September 30, 1919: The Elaine Massacre

September 30, 1919: The Elaine Massacre begins in Elaine, Arkansas, and continues over the next 2 days. It was part of a year of civil rights abuses in America.

African Americans were organizing against peonage and abuses in tenant farming. The white mobs that attacked them were aided by federal troops, requested by Governor Charles H. Brough of Arkansas, and local terrorist organizations. Gov. Brough led a contingent of 583 U.S. soldiers from Camp Pike, with a 12-gun machine gun battalion.

Estimates of deaths made in the immediate aftermath of the Elaine Massacre by eyewitnesses range from 50 to "more than a hundred." Walter Francis White, an NAACP attorney (and later its Director) who visited Elaine shortly after the incident, stated "... twenty-five Negroes killed, although some place the Negro fatalities as high as one hundred." More recent estimates in the 21st Century of the number of black people killed during this violence are higher than estimates provided by the eyewitnesses, and have ranged into the hundreds.

According to The Encyclopedia of Arkansas, "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."

After the massacre, state officials concocted an elaborate cover-up, claiming that blacks were planning an insurrection. National newspapers repeated this falsehood. A New York Times headline read, "Planned Massacre of Whites Todaym", and the Arkansas Gazette (the leading newspaper in the State) wrote that Elaine was "a zone of negro insurrection."

Subsequent to this reporting, more than 100 African Americans were indicted, with 12 being sentenced to death by electrocution. After a years-long legal battle by the NAACP, the 12 men were acquitted.

Because of the widespread racial violence during the "Red Summer" of 1919, the Equal Justice Initiative of Montgomery, Alabama classified the black deaths at Elaine as lynchings in its 2015 report on the lynching of African-Americans in the South.

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September 30, 1919 was a Tuesday. There were no scores on this historic day: Baseball's World Series began the next day, and it became the most controversial World Series of all time.