The Cotton Pickers’ Strike of 1891
ON SEPTEMBER 29, 1891, a posse of armed white men led by the sheriff of Lee County, Arkansas, stormed Cat Island in the Mississippi River and killed two African American men. The posse captured nine more Black men, all of whom would soon be lynched. This bloodshed marked the culmination of a strike by cotton pickers that had begun earlier in the month. The strike lasted less than two weeks, and the ensuing violence left approximately sixteen men—all of them African American except for one white plantation manager—dead.
Historians have typically associated this strike with the Colored Farmers’ Alliance.1 To do so is not incorrect; the Colored Alliance was active across the South when the strike occurred, and its leader, a white Baptist minister named Richard M. Humphrey, had, as historian William F. Holmes has noted, “worked to organize cotton pickers for [such] a strike” during the summer that preceded it.2 But the emphasis on the Colored Farmers’ Alliance overlooks the broader and longer history of activism among African American farmers and farm laborers in Arkansas and across the South. In Arkansas, such activism began before the Civil War ended, and it was particularly prevalent in (although not confined to) the state’s Delta region. Like their brethren across the South, Black workers in the Delta joined a plethora of biracial organizations, including the Union League, the Agricultural Wheel, and the Knights of Labor, that served as vehicles for demanding economic and political rights. Black Arkansans also lined up behind white-led political parties—not only the Republican Party but also some short-lived producerist parties—to secure full citizenship and challenge the Democratic Party’s ideology of white supremacy and elite control. Only after white racism narrowed the organizational opportunities for Black agricultural laborers starting in the late 1880s and Jim Crow was imposed in the early 1890s did they join segregated organizations like the Colored Farmers’ Alliance. When viewed from this perspective, the Lee County cotton pickers’ strike of 1891 assumes a greater significance than just being the deadly flashpoint of the Colored Alliance’s brief career. Although white landowners had long resorted to violence to prevent Black laborers from organizing, the cotton pickers’ strike signaled a new phase of Black worker suppression in the Delta—one in which it was easier for planters and their allies to employ mass violence to keep Black workers from demanding greater rights. Thus, the 1891 cotton pickers’ strike foreshadowed the still bloodier Elaine Massacre in nearby Phillips County twenty-eight years later.
Tensions between Black agricultural laborers and white landowners began before the Civil War even ended. In dealing with landowners, the workers took advantage of new regulations issued by the U.S. Army that required a monthly minimum wage, and, even more importantly, they exploited a labor shortage on the plantations. Even when Black labor activists secured white support, the result could be violence and death. For instance, a group of newly freed Black farm laborers in Phillips County refused to work until their northern lessee agreed to their demands regarding wages and work rules. Shortly after the war, the formerly enslaved Bryant Singfield began organizing the newly free people in Phillips County who had stayed on the plantations of their former masters as contract laborers. Federal military commanders stationed in Helena “encouraged and assisted” Singfield in these efforts, according to the recollection of a former slave. Some of Singfield’s followers then took the bold step of leaving their employers’ plantations and moving onto abandoned land that they began farming as their own. A group of white planters, led by Singfield’s former master (and future county sheriff) Bart Turner, retaliated, rounding up Singfield and several others who were involved in this budding labor protest and apparently killing them. Local legend later held that Singfield’s ghost haunted a swamp where he was killed.3
Black agricultural workers also looked to the political arena to secure their civil and labor rights. While labor protests were isolated events, many more Black men in Arkansas asserted their rights by registering to vote in the wake of Congress’s passage of the Third Reconstruction Act in 1867 and the granting of universal manhood suffrage in the state constitution of 1868. Assisted by the Union League, which was started by northerners during the Civil War, some twenty-two thousand Black men registered to vote in Arkansas between May and November 1868. This required a great deal of resolve and courage, as the Ku Klux Klan, which emerged in Arkansas in late 1867, began a campaign of violence and terror against Republicans of both races. As the presidential and congressional elections approached in 1868, the Klan and other groups associated with the Democratic Party killed more than two hundred Arkansans, mostly African Americans but also some white Republicans. Most but not all of this violence occurred in the Delta or other cotton-growing regions. For instance, along the Red River in southwestern Arkansas that summer, Klansmen killed about twenty men, most of them African Americans.4
African American support for the Republican Party paid dividends, though. African Americans served in the state’s General Assembly as well as county and local offices. Perhaps more importantly, Republican governors and legislatures enacted some meaningful measures to benefit African Americans despite such violent opposition. For example, the Arkansas Civil Rights Act of 1873 preceded the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875 in barring segregation in most public venues. But after Democrats “redeemed” Arkansas in 1874 under the banner “A White Man’s Party for a White Man’s Land,” the state’s Republican Party soon became moribund. Fourteen years would pass before another competitive governor’s race occurred.5
Nevertheless, a new political party—the Greenback Party—soon offered Arkansas farmers and workers, both white and Black, a new outlet for challenging the dominance of the state’s Democratic Party and its planter-driven agenda. Agrarian reformers and, to a lesser extent, labor activists, primarily from Midwestern and mid-Atlantic states, held a series of conferences during the mid-1870s that culminated in the formation of the Greenback (later Greenback-Labor) Party. The Greenback movement began as a protest against the national banking and monetary systems, which had created an inflexible currency that exacerbated the problems of the working classes by making credit scarce and expensive. More broadly, however, the Greenback Party developed an anti-monopoly platform with planks that appealed to farmers and workers regardless of race. For example, the party called for the prohibition of contract prison labor and the reservation of public lands for actual settlers rather than their sale to railroads or other corporations. In 1876, the party held a national convention in Indianapolis and nominated a presidential candidate, Peter Cooper of New York. Arkansas sent nine delegates to the convention; the only other former Confederate state to send delegates was Tennessee. In September 1876, a small contingent of Arkansas Greenbackers held what they ambitiously deemed a “state convention” in Little Rock, and Arkansas was the only former Confederate state that counted any votes for Cooper in November, albeit a meager 289. But the Greenback Party’s protest against the national system of money and banking and its anti-monopolist ideology nevertheless gained enough adherents to allow it to persist for the next several years.
While the Greenback Party never seriously challenged the Democrats’ dominance in Arkansas—it never elected a congressman or state officer, and at its peak in 1878 it won only 7 of the state legislature’s 124 seats—it nevertheless drew support from farmers and the state’s nascent labor movement and appealed to voters across the color line.6 In Little Rock, the party swept the municipal elections in 1878, and Isaac T. Gillam, a former slave and Union veteran who was serving as a Republican alderman in the capital city at the time, won election to the state legislature as a Greenbacker.7 In 1882, the Greenback Party ran its last statewide campaign in Arkansas, as Rufus K. Garland of Nevada County received only 6.9 percent of the vote in a three-man race for the governor’s office.8
Even as the Greenback Party collapsed in the early 1880s, Arkansas farmers and laborers began to form or join nonpartisan organizations that demanded similar reforms on behalf of producers. The National Grange of the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry had entered Arkansas in 1872 and organized only among the state’s white farmers, but by the late 1870s it had already lost most of those members. In 1882, two homegrown farmers’ groups emerged in the state to fill the void. A small group of farmers in Prairie County, located on the western edge of the Arkansas Delta, formed the Agricultural Wheel, while the Brothers of Freedom emerged in western Arkansas’s Johnson County, an area of rockier soil where coal mining communities were emerging. The Wheel and the Brothers, which would merge under the name of the former in 1885, both expressed a producerist ideology that echoed the antimonopolism of the Greenback Party. They complained that nonproducers—bankers, gamblers, middlemen, monopolists, and stock speculators—were becoming rich while the farmers and workers that actually produced the nation’s wealth were struggling. W. Scott Morgan, an early leader of the Wheel, succinctly expressed the outlook of many of his followers when he condemned “the infamous trusts that have become an incubus upon our body politic.”9
Such a view of the political economy made these farmers’ organizations sympathetic to the budding national labor organization of the day, the Pennsylvania-based Knights of Labor, which entered Arkansas at the end of 1882. The Knights declared in the preamble of its 1878 platform that “[t]he alarming development and aggressiveness of great capitalists and corporations, unless checked, will inevitably lead to the pauperization and hopeless degradation of the toiling masses.”10 The Knights of Labor entered the state by chartering a local assembly (or lodge) in Hot Springs of white men, mostly carpenters and clerks.11
Despite similarities in their producer-oriented ideologies, the Knights of Labor and the Arkansas farmers’ organizations did not initially see eye to eye on issues of race. The Agricultural Wheel did not admit African Americans or women until 1886, by which time the organization had reached enough other southern states to call itself the National Agricultural Wheel. The Knights of Labor, however, had no such restrictions, welcoming Blacks and whites as well as men and women, skilled and unskilled alike. The second Knights local assembly in the state, also chartered in Hot Springs in January 1883, consisted of African American men, and soon women, both white and Black, joined the Knights’ ranks in Arkansas as well. The Knights organized farmers as readily as industrial laborers and led the way in the organization of African American farmers and farm laborers in Arkansas, along with an all-Black farmers’ group in the Arkansas Delta called the Sons of the Agricultural Star. (In Prairie County, the founder of the National [Northern] Farmers’ Alliance, Milton George, established an all-Black lodge of that organization in 1882, but it apparently failed to last long.)12 Thus, the Knights became the primary vehicle for African American farm labor activism across the South in the mid-to-late 1880s, most notably in leading a strike of predominantly Black sugar cane cutters in southeastern Louisiana that ended with the murder of as many as sixty Black men, women, and children at Thibodaux.13
In Arkansas, too, Black farm laborers struck for higher wages under the aegis of the Knights of Labor, and it is possible that its biracial structure prevented the outbreak of mass killing that characterized Thibodaux and later the Arkansas cotton pickers’ strike. In June 1886, Dan Fraser Tomson, one of the founders of the first Knights local assembly in Arkansas, began to organize African American farmworkers on plantations south of Little Rock in Pulaski County. In the face of stiff resistance from planters, Tomson procured the assistance of a Black Knight, G. W. Merriman, who had served two terms as the master workman of a local assembly in Argenta (later North Little Rock).14 On Thursday, July 1, 1886, at the Tate Plantation, about thirty farmhands, men and women, went on strike demanding a raise from seventy-five cents to one dollar per day “until the [cotton crop] was out of the grass” and payment in cash rather than scrip that could only be spent at the plantation store. Knights of Labor from Little Rock assisted the striking farmhands, bringing meat, flour, and meal to feed families as they remained on the plantation over the weekend. On Monday, July 5, at 5:00 in the morning, Sheriff Robert Worthen arrived at the plantation with several deputies. The officers approached the house of one of the strike leaders, Hugh Gill, “called him out of bed and to the door,” and then shot him with a double-barreled shotgun, wounding him in both arms. When this news spread throughout Pulaski County, about 250 Black men, many of them armed, rushed to the scene. Worthen and the deputies remained inside Gill’s house and called for reinforcements to be sent from Little Rock. When the posse of twenty-seven men arrived that evening, some of its members fired shots. A few newspaper accounts reported that the strikers fired shots as well, but Arkansas Knights of Labor state master workman E. H. Ritchie claimed that the strikers, under the guidance of Tomson and Merriman, “refused to return fire, . . . preferring death rather than to violate the law or resort to violence.” No one was seriously hurt that evening, but the posse dispersed many of the Black men on the scene. On July 7, the strike ended, as most of the strikers returned to work without their demands being met.15 Given the propensity of white planters and officials to violently suppress Black farm labor activism in Arkansas, especially in the decades after the brief existence of the Knights of Labor, this episode stands out for its relatively peaceful resolution. Unlike most of the other episodes, though, a well-known white local labor leader (Tomson) was on the scene.
The Knights of Labor’s efforts in Arkansas pushed it into closer contact with the Agricultural Wheel. The Tate Plantation strike came on the heels of the Great Southwest railroad strike, a much larger Knights of Labor conflict that occurred across several states from the Midwest to the Southwest, including Arkansas. The railroad strike witnessed not only widespread worker militancy but also gained popular support across the state. This would not be enough, though. The strike ultimately failed under the weight of heavy-handed oppression, from police forces, judges, and, in Arkansas, the state militia sent by Gov. Simon Hughes.16
In the aftermath of the Tate Plantation and Great Southwest strikes, the Knights of Labor informally joined the Agricultural Wheel’s effort to challenge Democrats like Governor Hughes who had mobilized against the strikers. The challenge initially amounted to little. The Wheel’s 1886 candidate for governor, former Granger and Greenbacker Charles E. Cunningham, received only 11.7 percent of the vote in a three-man race that saw Hughes’s reelection.17 But this modest Wheel–Knights coalition of 1886 grew considerably after several hundred agrarian and labor reformers created a new party, the Union Labor Party, at a conference in Cincinnati, Ohio. Even though that party never amounted to much nationally, it waged (with the support of Arkansas’s Republican Party) spirited campaigns that attracted widespread support, only failing to take control of the state government in 1888 and 1890 because Democrats used fraud and violence, including murders, to remain in power. Most infamously, Democrats assassinated the Union Labor–supported Republican John M. Clayton in Plumerville (Conway County) in January 1889 while he was gathering evidence to support his contested election case before the U.S. House of Representatives. (The House later ruled that Clayton had indeed won the election and declared the seat vacant pending a special election, which the unseated Democrat, Clifton R. Breckinridge, won.)18
Arkansas’s 1890 elections witnessed similar violence and fraud, prompting the state’s Democratic lawmakers to take preemptive measures to crush the interracial, working-class challenge to their hegemony.19 In 1891, the Democrat-controlled state legislature hardened the color line by mandating Jim Crow in Arkansas railroad cars (as well as waiting rooms in train stations) with the “separate coach” law and also began passing “election reform” laws that would disfranchise most Black men as well as many poor white ones. These efforts led to what historian Kenneth C. Barnes calls “a harsher, more inflexible form of white racism” that was accompanied by violent policing of the color line and increasing episodes of lynching.20
As Arkansas Democrats embraced Jim Crow and disfranchisement in the early 1890s, the Agricultural Wheel, which had been biracial since 1886 when it began chartering “colored Wheels,” expelled its Black members. While the new political climate probably encouraged the expulsion, the process actually had begun in December 1888, when the Texas-based Southern Farmers’ Alliance and the National Agricultural Wheel agreed to a merger in which the latter would be absorbed by the former. Ratification of the agreement occurred at the state level, and, not surprisingly, opposition to the merger proved strongest in Arkansas, where it was not ratified until early 1891. Unlike the Wheel, the Southern Farmers’ Alliance restricted membership to whites only, which meant that white Wheel lodges were absorbed into the Alliance but “colored Wheel” lodges were not.
African American farmers in Arkansas thus had little choice but to turn to an all-Black organization that had begun in Texas, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance. This process began before the merger of the Wheel into the Southern Alliance became complete, the white general superintendent (president) of the Colored Alliance, Richard M. Humphrey, claiming that his organization had twenty thousand members in Arkansas by December 1890.21 The relationship between the Southern Alliance and the Colored Alliance, however, proved fraught, in part since many members of the latter organization worked for members of the former. As historian Charles Postel has noted, the Colored Alliance was both “segregated and subordinated.”22 On the other hand, the Knights of Labor, which still had about 3,500 members in the state in 1890, remained active among Black workers as well as white ones, albeit usually in segregated local assemblies.23
More so than any of the earlier producerist organizations, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance was the target of violent attacks. In many respects, the Colored Alliance had less in common with the white Southern Alliance than it did with the Knights of Labor insofar as the South’s Black agricultural laborers were concerned. The Knights and Colored Alliance both made attempts at cooperative enterprises among Black farmers and farm workers, they both mobilized their Black members politically, and they both led strikes among Black farm workers. But white landowners rarely targeted the biracial Knights as they did the Colored Alliance. In the Delta county of Leflore, Mississippi, Black farm workers began joining the Colored Alliance in the summer of 1889. At the urging of an African American leader named Oliver Cromwell, Colored Alliance members began taking their business away from local merchants in favor of a Southern Farmers’ Alliance cooperative store in the railroad town of Durant, about thirty miles south of Leflore County.24 In nearby Grenada County, newspaper reports suggested that Black cotton pickers, who were being paid fifty cents per hundred pounds, “have organized and will demand an increase in their wages or guard the fields with shotguns and prevent others from gathering crops.”25 The Washington Bee reported that the Alliance cooperative store at Durant had sold more than two hundred guns to African Americans on credit, and in early September 1889 newspapers warned that African Americans were plotting a race war in Leflore County. Gov. Robert Lowry sent National Guardsmen into Leflore, and what became known as the Leflore County Massacre ended with the murder of about twenty-five African Americans. Cromwell, a traveling Colored Alliance organizer, was not among the victims, having fled Leflore County before the bloodshed began and apparently succeeding in leaving Mississippi. After the massacre, a group of planters met in the Leflore County town of Sunnyside and passed a resolution in which they condemned the Colored Alliance for “being diverted from its original or supposed purpose and . . . being used by designing and corrupt Negroes to further their intentions and selfish motive[s].”26 William F. Holmes, who examined the massacre in 1973, concluded that the reports of an impending Black uprising were a mere “pretext” for using violence to crush the Colored Alliance, and that white planters and officials took those measures because “the Blacks pursued policies aimed at bettering their economic conditions and lessening their dependence upon whites.”27
While the Leflore County Massacre destroyed the Colored Farmers’ Alliance in that part of Mississippi, the organization continued to grow elsewhere in the South. In Arkansas, by the summer of 1890, the Colored Alliance, the Knights of Labor, and Colored State Wheel lodges all coexisted, with some overlapping membership, and were all close to the Union Labor Party. Pending ratification of the Southern Farmers’ Alliance–Agricultural Wheel merger, the Colored State Wheel held its annual meeting in July 1890, at which time it reelected its president, G. W. Lowe, who also represented Monroe County in the General Assembly as a member of the Union Labor Party. Likewise, the Knights of Labor, which had formed local assemblies in most Arkansas Delta counties in the latter half of the 1880s, continued to attract Black farm workers. For example, in St. Francis County, the Knights organized at least six local assemblies, at least two of which consisted of or included farmhands. Knights of Labor records often fail to indicate the racial composition of local assemblies, but since “colored Wheels” existed in St. Francis County, most likely at least one of the Knights locals of farmhands consisted of African Americans. In Phillips County, one of the two known Knights assemblies organized Black cotton oil mill, sawmill, and cotton compress workers. The Knights chartered at least three locals in Lee County, at least one of which, in LaGrange, existed at least as late as 1890.28 In contrast to the national membership of the Knights of Labor, which was rapidly declining by 1890, membership in Arkansas fell much more slowly, from a reported peak of about 5,400 members in 1887 to about 3,500 three years later.29
Amid these organizational changes, Colored Farmers’ Alliance superintendent (president) Humphrey issued a circular on September 6, 1891, calling for cotton pickers across the South to strike on Saturday, September 12, for a wage of one dollar per hundred pounds. Newspapers across the nation carried the story, along with Humphrey’s claim that over a million African American cotton pickers would participate and his insistence that they were to “avoid all gatherings in public places and all insolent displays.” Humphrey signed the circular with the title “General Superintendent Colored Farmers’ Alliance and Cotton-Pickers’ League.”30 According to William F. Holmes, Humphrey formed the Cotton-Pickers’ League as sort of an adjunct organization “after he encountered opposition to the strike within the Colored Alliance.” Holmes asserts that while African American tenants “had always formed a large part of the Colored Alliance, the organization had catered chiefly to the interests of landowners.”31 A more recent study by Charles Postel suggests otherwise, stating that most members of the Colored Alliance “suffered acute land hunger, mainly toiling on the land of white owners as sharecroppers and day laborers.”32 In the Arkansas Delta, judging from more readily available evidence about the composition of Knights of Labor and Agricultural Wheel lodges, Postel’s assessment rings truer. In Woodruff County, where African Americans outnumbered whites, the Knights and Wheel jointly “petitioned the landholders for a reduction of land rent of 25 percent per acre.”33
Not surprisingly, the major newspapers of the South treated Humphrey’s strike proposal with a mixture of scorn and malice. For example, the Atlanta Constitution denounced the Colored Alliance leader’s plan as “rash” and his demands as “absurdly extravagant.” The newspaper also opined that “the negroes very generally understand the situation, and it will take something more than Humphrey’s order to plunge them into a strike which promises so little and threatens so much of evil to themselves.”34 The Houston Daily Post reported that east Texas planters were “not a bit alarmed” by the proposed strike, adding, “Such a movement if successfully carried out would cause the planters to lose some cotton, but there would be great distress and poverty among the strikers this winter if they lost the wages for cotton picking.”35 In Little Rock, the Arkansas Democrat struck a more balanced note: “The demand for $1 per hundred pounds is excessive and unreasonable, although we are free to say that the price fixed by the Cotton Planters’ Association at its recent session (50 cents per hundred) is too low.”36
African American cotton pickers mostly ignored Humphrey’s strike call. William F. Holmes suggests the possibility that “the majority of cotton pickers—most of whom were illiterate—never knew of the proposed strike.” Colored Alliancemen in East Texas, where that organization had begun, debated whether to strike, most refusing. Cotton pickers struck on a farm near Palestine, Texas, but their employer simply fired them, thus scuttling the strike. Newspapers across the South, in Holmes’s words, “ridiculed” Humphrey in the days following September 12, 1891.37
Without attracting much public notice, however, a thirty-year old African American labor organizer from Memphis named Ben Patterson—“most likely,” according to historian Steven Hahn, “a member of the Colored Alliance”—arrived in Lee County, Arkansas, in early September 1891 and began organizing cotton pickers in preparation for a strike. Local pickers quickly took an active role in organizing activities. On September 20, eight days after Humphrey’s proposed regionwide walkout had fizzled, a cotton pickers’ strike began in Lee County. J. F. Frank, a Memphis resident who owned cotton fields in Lee County, told one of his Arkansas plantation managers, Tom Miller, that he would pay one dollar per hundred pounds if necessary to hasten the pace at which the pickers worked. Frank made this statement, which Holmes deems “probably . . . an idle boast,” on the front porch of a general store. Some nearby cotton pickers overheard Frank’s statement and reported it to Patterson, who decided that the opportune moment for the strike had arrived. Cotton pickers left the fields of the plantation managed by Miller as well as the nearby plantation of Col. H. P. Rodgers.38
Manager Miller settled the strike by giving the pickers a raise from fifty to sixty cents per hundred pounds, although Frank later received a letter from fellow planters warning that such a course of action was not permissible. Rodgers reacted the same way that the planter in Palestine, Texas, had earlier that month: he fired the strikers and made them leave his plantation. But the strikers soon came back, tried to convince other pickers to join their cause, and began recruiting pickers on nearby plantations. Meanwhile, Patterson went to Marianna, the county seat, and made a public speech attempting to garner support for the strike.
Violence erupted on September 25 as strikers entered one plantation and met resistance from the pickers at work. The melee resulted in the killing of two pickers. White men in Lee County then formed a posse, led by the county sheriff, in response not only to the violence but also to the increasing effectiveness of the strike, which had led to a noticeable decrease in the picking of cotton. On September 28, someone murdered Miller while he was riding on horseback to join the posse. Frank suggested that angry whites may have done this in retaliation for Miller giving pickers a raise, but most accounts blamed either Ben Patterson or two strikers, the brothers Mit and Early Jones, who had worked for Miller. The killing of Miller, of course, escalated white anger and panic and also drew “the condemnation of many Blacks in Lee County, some of whom joined the white posse to search for the strikers.” Whites from neighboring Crittenden County swelled the posse’s ranks as did deputy sheriffs from Phillips County.39
On September 29, the posse caught up with most of the strikers at a gin house on Cat Island in the Mississippi River just downstream from Memphis. The posse quickly killed two strikers and captured nine others. Two escaped, including a wounded Ben Patterson. As two deputies were ostensibly taking the captives to the Marianna jail, a mob of masked white men seized the nine men and hanged them. When Patterson boarded a boat docked at Cat Island later that night, crew members discovered his identity, and, when the boat stopped at Hackney’s Landing, armed white men boarded and killed him. The cotton pickers’ strike came to an end. Fifteen Black men, along with one white man, were dead, and six other Black men were imprisoned.40
The swift and severe repression of the Lee County cotton pickers’ strike marked the end of the type of the African American farm labor activism that had found an outlet in organizations such as the Knights of Labor, the Agricultural Wheel, and the Colored Farmers’ Alliance. In the aftermath of the strike, notes Holmes, “the Colored Alliance began to decline rapidly, and by 1892 only a remnant of the organization remained.”41 Neither the Southern Farmers’ Alliance nor, more surprisingly, the Knights of Labor so much as issued a resolution of protest against the brutal manner in which the strikers were treated. Charles Postel suggests that the dismal failure of the cotton pickers’ strike and its aftermath “put in stark relief the evolution of the Knights’ leadership, which by this time had placed their fate in a coalition with white planters and farmers and had turned their backs on the Black poor.”42 By this point, the decline of the Knights in Arkansas was catching up to the organization’s national deterioration. While a state labor convention in Little Rock in June 1892 drew about seventy-five delegates, most of them craft unionists, the annual meeting of the Arkansas Knights of Labor State Assembly in the same city three months later drew only sixteen delegates. The Knights of Labor managed to maintain a presence in Arkansas for more than another decade, holding State Assembly meetings as late as 1906, but by the mid-1890s, its era of significance had passed.43
The year 1891, then, proved to be a bleak one for African Americans in Arkansas on several significant counts: the passage of the Jim Crow railroad coach law, the beginning of disfranchisement measures, the end of the Colored State Wheel, and the brutal suppression of the Lee County cotton pickers’ strike and destruction of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance. Not surprisingly, many African Americans in the state became interested in the “Liberia Fever” and the back-to-Africa movement; some actually followed through while more left for Oklahoma but, of course, most remained in Arkansas.44 The events of 1891 marked more of a turning point than a nadir for Black civil and political rights in Arkansas, however; in 1892, voters approved a poll tax that made it still harder for the state’s poor Blacks and whites to vote, and, as Kenneth C. Barnes has argued, violence directed against African Americans intensified.45 Not surprisingly, the People’s (or Populist) Party, which in Arkansas absorbed the Union Labor Party, did not draw the same level of support in the state’s elections as its predecessor had, and by the end of the 1890s it too was finished. Its decline accompanied that of not only the Knights of Labor but also the Southern Farmers’ Alliance.46
Nevertheless, the farmer and labor movements in Arkansas persisted even as these organizations withered. Coal miners, who had been, in the western part of the state, an important component of the Knights of Labor, formed Arkansas chapters of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) before the decade ended.47 But while the UMWA did organize African American miners (into segregated locals), in Arkansas the union failed to match even the limited racial egalitarianism of the Knights. In fact, historian Guy Lancaster has found it “likely that the union had a hand” in the Bonanza Race War of 1904, in which riotous whites expelled African Americans (some of whom were apparently UMWA members) from that Sebastian County town.48 During that same year, UMWA leaders took the initiative in organizing the Arkansas State Federation of Labor, which affiliated with the American Federation of Labor and was less inclusive of African Americans and women than the Knights had been.49
Arkansas farmers, too, found a new organization. Like the Farmers’ Alliances (Southern and Colored) before it, the National Farmers’ Union began in Texas in 1902 before entering Arkansas the following year. Also like the Southern Farmers’ Alliance, the Farmers’ Union did not admit African Americans, and a Texas-based counterpart, the Colored Farmers’ Union, soon entered Arkansas as well. But the white Farmers’ Union proved no more willing to support its African American counterpart than the white Alliance had; in 1906, the Arkansas State Farmers’ Union revoked the commissions of some organizers who had been working across the color line and forming Colored Farmers’ Union locals.50
The relatively greater racial egalitarianism of the Knights of Labor and the Agricultural Wheel lived on only in smaller segments of the Arkansas farmer and labor movements. In 1905, Arkansas Socialists helped to organize the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which combined the “one big union” approach of the Knights of Labor with a more radical critique of capitalism. The IWW recruited timber workers in southern Arkansas, who had been some of the state’s last Knights, and, during the mid-1910s, the union endeavored to organize Black tenant farmers and agricultural laborers in the Arkansas Delta.51 Around the same time, Socialists, former Knights, and former Populists formed the Working Class Union (WCU), the membership of which consisted largely of Black and white tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and farmhands. The WCU led a strike of farmhands in the vicinity of Moffatt, Oklahoma, just across the state line from Fort Smith, Arkansas, in 1916, to raise their daily wages from $1.00 to $1.25. The strike failed, but it did not meet with the violent reprisal that the Lee County cotton pickers’ strike of 1891 did.52 Nevertheless, during World War I, the Socialist Party, IWW, and WCU would all meet their demise in Arkansas (and elsewhere) over their opposition to the nation’s involvement in World War I, in particular the Selective Service Act of 1917.53
In more than just the most obvious manner (namely, the murder of Black farmworkers for engaging in strikes or union activity in the Arkansas Delta), the cotton pickers’ strike of 1891 foreshadowed the Elaine Massacre. When the strike occurred, the biracialism (albeit limited) that had characterized the Arkansas farmer and labor movements under the influence of the Knights of Labor and (beginning in 1886) the Agricultural Wheel already had faded. Thus, the cotton pickers were unprotected by white allies, as the striking African American plantation workers in Pulaski County in 1886 had been in the form of white Knights of Labor leader Dan Fraser Tomson, who came to the scene to prevent bloodshed. Similarly, the WCU farmhand strike just across the state line from Fort Smith in 1916 included both white and Black workers. Neither of these strikes had taken place in the Delta, but there too, interracial farmer and labor movements had existed in the 1880s and again in the early twentieth century until World War I. But by 1919, when African American tenant farmers and sharecroppers organized themselves into the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America in Phillips County, they did so, like their Lee County predecessors in 1891, without the presence of white allies. The cotton pickers’ strike of 1891 had suggested what could happen when Black farmworkers in all-Black organizations struck with no support or solidarity—or, in fact, with hostility—from white farmers’ and farmers’ groups. Occurring just after a brief period of even limited interracial inclusion and cooperation in the Arkansas farmer and labor movements, the outcome of the Lee County cotton pickers’ strike demonstrated the enormous danger and risk for African American activists in the state during the era of Jim Crow.