Many Negro tenants in eastern Arkansas, as in other states, were still living under a share system by which the owner furnished the land and the Negro the labor, and by which at the end of the year the two supposedly got equal parts of the crop. Meanwhile throughout the year the tenant would get his food, clothing, and other supplies at exorbitant prices from a "commissary" operated by the planter or his agent; and in actual practice the landowner and the tenant did not go together to a city to dispose of the crop when it was gathered, as was sometimes done elsewhere, but the landowner alone sold the crop and settled with the tenant whenever and however he pleased; nor at the time of settlement was any itemized statement of supplies given, only the total amount owed being stated. Obviously the planter could regularly pad his accounts, keep the Negro in debt, and be assured of his labor supply from year to year.
In 1918 the price of cotton was constantly rising and at length reached forty cents a pound. Even with the cheating to which the Negroes were subjected, it became difficult to keep them in debt, and they became more and more insistent in their demands for itemized statements. Nevertheless some of those whose cotton was sold in October, 1918, did not get any statement of any sort before July of the next year.
Seeing no other way out of their difficulty, sixty-eight of the Negroes got together and decided to hire a lawyer who would help them to get statements of their accounts and settlement at the right figures. Feeling that the life of any Negro lawyer who took such a case would be endangered, they employed the firm of Bratton and Bratton, of Little Rock. They made contracts with this firm to handle the sixty-eight cases at fifty dollars each in cash and a percentage of the moneys collected from the white planters. Some of the Negroes also planned to go before the Federal Grand Jury and charge certain planters with peonage. They had secret meetings from time to time in order to collect the money to be paid in advance and to collect the evidence which would enable them successfully to prosecute their cases. Some Negro cotton-pickers about the same time organized a union; and at Elaine many Negroes who worked in the sawmills and who desired to protect their wives and daughters from insult, refused to allow them to pick cotton or to work for a white man at any price.
Such was the sentiment out of which developed the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America, which was an effort by legal means to secure protection from unscrupulous landlords, but which did use the form of a fraternal order with passwords and grips and insignia so as the more forcefully to appeal to some of its members. About the first of October the report was spread abroad in Phillips County that the Negroes were plotting an insurrection and that they were rapidly preparing to massacre the white people on a great scale. When the situation had become tense, one Sunday John Clem, a white man from Helena, drunk, came to Elaine and proceeded to terrorize the Negro population by gun play. The colored people kept off the streets in order to avoid trouble and telephoned the sheriff at Helena. This man failed to act. The next day Clem was abroad again, but the Negroes still avoided trouble, thinking that his acts were simply designed to start a race riot. On Tuesday evening, October 1, however, W.D. Adkins, a special agent of the Missouri Pacific Railroad, in company with Charles Pratt, a deputy sheriff, was riding past a Negro church near Hoop Spur, a small community just a few miles from Elaine. According to Pratt, persons in the church fired without cause on the party, killing Adkins and wounding himself. According to the Negroes, Adkins and Pratt fired into the church, evidently to frighten the people there assembled. At any rate word spread through the county that the massacre had started, and for days there was murder and rioting, in the course of which not less than five white men and twenty-five Negroes were killed, though some estimates placed the number of fatalities a great deal higher. Negroes were arrested and disarmed; some were shot on the highways; homes were fired into; and at one time hundreds of men and women were in a stockade under heavy guard and under the most unwholesome conditions, while hundreds of white men, armed to the teeth, rushed to the vicinity from neighboring cities and towns. Governor Charles H. Brough telegraphed to Camp Pike for Federal troops, and five hundred were mobilized at once "to repel the attack of the black army." Worse than any other feature was the wanton slaying of the four Johnston brothers, whose father had been a prominent Presbyterian minister and whose mother was formerly a school-teacher. Dr. D.A.E. Johnston was a successful dentist and owned a three-story building in Helena. Dr. Louis Johnston was a physician who lived in Oklahoma and who had come home on a visit. A third brother had served in France and been wounded and gassed at Château-Thierry.
Altogether one thousand Negroes were arrested and one hundred and twenty-two indicted. A special committee of seven gathered evidence and is charged with having used electric connections on the witness chair in order to frighten the Negroes. Twelve men were sentenced to death (though up to the end of 1920 execution had been stayed), and fifty-four to penitentiary terms. The trials lasted from five to ten minutes each. No witnesses for the defense were called; no Negroes were on the juries; no change of venue was given. Meanwhile lawyers at Helena were preparing to reap further harvest from Negroes who would be indicted and against whom there was no evidence, but who had saved money and Liberty Bonds.
Governor Brough in a statement to the press blamed the Crisis and the Chicago Defender for the trouble. He had served for a number of years as a professor of economics before becoming governor and had even identified himself with the forward-looking University Commission on Southern Race Questions; and it is true that he postponed the executions in order to allow appeals to be filed in behalf of the condemned men. That he should thus attempt to shift the burden of blame and overlook the facts when in a position of grave responsibility was a keen disappointment to the lovers of progress.
Reference to the monthly periodical and the weekly paper just mentioned, however, brings us to still another matter—the feeling on the part of the Negro that, in addition to the outrages visited on the race, the Government was now, under the cloak of wartime legislation, formally to attempt to curtail its freedom of speech. For some days the issue of the Crisis for May, 1919, was held up in the mail; a South Carolina representative in Congress quoted by way of denunciation from the editorial "Returning Soldiers" in the same number of the periodical; and a little later in the year the Department of Justice devoted twenty-seven pages of the report of the investigation against "Persons Advising Anarchy, Sedition, and the Forcible Overthrow of the Government" to a report on "Radicalism and Sedition among the Negroes as Reflected in Their Publications." Among other periodicals and papers mentioned were the Messenger and the Negro World of New York; and by the Messenger indeed, frankly radical in its attitude not only on the race question but also on fundamental economic principles, even the Crisis was regarded as conservative in tone. There could be no doubt that a great spiritual change had come over the Negro people of the United States. At the very time that their sons and brothers were making the supreme sacrifice in France they were witnessing such events as those at East St. Louis or Houston, or reading of three burnings within a year in Tennessee. A new determination closely akin to consecration possessed them. Fully to understand the new spirit one would read not only such publications as those that have been mentioned, but also those issued in the heart of the South. "Good-by, Black Mammy," said the Southwestern Christian Advocate, taking as its theme the story of four Southern white men who acted as honorary pallbearers at an old Negro woman's funeral, but who under no circumstances would thus have served for a thrifty, intelligent, well-educated man of the race. Said the Houston Informer, voicing the feeling of thousands, "The black man fought to make the world safe for democracy; he now demands that America be made and maintained safe for black Americans." With hypocrisy in the practice of the Christian religion there ceased to be any patience whatsoever, as was shown by the treatment accorded a Y.M.C.A. "Call on behalf of the young men and boys of the two great sister Anglo-Saxon nations." "Read! Read! Read!" said the Challenge Magazine, "then when the mob comes, whether with torch or with gun, let us stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord." "Protect your home," said the gentle Christian Recorder, "protect your wife and children, with your life if necessary. If a man crosses your threshold after you and your family, the law allows you to protect your home even if you have to kill the intruder." Perhaps nothing, however, better summed up the new spirit than the following sonnet by Claude McKay:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,