A Legacy of the Elaine Massacre?
FIFTEEN MONTHS AFTER THE Elaine Massacre, a gruesome lynching occurred in Mississippi County, the northernmost Delta county in Arkansas. The lynching of Black sharecropper Henry Lowery, though, was not a legacy of the Elaine Massacre. Rather it was more likely merely “business as usual” on Delta plantations. Violence, including lynching, was one of several mechanisms planters used to try to force Black compliance with the plantation labor regime, but their power was insufficient to discourage activism on the part of African Americans. Indeed, the Elaine Massacre followed the founding of a union of sharecroppers, a direct challenge to the supremacy of whites and the economic system that disproportionately rewarded the planters. The precipitating event was an exchange of gunfire between white deputies and Black guards at a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America, but the planters knew of the union activism and intention to file suit for a fair settlement of the crop. Planters would not tolerate this sort of collective action, and government, army, and local authorities dispensed violence to serve the interests of planters. Over two hundred African Americans lost their lives in the worst rural massacre of Black people in American history.1
Before the Elaine massacre and afterward, however, individual African American sharecroppers addressed their grievances directly to their planters, and sometimes violence was the result. This individual, rather than collective, action will be explored in the case of Henry Lowery, who approached his planter on Christmas Day 1920 to demand a written “settlement of accounts” so that he could seek employment elsewhere. We have mostly biased white reports of what happened next, but, suffice it to say, once the smoke cleared, the planter and his adult daughter were dead, his two adult sons were wounded, and Lowery, though himself wounded, had escaped to the swamps with bloodhounds and mobs on his trail. With the help of his Odd Fellows lodge brothers, he miraculously eluded capture and made his way to El Paso, Texas. There, he was later arrested and returned to Mississippi County where he was burned to death at Nodena Landing on January 26, 1921.2
The Lowery lynching and the Elaine Massacre were similar in that they were challenges to planter power and the workings of the sharecrop-ping system, but there were important differences. Lowery’s temerity in demanding a written statement stipulating that he had “paid out” at the end of the 1920 crop year was an individual act against a specific planter. On the other hand, the Farmers and Household Union represented a bold and rare collective challenge: Black sharecroppers formed a union, hired a prominent white attorney to file suit for fair settlement of the crop, and, in doing so, struck at the heart of planter control over plantation labor. Regardless of these differences, both tragedies attracted the attention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Just a decade after its founding in 1909, the NAACP became actively involved in the pursuit of justice for the Elaine Twelve, the Black men convicted and sentenced to death after Elaine Massacre. When Lowery was arrested in Texas, the NAACP attempted to prevent his return to Arkansas until some guarantee was made that he would receive a fair trial. After his lynching, as historian Karlos K. Hill has persuasively argued, the episode became a key feature in the organization’s antilynching campaign with the NAACP producing a pamphlet, “An American Lynching,” that detailed Lowery’s brutal murder. While the Lowery lynching contributed to a renewed effort to secure passage of a federal anti-lynching bill—one that would fall short—the Elaine Massacre led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck a blow against unfair trials and asserted a new interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment.3
Behind the efforts of the NAACP in both situations was a keen understanding of the obstacles facing African Americans in the South, one based on careful observation of the situation in Arkansas. Walter White, an investigator for the organization since 1918, authored a particularly astute account of the Elaine Massacre.4 William Pickens, who became a field secretary for the NAACP in 1920, wrote a cogent analysis of the circumstances surrounding the Lowery lynching in The Nation in March 1921, placing it in the context of the exploitation of African American sharecroppers on Arkansas plantations. It stands as an indictment of the plantation system in the South. Pickens, an African American who spent much of his childhood in Woodruff County, Arkansas, was quite familiar with the workings of the sharecropping system as his father had been lured to Arkansas by the promises of a labor agent. The landowner had paid the family’s fare to Arkansas, so he began his sojourn there in debt and was unable to “pay out.” The family struggled mightily until his father found a planter willing to assume his debt and rent him a farm near Little Rock. Young Pickens left the state to secure one degree at Talladega College (1902) in Alabama and another at Yale University (1904). He taught at various colleges and became an active member of the NAACP. In 1918, he became the NAACP’s director of branches, traveling the South to establish chapters of the organization. He was appointed field secretary in 1920, and in that capacity traveled to Arkansas to investigate the Lowery lynching in 1921.5
Pickens’s understanding of the pernicious sharecropping system hinged on his personal association with it, but his intellectual appreciation for its vagaries was greatly enhanced by his NAACP activities. Not only did Pickens have a keen understanding of how African Americans were exploited on plantations in the American South; he also was able to grasp the macro-level forces at work, calling the lower Mississippi Valley “the American Congo.” In fact, both the sharecroppers of Elaine and Henry Lowery were confronting the larger edifice of the global cotton complex. Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History argues that cotton was essential to the development of capitalism both in the United States and globally. From the cotton growers in the American South and elsewhere to the textile mills of England and thence distributed as cloth to a global market, cotton was fundamental to a new global network of finance and commerce. The world had never seen anything like it. Between the plantation owner and the textile mills, however, was an important intermediary: the cotton broker. Cotton brokers served eastern Arkansas out of cities like Memphis, Tennessee, and Greenville, Mississippi, and played pivotal roles not only in selling the crop to the textile mills but also providing credit services to planters—at a price, of course. It was through this mechanism that planters found themselves locked into the global cotton economy, and they passed on their own dependency on broker financing to their sharecroppers by requiring them to grow a cotton crop and to mortgage any mules and implements they might own to the planter. Neither sharecroppers nor planters had a lot of maneuvering room within the global cotton complex, an entity that had no conscience, no heart. The mechanisms of the market were not curbed by justice to any of the individual players. Each was left to struggle within the system and, particularly for the Black sharecropper, on unequal terms.6
While Beckert writes of the global cotton complex, historians of the “global plantation” offer an elaboration on the workings of plantation economies around the globe. They do not argue that the plantation economies are necessarily interconnected but rather function independent of one another with remarkable similarities. Wherever they exist, they dominate the region in which they operate, politically, economically, and socially. They have considerable influence over politicians and the police apparatus; they own the best land and control other resources like water, often driving out smaller farmers; and they exercise power over labor, whether ethnic or racial minorities, immigrants, or local indigenous labor. This is certainly true of plantations in the American South and particularly in the Mississippi Delta region.7
The key component of control over labor in the American Congo was the sharecropping system, which arose in the wake of the Civil War, replacing the contract labor system that had maintained the plantation system in the South even as war raged. Northerners who had come South to run cotton plantations or southerners who took an oath of allegiance to the United States employed Black workers who had taken advantage of the war to secure their own emancipation. The arrangement illustrates the importance of the cotton economy not only to the South but also to the financiers in centers like New York City. The contract labor system had severe shortcomings, however, as planters had little cash to offer in wages, and freedmen wanted land of their own to farm. But the former slaves had no resources to purchase land, only their bodies to offer in labor, and they resented the fact that they were forced to live in the old slave quarters and often worked under overseers, just as they had under the slave regime. Out of this dissatisfaction of both sides, the sharecropping system was born. In its initial configuration, African Americans moved away from the old slave quarters onto roughly twenty-five-acre parcels of land that they farmed and were paid their wages in cotton. The planter marketed the crop and paid the sharecropper what they said they were owed.
Given that wages came only at the harvest, sharecroppers became indebted to plantation commissaries until the crop came in. There was plenty of room for chicanery, of course, as few freedmen could read or write given that it had been against the law or custom to teach enslaved people to read. Using lessons they had learned as slaves in resisting slavery’s dehumanizing conditions, freedmen maneuvered as best they could under these circumstances and frequently exercised their freedom by moving to other plantations, hoping for a better deal. Southern legislatures passed “Black codes” to impede the movement of freedmen. For instance, in the 1870s most legislatures passed laws that made it illegal for a sharecropper to leave the employment of the planter for whom he worked if he owed a debt. If a sharecropper was lucky enough to acquire some mules and implements of his own, he could move into the ranks of tenant farmers and demand a larger share of the crop. If a sharecropper or tenant failed to break even at the end of the year and attempted to leave, it was commonplace for a constable, sometimes in the pay of prominent planters, to pursue “absconded” tenants and sharecroppers and force their return. This led to the development of a system of debt peonage and was precisely what Henry Lowery was rejecting when he confronted seventy-year-old Oscar Craig on Christmas Day in 1920. He wanted a written statement to the effect he had fulfilled his contract and did not owe Craig anything. A simple enough request, it might seem, but to Craig it was an affront. Besides, cotton prices were already on the way down in late December 1920, and Craig was likely in no mood to be challenged. He threw a billet of wood at Lowery as his two sons charged out the front door, guns blazing.8
Craig’s violent response to Lowery’s audacity in demanding a written accounting was entirely in keeping with the norms of plantation operations. Vagrancy statues, laws making it illegal for a sharecropper to leave an employer to whom he owed money, and the practice of sending constables after absconding sharecroppers were all mechanisms planters used to keep labor in place. Violence was another. Admittedly, violence could get out of hand, such as in the situation in Elaine, where the murder of hundreds of Black workers could hardly have served planter interests. In its aftermath, African Americans in Phillips County departed in larger than usual numbers. The Black population in the county dropped by 17 percent between 1920 and 1930, though some of that was surely the result of other factors, and other southeastern Arkansas Delta counties were experiencing similar declines. Meanwhile, in the northeastern part of the state where Mississippi County and Lowery were located, the plantation system was expanding as drainage enterprises opened tens of thousands of acres for cotton production. An increasing labor supply was acutely necessary, and there the African Americans population increased by 31.3 percent. These were the forces prevailing when Henry Lowery confronted Craig. Labor was in great demand, and Oscar Craig was determined to keep Lowery in place.9
Henry Lowery’s escape after the confrontation with the Craig family led to sensational stories that threatened to expose the injustices that existed on Arkansas plantations. The state was still dealing with the fallout over the Elaine Massacre and, once again, national and international outrage was aroused. Ironically, the lynching might have been avoided had the agreement reached between the governors of Texas and Arkansas been adhered to. Pat Morris Neff, the newly inaugurated governor of Texas, had been pressed by a prominent white attorney in Texas who was representing the NAACP to demand a guarantee from recently inaugurated Gov. Thomas McRae of Arkansas that Lowery would be returned to Little Rock, where he would receive a fair trial. McRae, for his part, was preoccupied by the legal ramifications of the death sentences facing the Elaine Twelve and most likely preferred to avoid another such controversy, so the prospects of a “fair trial” probably resonated with him. On the same page where a story appeared about Lowery’s seizure by the mob in Sardis, Mississippi, the Arkansas Democrat ran a separate story concerning pressure being applied on McRae to stay the executions of the Elaine Twelve.10 Having assured Neff of a fair trial, McRae was genuinely outraged when the train with Lowery aboard was intercepted at Sardis and Lowery was seized and rushed back to Mississippi County, where he faced a crowd of hundreds eager to see him die.11
As Karlos Hill suggests, a “climate of fear” in Mississippi County made many African Americans reluctant to talk about the lynching.12 Nevertheless, Pickens traveled there—just as Walter White had traveled to Phillips County in 1919—and secured enough information to write the account that was published in The Nation. While local and regional white newspapers offered various versions of Lowery’s motivations, they never probed the economic system in place. Instead, with one exception, they portrayed Lowery as deranged or drunk at the time of the shooting. In fact, Lowery was neither. As Pickens notes, “even the Memphis newspapers admitted finally that he [Lowery] was an honest, hard-working, inoffensive Negro. They admitted this to make it sound reasonable to assert that he ran a still and got drunk.”13
Little is known about Lowery’s background beyond the fact that he asked to be buried in Magnolia, Mississippi.14 If that was his home and if he was farming there before 1918, the year he moved across the river to Arkansas, he was almost certainly experiencing what other farmers faced in southern Mississippi. Magnolia, the seat of Pike County, is along the border of Louisiana. Like much of south Mississippi, it was facing the boll weevil infestation, something planters, farmers, and agricultural scientists were struggling to conquer. Farmers in southeast Arkansas were also struck with the boll weevil blight, but it had yet to move into the northeastern portion of the state and that may have been what attracted Lowery to Oscar Craig’s Stonewall plantation in the spring of 1918. Lowery quickly integrated into the Black community there, joining the local African American Odd Fellows and Knights of Pythias, and attending lodge meetings of the Masons. He gained his reputation as an “honest, hardworking farmer,” and his first year on the Stonewall plantation passed without incident.
The trouble began the next year, which saw a precipitous drop in cotton prices—from 35.3 to 15.9 cents per pound—and, as was the custom, planters often passed their losses on to their sharecroppers and tenants. That apparently happened in the fall of 1920. Lowery discovered that Richard “Dick” Craig, Oscar’s son who was then running the plantation, was a difficult man. Lowery probably turned his crop over to the younger Craig, as was required by the typical contract, and Craig had it ginned and marketed and reported to Lowery the price he had secured. If Lowery had owed money to the company store for the year’s furnish, that would have been subtracted from the amount due him. Lowery may or may not have accepted the reckoning of the figures—meaning, agreed with what Craig said the crop had fetched at the market and what he had coming to him—but he made his first demand for a written statement from Dick Craig that he had “paid out.” This would have verified that Lowery’s share of the sale had been greater than the amount he owed to the plantation commissary. Dick Craig not only refused to give him that statement but also “struck Lowery and admonished him not to come again for settlement.”15 His treatment both angered Lowery and made it dangerous for him to leave Craig’s employment. Had Lowery done so, local law enforcement officials, in keeping with practice, would have been dispatched to return him to the plantation to work off any debt Craig claimed he owed. In this case, the official likely would have been Jesse Greer, who served as a part-time constable and worked full time for Oscar Craig’s brother-in-law, Lee Wilson. Wilson was the largest plantation owner in Arkansas and one of the largest in the South. Craig banked at the Bank of Wilson in the nearby town of Wilson, and may have marketed his cotton through Wilson & Ward Cotton brokerage of Memphis, Tennessee, a Lee Wilson entity that attempted to sidestep the important broker middleman in the cotton trade.16
Despite the obstacles in his way, Lowery was desperate to leave Craig’s Stonewall plantation, and on Christmas 1920 he went to the Craig home to demand, once again, a written statement. He arrived as the family assembled for their Christmas dinner, including Oscar Craig, his wife, and their three adult children, Dick, Hugh, and Mrs. C. O. “Maybelle” Williamson. One of the Craig servants, a Black woman who, according to William Pickens, was known to be “on perfectly friendly terms” with Dick Craig, saw Lowery coming down the road and ran to the house to warn of his arrival.17 Oscar Craig went out on the porch to speak to Lowery, exchanged some words, and then threw a billet of wood at him. Hearing a commotion, Dick, Hugh, and Maybelle rushed to the porch, the sons firing their guns. Lowery returned fire, killing Oscar and Maybelle and wounding Dick and Hugh. Although injured himself, he escaped into the swamps and over the next few days was tended to and fed by his Odd Fellows lodge brothers. A posse of hundreds combed the swamps, and Lowery later reported that “they nearly stepped on me once. It was cold and once or twice I had to crawl through puddles of water.”18
At this point, the relationships Henry Lowery had forged with the Black community came into play. Despite the power of the planter class and the high stakes incurred by the deaths of two prominent whites, his Odd Fellows lodge brothers did not fail him. They enabled him to stay hidden in the swamps, supplied him with medical care and food, raised money for his escape, and transported him to the Earle, Arkansas, train station where they hid him in a load of cotton heading south. When he reached El Paso, he took a job as a janitor under an assumed name. He planned to cross the border into Mexico, but he wanted his wife and daughter to join him. However, he made a fatal mistake by writing a letter to one of his lodge brothers, Morris Jenkins: “I want to hear from my wife. I don’t know how she is fairing. I left her with a plenty, but you know how it is with the white people in a case like this.”19 He sent the letter by way of an acquaintance who was instructed to deliver it directly to Jenkins. But Jenkins was in jail, along with his own wife and four lodge brothers, for having helped Lowery to escape. The acquaintance, unable to find Jenkins, mailed the letter to him instead, a tragic error. The letter, which included Lowery’s assumed name (Sam Thompson), his address, and his place of work, was intercepted and read by the postmaster at Terrell, who notified authorities. When arrested, Lowery was “firing a furnace in a bank building” and reportedly said, “Please kill me, boss. If they take me back to Arkansas, they’ll burn me sure.”20
Lowery might have escaped the fate he so clearly foresaw but efforts made on his behalf were undermined by Arkansas parties determined to wreak an awful vengeance on him. At first there seemed to be some hope for Lowery after Lawrence A. Nixon, an African American physician in El Paso and leader of the local NAACP chapter, visited him in jail and then convinced a prominent white attorney, Fred C. Knollenberg, to make overtures on his behalf to the Texas governor, Pat Morris Neff. Knollenberg had represented Black clients in various capacities but his most famous case was one he and Nixon would later launch to end the white primary in Texas. That saga began when Nixon sought to vote in the 1924 Texas Democratic primary, a direct challenge to a law the legislature passed the year before, which restricted the primary to white voters. Election officials turned him away from the polls, and he brought suit with Knollenberg representing him. In Nixon v. Herndon (1927), the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Texas law, but the state simply rewrote it and, again, Nixon sued. In 1932, in Nixon v. Condon, the Court again overturned the law. This case was instrumental in the 1944 ruling in Smith v. Allwright, a Texas case that overturned white primary laws across the South.21 Clearly, these men made a powerful partnership, and Lowery had some reason to trust them. It was Knollenberg who convinced Governor Neff to intervene with Governor McRae of Arkansas to secure a promise of a fair trial.22
Despite McRae’s assurances that Lowery would be returned to Little Rock where he would stand trial, the Arkansas governor found that he had little influence upon the officers who traveled to Texas to take charge of the prisoner and no influence over a group of men determined to interfere with his transfer. The Mississippi County officers dispatched to return Lowery to Arkansas—Jesse Greer and D. H. Dickson—were directed to bring the prisoner to Little Rock but ignored those instructions.23 As mentioned, Greer was the part-time constable whose full-time job was working for planter Lee Wilson, Oscar Craig’s brother-in-law. Instead of taking a train from El Paso through Texarkana, which would have been the direct route to reach Arkansas’s capital city, Greer and Dickson took Lowery on a circuitous route to New Orleans and north up the Illinois Central Railroad. According to one account, Mississippi County sheriff Dwight Blackwood, who would come under fire for failing to prevent the lynching, later defended himself and the circuitous route, saying, “I knew several days ago that they [the mob] had men at Texarkana, Hoxie and Jonesboro and that we wouldn’t have a chance going that way, so we took the only route left open. We found later that they had men at New Orleans and were tipped off when my men left that place.”24 The governor remarked that he had “asked that Lowery be brought direct to Little Rock from El Paso for safe keeping and he could not understand why the negro should have been taken that round-about way through New Orleans, Mississippi and Tennessee instead of direct to Texarkana and thence to Little Rock and the state penitentiary.”25 Blackwood, though, was in frequent contact with the governor in the days leading up to Lowery’s transfer, and it seems likely he would have shared any genuine misgivings about the route and the details of the transfer with McRae. In response to the governor’s criticism, Blackwood blamed the “activity of certain negro lodges and the free publicity of the actions of Governor McRae in behalf of Lowery from the time he was placed in jail at El Paso until he was taken from my deputies at Sardis, Miss., were solely responsible for the mob’s action.”26 It is unclear precisely what Blackwood meant by the reference to the “activity of certain negro lodges” but it is certainly true that the NAACP was exerting considerable pressure and that Governor McRae was in contact with that organization. In fact, there was some initial confusion about whether Greer and Dickson had received a telegram the governor sent to El Paso, but it was later confirmed that the communication had been delivered to them.27
Whether the sheriff and the deputies responsible for delivering Lowery safely to Little Rock for trial were culpable or not, their failure to protect him had tragic consequences. At 5:00 a.m. on January 26, just half an hour before the train was due to stop in Sardis, six mud-covered automobiles carrying between twenty-two and twenty-five armed men arrived at the station. The leader of the group told the night watchman that “he had been appraised by a telegram from New Orleans that the officers and the negro were on the train.” He indicated that the group intended to take Lowery from the train rather than allow him to reach the safety of the penitentiary in Little Rock.28 When the train arrived thirty minutes later, they boarded it and seized Lowery from Greer and Dickson. Although the two officers claimed that they were taken by surprise, their quick and easy surrender astonished Governor McRae, who complained of their “lamb-like docility.”29 According to some reports, the posse intended to parade him through the streets of Memphis, but, with feelings running high because of the inflammatory newspaper accounts of the murders, that city’s authorities wanted no part of that spectacle or the disorder certain to accompany it and set up a roadblock. The posse, somehow alerted to the existence of the barricade, skirted the city and stopped at Fowler’s Restaurant in Millington, Tennessee, just northeast of Memphis, for lunch. Lowery was taken into the restaurant “and kept under observation while the party ate.” An observer remarked he “said nothing, but showed the intense strain he was under. He realized he was on his way to death.”30
From Fowler’s Restaurant, the men and their prisoner headed to the Mississippi River where they boarded boats and crossed at Nodena Landing, which was in sight of the Craig home. Somewhere between five hundred and six hundred men, together with Dick and Hugh Craig, who were still recovering from their wounds, were on hand in a large grassy area that formed a natural amphitheater. A few women were among the crowd, and, at Lowery’s request, his wife and daughter (in some accounts “his children”) were brought to the scene, presumably so he could say his goodbye. He was chained to a log and “questioned,” but no transcript of that interrogation survives. As the Osceola Times later reported, no one was willing to identify those present. Lowery was placed “on top of a huge pile of dry leaves and cracker boxes. Gasoline was applied to his body and a torch lighted. As the flames ate away his abdomen, a member of the mob stepped forward and saturated Lowery’s body with gasoline. When he burned too fast, water was splashed on him.” Although some reporters indicated he screamed and begged them to end his life, others claimed that he remained remarkably silent and only uttered a distress call common to one of one of his fraternal lodges.31 The brutal nature of the retribution was not simply to punish Lowery for the deaths of two white people but also to serve as a warning to the Black community of sharecroppers. The system of plantation agriculture would brook no defiance on the part of labor, no challenge to the power of the planter class.
In the end, similar to the situation in the Elaine Massacre, no white man was held to account for the Lowery lynching. Immediately following the lynching, Governor McRae declared his intention to “recommend to the legislature that any Sheriff or officer who permitted or did not prevent the lynching of persons within his jurisdiction should be removed from office.”32 A Little Rock newspaper, however, suggested prophetically that the effort to pass such legislation “would meet bitter opposition from the legislative delegations from the so-called ‘Black-belt’ counties or counties having large negro populations.” So incensed was the governor, in fact, that he suggested that the incident might attract federal attention. “Inasmuch as the negro was taken from an interstate train and brought from Mississippi into Arkansas where he was killed, the matter may come within the purview of federal authorities, and it is possible that this occurrence may result in the enactment of federal statutes for the prevention of crimes which should be prevented by our county officers.”33 Whether intentionally or not, he was offering an argument for the passage for a federal antilynching law—or near enough to it—something the NAACP was attempting. As Karlos Hill has argued, the NAACP pamphlet “An American Lynching” included appalling details of the lynching precisely to appeal to the sensibilities of the public and officials, all in an effort to buttress their campaign for an antilynching law.34
Neither state nor federal action was taken, however, and, with one exception, the perpetrators remained unidentified. A Chicago Defender article named Oscar Craig’s brother-in-law, Lee Wilson, as playing a role in the lynching. The article reported that an arrest warrant had been issued for Wilson, whom the paper described as a sawmill owner, in connection with the lynching, but there is reason for skepticism. No record of such an arrest warrant could be located, the Defender article was published without an author byline, and it is not known who provided the newspaper with this information.35 Even without confirmation from the public record of an arrest warrant, the Chicago Defender’s account cannot be entirely dismissed. First, Wilson was the most powerful man in the region, and it was his brother-in-law and niece who had been killed in the confrontation with Lowery. He had the prominence and moral authority as a relative to demand a trial and prevent the lynching. He did not. Second, his son, Lee Wilson Jr., was the commander of the American Legion Post at the town of Wilson, to whom the governor addressed a telegram calling upon him to “to use every means at your command in assisting civil authorities to uphold the law and prevent lynching of the negro who will arrive at Nodena tonight.”36 Instead, the younger Lee Wilson indicated to a local reporter that “feeling against Henry Lowery was so acute that he doubted if the lynching could be averted.”37 Third, Jesse Greer, who worked for Lee Wilson & Company and had been charged with returning Lowery safely to Little Rock for trial, had taken a route that seems to have been calculated to coincide with the plans of a posse. If it is true that an arrest warrant had been issued for Wilson, it would have come from Sheriff Blackwood, who was himself under scrutiny for having allowed the lynching to take place.38 If Blackwood secured a warrant for his arrest, it might explain the animus Lee Wilson developed toward Blackwood, a hatred that survived into 1932 when Blackwood was running for the Democratic nomination to the governor’s office.39 Wilson did everything in his power to secure the nomination for Blackwood’s rival. Though not solely due to Wilson’s efforts, Blackwood lost the nomination. If Blackwood did indeed attempt to arrest Lee Wilson, it challenges assumptions about the power planters exercised in plantation areas or, at the very least, suggests that the Lowery lynching was a step too far.
And what of Lowery’s lodge brothers who had been implicated in Lowery’s initial escape? They survived, unlike many members of the Farmers and Household Union and hundreds of other innocent Black men, women, and children in Phillips County. The Elaine violence led to a mass exodus of Black labor from the county and an ongoing crisis in its plantation economy, a crisis that was not lost on planters elsewhere. It is likely that the effort to contain the violence after the Lowery lynching was motivated as much—or maybe more—by a desire to protect the plantation system rather than some altruistic pursuit of justice. Nevertheless, the survival of Lowery’s compatriots was not without drama. Mississippi County authorities arrested Morris Jenkins and his wife, Jenny, along with Mott Orr, Walter Johnson, and John Redditt and incarcerated them in the Crittenden County jail in nearby Marion. By the time the mob that burned Lowery turned their attention toward his friends, the lynchers were exhausted, and “the almost impassable dirt roads” probably saved the prisoners. Meanwhile, John Williams and Henry Corbin were being held in the north Mississippi County jail in Blytheville on charges of abetting Lowery’s escape. Believing that the lynch mob at Nodena was on its way to Blytheville, the “courthouse and jail were barricaded,” and Sheriff Blackwood and Circuit Judge R. H. Dudley stood with “forty armed men” prepared to fend off any effort to reach the prisoners.40 A reporter from the Memphis Press was on the scene in Blytheville and described the frenzied effort to protect the prisoners. Sharpshooters were placed on roofs and “squads of men were stationed at points of vantage thruout [sic] the building.” Other men were stationed inside the jail and “rushed thruout [sic] the building guarding doors and flashing lights in each other’s eyes. The guards in the building were under instructions to shoot the minute that an attempt was made to rush the jail.” The reporter claimed to be “more afraid that they would start shooting each other before the mob arrived. . . . The majority of them were a bit excited, and with the building in darkness, it was impossible to tell which were guards.”41 In the end, muddied roads stymied what remnants of the Nodena mob tried to reach the jail, probably preventing an attack.
The two men in Blytheville were soon transported to the Pemiscot County jail in Caruthersville, Tennessee, for safekeeping but eventually moved to Little Rock. The five prisoners in Marion were moved to Memphis a day or so after the Lowery lynching in order to place them on the train to Little Rock. They were briefly held in the city jail—the sheriff refused to take them at the Shelby County jail—before being transported to the Memphis Grand Central Station “in a closed car.” Once at the station, “they were led down a long freight chute and taken to the track level in the freight elevator, just in time to board the fast Rock Island train . . . for Little Rock.”42 According to one report, they were to be tried in late February, but no record of their prosecutions has been located. Two of them, Morris and Jenny Jenkins, could be found in the 1930 census, working as sharecropper and wife on a Pulaski County plantation. It may well be that they served time in prison for having aided Lowery, but that was not the only possible price they paid. Prior to being discovered as a Lowery confederate, Jenkins had been a caretaker for a Memphis hunting club in Crittenden County, a position of some authority. His status as a sharecropper at age sixty-five was a step down.43
Given the association of his lodge brothers with Lowery’s escape to El Paso, there was “considerable talk [throughout southern Mississippi County] . . . to start a campaign to break up the various negro fraternal lodges throughout the state.”44 One white observer, clinging to the unfounded conviction that southern African Americans were docile and content, alleged that the lodges were “said to have been organized by smart eastern negroes for the double purpose of inciting the southern negro and for getting what money they could out of him.”45 It was a common white delusion shared with the Phillips County whites who said virtually the same thing about the Farmers and Household Union. It remains unknown whether an effort to eliminate Black lodges occurred elsewhere in Arkansas, but records of the Universal Negro Improvement Association establish that there were no Garvey clubs—organizations formed in southern rural areas under the association’s auspices—in southern Mississippi County. The Garvey clubs focused on self-improvement, promoted the segregation of the races (to maintain the purity of Black women), and supported a back-to-Africa movement. It was more than a fraternal club, as women were often heavily involved, and it was more public facing than traditional Black fraternal organizations. Wearing military regalia, Garveyites paraded on the streets, calling attention to themselves in a way that south Mississippi County African Americans may have found too dangerous in the aftermath of the Lowery lynching. Nevertheless, the formation of Garvey clubs in the northern portion of the county may be, as historian Kenneth Barnes suggests, connected to the Lowery lynching.46
Without the “testimony” that Lowery allegedly provided his inquisitors at Nodena Landing, there was no word from him as to the circumstances of his confrontation with Craig, no “possible” record of any indictment of the plantation system as it operated in the Arkansas Delta. Ironically, Lowery’s lynching and the Elaine Massacre occurred just as the global cotton complex started to unravel and sharecropping along with it. Other industries were already in the process of displacing cotton as global operators, and other agricultural commodities were soon to overtake cotton as the dominant crop in the old cotton South and the Mississippi River Valley. Cotton and the sharecropping system had barely another two decades of life left in them. Government programs that arose out of the 1930s New Deal bailed out planters and land-owning farmers and—circumventing the workings of the free market—extended them an economic safety net through farm programs. Cotton planters would use the funds they received from the government to diversify, mechanize, and, after World War II, begin to use chemicals, all of which eliminated the need for the sharecropping system. Sharecroppers would become a burden to planters in the post–World War II South, who no longer needed year-round labor. Historian Don Holley calls the New Deal, in fact, the “second great emancipation”—an emancipation of planters from the burden of labor-intensive cotton farming.47 But it was not an emancipation that beckoned a better future on the farm for Black sharecroppers.