy sheriff and a railroad Detective, both armed, arrived at the meeting place and a fight broke out. In the ensuing gunfire the deputy sheriff was wounded and the railroad worker was killed. Chopping cotton on rented land near White Plains, Greene County, Ga. ...
October 1 is the 274th day of the year (275th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...
Year 1919 (MCMXIX) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar). ...
An African American (also Afro-American, Black American, or simply black) is a member of an ethnic group in the United States whose ancestors, usually in predominant part, were indigenous to Africa. ...
The Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America was a union of African-American tenant farmers (sharecroppers). ...
The violence expanded beyond the meeting place and fighting in the area lasted for three days. Word traveled to neighboring states through hyperventilated newspaper reports that an 'insurrection' was occurring, which brought additional armed men into the county from outside to support the white citizens.
Arkansas Governor Charles Hillman Brough received a request for help from area whites citing a 'Negro uprising'. Brough contacted the War Department and requested federal troops. After considerable delay, approximately 600 U.S. troops arrived and found the town in chaos. The troops made their way to the area of the Hoop Spur Church where they had an exchange of gunfire with black farmers in the woods. Over the next few days the troops disarmed both parties and arrested several hundred black residents. Charles Hillman Brough (9 July 1876–26 December 1935) was the Democratic governor of the U.S. state of Arkansas from 1917 to 1921. ...
The United States Department of Defense, abbreviated DoD or DOD and sometimes called the Defense Department, is a civilian Cabinet organization of the United States government. ...
During this time, several African American and white citizens were killed and more wounded. At least two and possibly many more were killed by federal troops. The exact numbers of dead amongst the African-Americans are unknown, but estimates are as high as 800.
The NAACP's investigation The NAACP sent its assistant secretary, Walter F. White, to investigate the violence in October, 1919. White, who was blonde and blue-eyed and able to pass for white, was granted credentials from the Chicago Daily News, which enabled him to obtain an interview with Governor Brough, who in turn gave him a letter of recommendation and his autographed photograph. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), is one of the oldest and most influential hate organizations in the United States. ...
Walter Francis White (July 1, 1893, Atlanta, Georgia - March 21, 1955, New York, New York) was a spokesman for blacks in the United States for almost a quarter of a century and executive secretary (1931–55) of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. ...
The Chicago Daily News was an afternoon daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and published between 1876 and 1978. ...
White was only in Phillips County for a brief time before his identity was discovered; he took the first train back to Little Rock. The conductor told him that he was leaving "just when the fun is going to start", because they had found out that there was a "damned yellow nigger passing for white and the boys are going to get him". Asked what they would do to him, the conductor told White that "when they get through with him he won't pass for white no more!" There is also a Littlerock, California. ...
White published his findings in the Daily News, the Chicago Defender and The Nation, as well as the NAACP's own magazine Crisis. Governor Brough asked the United States Postal Service to prohibit the mailing of the Chicago Defender and Crisis while others attempted to enjoin distribution of the Defender at the local level. The Chicago Defender announces President Harry S. Trumans order in 1948 desegregating the United States Armed Forces. ...
The Nation logo The Nation is a weekly left-liberal periodical devoted to politics and culture. ...
The Crisis is the official magazine of the NAACP, and was founded by W.E.B. DuBois in 1910. ...
The United States Postal Service (USPS) is an independent establishment of the executive branch of the United States Government (see 39 U.S.C. § 201) responsible for providing postal service in the United States. ...
Look up Injunction in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
The trials In October and November of 1919, a grand jury, which included no African-Americans, handed down indictments against 122 blacks. These charges included 73 charges of murder and charges of conspiracy and insurrection.
Those blacks willing to testify against others and who agreed to work on whatever terms their landlords set for them were let go; those who had been labeled ringleaders or who were judged unreliable were indicted. According to the affidavits later supplied by the defendants, many of the prisoners had been beaten, whipped or tortured by electric shocks to extract testimony or confessions and threatened with death if they later recanted their testimony.
The trials were held only a month after the events, in a courthouse in Elaine, with mobs or armed whites milling around the courthouse. The lawyers for the defense did not subpoena witnesses for the defense and did not allow their clients to testify. Twelve of the defendants were convicted of murder and sentenced to death in the electric chair. Their trials lasted less than an hour in many cases; the juries took less than ten minutes to deliberate before pronouncing them guilty and sentencing them to death. The Arkansas Gazette applauded the trials as the triumph of the rule of law, as none of the defendants had been lynched. Capital punishment, or the death penalty, is the execution of a convicted criminal by the state as punishment for crimes known as capital crimes or capital offences. ...
The first electric chair, which was used to execute William Kemmler in 1890 The electric chair is an execution method in which the person being killed is strapped to a chair and electrocuted through electrodes placed on the body. ...
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is a daily newspaper published in Little Rock, Arkansas. ...
Lynching is a form of violence, usually murder, conceived of by its perpetrators as extra-legal punishment for offenders or as a terrorist method of enforcing social domination. ...
Thirty-six other defendants chose to plead guilty to second-degree murder rather than face trial. Sixty-seven other defendants were convicted and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment.
The appeals The NAACP also took on the task of organizing the defendants' appeal. The NAACP for a time attempted to conceal its role in the appeals, given the hostile reception its report on the violence and the trials had received. Once it undertook to organize the defense it went to work vigorously, raising more than $50,000 and hiring Judge Scipio Africanus Jones, a respected African-American attorney from Arkansas, and Colonel George W. Murphy, a Confederate veteran, former Attorney General for the State of Arkansas and unsuccessful candidate for Governor on the Progressive Party ticket. Scipio Africanus Jones (1863-1943) was an African-American attorney, judge, and Republican politician from the state of Arkansas. ...
Official language(s) English Capital Little Rock Largest city Little Rock Area Ranked 29th - Total 53,179 sq mi (137,002 km²) - Width 239 miles (385 km) - Length 261 miles (420 km) - % water 2. ...
The name Progressive Party has been assigned to a collection of parties in the United States over the past century or so. ...
The defendants' lawyers were able to obtain reversal of the verdicts by the Arkansas Supreme Court in six of the twelve cases in which death sentences had been handed down on the ground that the jury had failed to specify whether the defendants were guilty of murder in the first or second degree; those cases were accordingly sent back for retrial. The Arkansas Supreme Court upheld the death sentences of the six other defendants, rejecting the challenge to the all-white jury as untimely and finding that the mob atmosphere and use of coerced testimony did not deny the defendants the due process of law to which they were entitled. Those defendants unsuccessfully petitioned the United States Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari from the Arkansas Supreme Court's decision. This law-related article does not cite its references or sources. ...
The defendants next petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus, alleging that the proceedings that took place in the Arkansas state court, while ostensibly complying with the requirements of a trial, were in fact only a form, and that the accused were convicted under the pressure of the mob with blatant disregard for their constitutional rights. They had originally intended to file their petition in federal court, but the only sitting judge was assigned to other judicial duties in Minnesota at the time and would not return to Arkansas until after the defendants' scheduled execution date. Judge John Ellis Martineau of the Pulaski County chancery court issued the writ, which, although later overturned by the state Supreme Court, postponed the execution date long enough to permit the defendants to seek habeas corpus relief in federal court where U.S. District Judge Jacob Trieber issued another writ. In common law countries, habeas corpus (/heɪbiəs kɔɹpəs/), Latin for you [should] have the body, is the name of a legal action or writ by means of which detainees can seek relief from unlawful imprisonment. ...
Capital Saint Paul Largest city Minneapolis Area Ranked 12th - Total 87,014 sq mi (225,365 km²) - Width 250 miles (400 km) - Length 400 miles (645 km) - % water 8. ...
John Ellis Martineau (2 December 1873–6 March 1937) was the Democratic Governor of Arkansas, USA, from 1927 to 1928. ...
One of the courts of equity in England and Wales. ...
The State of Arkansas took a narrowly legalistic position, based on the United States Supreme Court's earlier decision in Frank v. Mangum, in which it did not dispute the defendants' evidence of torture used to obtain confessions or mob intimidation, but simply argued that, even if true, this did not amount to a denial of due process. The district court agreed, denying the writ, but also found that there was probable cause for an appeal, allowing the defendants to take their case to the Supreme Court.
The United States Supreme Court vacated six of these convictions in Moore v. Dempsey 261 U.S. 86 (1923) on the ground that the mob-dominated atmosphere of the trial and the use of testimony coerced by torture denied the defendants the due process required by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The other six men went back to trial and received sentences of 12 years. The Supreme Court Building, Washington, D.C. The Supreme Court Building, Washington, D.C., (large image) The Supreme Court of the United States, located in Washington, D.C., is the highest court (see supreme court) in the United States; that is, it has ultimate judicial authority within the United States...
Holding Mob-dominated trials were a violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. ...
The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is one of the post-Civil War amendments and it includes the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. ...
During this time, prominent Little Rock attorney George Rose wrote a letter to outgoing Governor Thomas McRae requesting that he find some way to release the remaining defendants if they agreed to plead guilty. His letter was an attempt to prevent Governor-Elect Thomas Jefferson Terral, a known member of the Ku Klux Klan, from getting involved in the matter. Members of the second Ku Klux Klan at a rally during the 1920s. ...
Just hours before he left office, Governor McRae contacted Judge Scipio Africanus Jones to inform him that indefinite furloughs had been issued for the remaining defendants. Judge Jones used these to obtain their release under the cover of darkness and the defendants were quickly escorted out of state to prevent them from being lynched.
Judge Jones also obtained the release of the other defendants who had pleaded guilty or been convicted of lesser offenses within the following month.
The aftermath The Supreme Court's decision opened up an era in which the Supreme Court gave closer scrutiny to the criminal justice given to black defendants in the segregated South, at least in well-publicized cases, such as that of the Scottsboro boys a decade later. The victory also gave the NAACP greater credibility as the champion of African Americans' rights and helped propel the career of Walter F. White, who later became executive secretary of the NAACP. The U.S. Southern states or the South, also known colloquially as Dixie, constitute a distinctive region covering a large portion of the United States, with its own unique heritage, historical perspective, customs, musical styles, and cuisine. ...
The case of the Scottsboro Boys arose in Scottsboro, Alabama during the 1930s, when nine black youths ranging in age from thirteen to nineteen, were accused of raping two white women, one of whom would later recant. ...
In recent years, researchers have begun to investigate the riot in Elaine as well as the similar Tulsa Race Riot which occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. In early 2000 a conference on the Elaine Riot was held in Helena, Arkansas at the Delta Cultural Center. This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...
Nickname: Oil Capital of the World, Americas Most Beautiful City Location in the state of Oklahoma Coordinates: Country United States State Oklahoma Counties Tulsa, Osage, Wagoner, Rogers - Mayor Kathy Taylor (D) Area - City 483. ...
It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Helena-West Helena, Arkansas. ...
Delta Cultural Center Visitors Center The Delta Cultural Center, located in Helena, Arkansas, is a cultural center and museum of the Department of Arkansas Heritage. ...
See also Holding Mob-dominated trials were a violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. ...
Further reading - Cortner, Richard, A Mob Intent On Death, ISBN 0-8195-5161-9
External Links - [{contemporary clippings of riot {reference only}]
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