NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. The best monograph on the Elaine Massacre is Grif Stockley, Brian K. Mitchell, and Guy Lancaster, Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Massacre of 1919, rev. ed. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2020). Important works include Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “The Arkansas Race Riot” (Chicago: self-published, 1920); B. Boren McCool, Union, Reaction, and Riot: The Biography of a Rural Race Riot (Memphis, TN: Memphis State University Press, 1970); Richard Cortner, A Mob with Intent on Death: The NAACP and the Arkansas Riot Cases (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1988); Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (New York: St. Martin’s, 2011); Robert Whitaker, On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle that Remade a Nation (New York: Crown, 2008); David F. Krugler, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

2. Joe Martin to William Woods, August 6, 1943, in the author’s possession.

CHAPTER 1

1. William F. Holmes, “The Arkansas Cotton Pickers Strike of 1891 and the Demise of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 32 (Summer 1973): 107–19. See also Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 423–25; Gerald H. Gaither, Blacks and the Populist Movement: Ballots and Bigotry in the New South, rev. ed. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 16, 27–30; Omar H. Ali, In the Lion’s Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886–1900 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 62, 70–71, 75–76.

2. Holmes, “Arkansas Cotton Pickers Strike,” 107–108, 111 (quotation). See also Hahn, Nation under Our Feet, 424.

3. M. Langley Biegert, “Legacy of Resistance: Uncovering the History of Collective Action by Black Agricultural Workers in Central East Arkansas from the 1860s to the 1930s,” Journal of Social History 32 (Fall 1998): 78–79; Grif Stockley, Ruled by Race: Black/White Relations in Arkansas from Slavery to the Present (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2009), 49–50 (quotation p. 49); “Henry Turner,” in Bearing Witness: Memories of Arkansas Slavery Narratives from the 1930s WPA Collections, 2nd ed., ed. George E. Lankford (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006), 293–94.

4. Carl H. Moneyhon, The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on Arkansas: Persistence in the Midst of Ruin (1994; reprint, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2002), 246; Jeannie M. Whayne et al., Arkansas: A Narrative History, 2nd ed. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2013), 237, 241–46; Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863–1877, updated ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2015), 125–26; Randy Finley, “Arkansas,” in Encyclopedia of the Reconstruction Era, ed. Richard Zuczek (Westport: Greenwood, 2006), 1: 51.

5. “Office of the Governor,” CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, accessed July 13, 2019, https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/office-of-the-governor-5676/; Harry S. Ashmore, Arkansas: A Bicentennial History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 132; Foner, Short History of Reconstruction, 226, 234–35, 247; Matthew Hild, Arkansas’s Gilded Age: The Rise, Decline, and Legacy of Populism and Working-Class Protest (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2018), 7, 20; Carl H. Moneyhon, Arkansas and the New South, 1874–1929 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997), 18; Gubernatorial Elections, 1787–1997 (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1998), 41. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883; Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883).

6. Matthew Hild, Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 20–23, 30–31 (quotation p. 30); New York Times, May 18, 1876; Moneyhon, Arkansas and the New South, 78–79.

7. Hild, Arkansas’s Gilded Age, 15.

8. Gubernatorial Elections, 41; Hild, Arkansas’s Gilded Age, 17.

9. Hild, Arkansas’s Gilded Age, 8–12, 23–28 (quotation p. 27), 40, 125.

10. Reprinted in The Industrial Revolution in America: A Primary Source History of America’s Transformation into an Industrial Society, ed. Corona Brezina (New York: Rosen Publishing Group, 2005), 55–56. General histories of the Knights of Labor include Norman J. Ware, The Labor Movement in the United States, 1860–1895: A Study in Democracy (New York: D. Appleton, 1929) and Craig Phelan, Grand Master Workman: Terence Powderly and the Knights of Labor (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000).

11. Hild, Arkansas’s Gilded Age, 29–31.

12. Hild, Arkansas’s Gilded Age, 25, 27, 31–32; Hild, Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists, 88; Jonathan Garlock, comp., Guide to the Local Assemblies of the Knights of Labor (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982), 11–21; Fon Louise Gordon, Caste and Class: The Black Experience in Arkansas, 1880–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 15; Gaither, Blacks and the Populist Movement, 5.

13. John DeSantis, The Thibodaux Massacre: Racial Violence and the 1887 Sugar Cane Labor Strike (Charleston: The History Press, 2016). For a collection of primary sources about the sugar cane strike, see Philip S. Foner and Ronald L. Lewis, eds., The Black Worker: A Documentary History from Colonial Times to the Present (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978), 3: 143–241. For examples of Knights of Labor activity among Black farmers and farm laborers elsewhere in the South, see Foner and Lewis, Black Worker, 3: 136–42; Robert C. McMath Jr., “Southern White Farmers and the Organization of Black Farm Workers: A North Carolina Document,” Labor History 18 (Winter 1977): 115–19; Matthew Hild, “Organizing across the Color Line: The Knights of Labor and Black Recruitment Efforts in Small-Town Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 81 (Summer 1997): 287–310.

14. Journal of United Labor (Philadelphia), June 25, 1884, October 10–25, 1886.

15. “War in Young,” Daily Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock), July 6, 1886, 4 (first quotation); Journal of United Labor, October 10–25, 1886 (all other quotations); “Colored Knights of Labor,” New York Times, July 7, 1886, 3; William Warren Rogers, “Negro Knights of Labor in Arkansas: A Case Study of the ‘Miscellaneous’ Strike,” Labor History 10 (Summer 1969): 498–505; Theresa A. Case, The Great Southwest Railroad Strike and Free Labor (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2010), 214–15. Rogers says that the strike began on July 2, but the newspaper accounts cited earlier both reported that it began on July 1.

16. Case, Great Southwest Railroad Strike; Ralph V. Turner and William Warren Rogers, “Arkansas Labor in Revolt: Little Rock and the Great Southwestern Strike,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 24 (Spring 1965): 29–46; Hild, Arkansas’s Gilded Age, 50–54.

17. Hild, Arkansas’s Gilded Age, 54–57, 59–64; Gubernatorial Elections, 41.

18. Hild, Arkansas’s Gilded Age, chap. 4; Kenneth C. Barnes, Who Killed John Clayton? Political Violence and the Emergence of the New South, 1861–1893 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 60–99.

19. For examples of this national attention, see the Chicago Daily Tribune, September 30, 1890; San Francisco Chronicle, October 2, 1890; New York Times, November 5, 1890; Journal of the Knights of Labor (Philadelphia), November 13 and December 11, 1890, January 15, 1891.

20. Barnes, Who Killed John Clayton?, 127 (quotation). On the “separate coach” law, see John William Graves, “The Arkansas Separate Coach Law of 1891,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 32 (Summer 1973): 148–65. On the disfranchisement laws of the early 1890s, see J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 123–30; John William Graves, Town and Country: Race Relations in an Urban-Rural Context, Arkansas, 1865–1905 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1990), 164–74; Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 61–64; Chris M. Branam, “Another Look at Disfranchisement in Arkansas, 1888–1894,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 69 (Autumn 2010): 245–62.

21. Robert C. McMath Jr., Populist Vanguard: A History of the Southern Farmers’ Alliance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 15, 46, 58–60, 153; Ali, In the Lion’s Mouth, 49.

22. Charles Postel, Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 308.

23. “Knights of Labor,” Arkansas Gazette, August 20, 1890, 1; Garlock, Guide to the Local Assemblies, 11–21.

24. Hahn, Nation under Our Feet, 414–25; Melton Alonza McLaurin, The Knights of Labor in the South (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978), 129, 138–42, 147–48; William F. Holmes, “The Leflore County Massacre and the Demise of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance,” Phylon 34 (September 1973): 267–74.

25. Advocate (Leavenworth, LA), September 28, 1889, reprinted in Foner and Lewis, Black Worker, 3: 347.

26. Washington Bee, September 27, 1889 (quotation), reprinted in Foner and Lewis, Black Worker, 3: 347–48; Holmes, “Leflore County Massacre,” 267–74.

27. Holmes, “Leflore County Massacre,” 267 (first quotation), 274 (second quotation).

28. Holmes, “Leflore County Massacre,” 274; Robert C. McMath Jr., American Populism: A Social History, 1877–1898 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 93; Hahn, Nation under Our Feet, 443, 474; Arkansas Democrat (Little Rock), July 23, 1890, 1; Garlock, Guide to the Local Assemblies, xxi–xxii, 11–21; F. Clark Elkins, “The Agricultural Wheel in Arkansas, 1887,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 40 (Autumn 1981): 254; Willard B. Gatewood Jr., “Negro Legislators in Arkansas, 1891: A Document,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 31 (Autumn 1972): 224–25, 227–28.

29. Ware, Labor Movement, 66; Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Knights of Labor of America, Eleventh Regular Session, Held at Minneapolis, Minnesota, October 4 to 19, 1887 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1950), microfilm, 1850; Arkansas Gazette, August 20, 1890.

30. Holmes, “Arkansas Cotton Pickers Strike,” 107; American Citizen (Kansas City, KS), September 11, 1891, reprinted in Foner and Lewis, Black Worker, 3: 331–332; Southern Star (Ozark, AL), September 16, 1891.

31. William F. Holmes, “The Demise of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance,” Journal of Southern History 41 (May 1975): 196–97.

32. Postel, Equality, 290.

33. Compendium of the Eleventh Census: 1890 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1892), 477; Journal of United Labor, December 3, 1887.

34. Atlanta Constitution, September 8, 1891, reprinted in Foner and Lewis, Black Worker, 3: 332.

35. Houston Daily Post, September 8, 1891, reprinted in Foner and Lewis, Black Worker, 3: 332.

36. “A Cotton Picking Trust,” Arkansas Democrat, September 9, 1891, 2.

37. Holmes, “Arkansas Cotton Pickers Strike,” 113–14.

38. Hahn, Nation under Our Feet, 425; Biegert, “Legacy of Resistance,” 82; Holmes, “Arkansas Cotton Pickers Strike,” 114–15. Holmes does not identify Patterson as a Colored Allianceman but suggests that “he was either a [Cotton Pickers] League member or strongly influenced by Humphrey’s call for a strike.”

39. Biegert, “Legacy of Resistance,” 82–83; Holmes, “Arkansas Cotton Pickers Strike,” 115–16 (quotation p. 116); Earth (Brookville, KS), October 9, 1891.

40. Holmes, “Arkansas Cotton Pickers Strike,” 116–17.

41. Holmes, “Demise of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance,” 200.

42. Holmes, “Arkansas Cotton Pickers Strike,” 118; Hahn, Nation under Our Feet, 425; Postel, Equality, 304–5. For a more sanguine view of the relationship between the Knights’ leadership and the Black poor in the South during the 1890s, see Deborah Beckel, “Southern Labor and the Lure of Populism: Workers and Power in North Carolina,” in Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power, ed. Matthew Hild and Keri Leigh Merritt (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018), 126–41.

43. Arkansas Gazette, June 8, 1892; Thomas S. Baskett Jr., “Miners Stay Away!: W. B. W. Heartsill and the Last Years of the Arkansas Knights of Labor, 1892–1896,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 42 (Summer 1983): 107–33; Journal-Advance (Gentry, AR), February 23, 1906.

44. Kenneth C. Barnes, Journey of Hope: The Back-to-Africa Movement in Arkansas in the Late 1800s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 49–73; Holmes, “Arkansas Cotton Pickers Strike,” 118.

45. Matthew Hild, “Labor, Third-Party Politics, and New South Democracy in Arkansas, 1884–1896,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 63 (Spring 2004): 39; Nancy Snell Griffith, “ ‘At the Hands of a Person or Persons Unknown’: The Nature of Lynch Mobs in Arkansas,” in Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas, 1840–1950, ed. Guy Lancaster (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2018), 47 (quotations); Moneyhon, Arkansas and the New South, 90; Barnes, Who Killed John Clayton?, 110.

46. Hild, “Labor, Third-Party Politics,” 38–39, 42.

47. Ashmore, Arkansas, 175.

48. Guy Lancaster, “ ‘Negroes Warned to Leave Town’: The Bonanza Race War of 1904,” Journal of the Fort Smith Historical Society 34 (April 2010): 24–29 (quotation p. 27).

49. Hild, Arkansas’s Gilded Age, 130–32.

50. Hild, Arkansas’s Gilded Age, 132–33.

51. G. Gregory Kiser, “The Socialist Party in Arkansas, 1900–1912,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 40 (Summer 1981): 136–37; Jeremy Brecher, Strike!, 3rd ed. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014), 102; Ashmore, Arkansas, 175; Moneyhon, Arkansas and the New South, 107.

52. Arkansas Gazette, May 24, 1903, November 29, 1914; James R. Green, Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895–1943 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 302, 323–28; Nigel Anthony Sellars, Oil, Wheat & Wobblies: The Industrial Workers of the World in Oklahoma, 1905–1930 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 77, 84–86; Nigel Anthony Sellars, “Working Class Union,” Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, accessed September 6, 2019, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=WO021; Covington Hall, Labor Struggles in the Deep South and Other Writings, ed. David R. Roediger (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1999), 186–87.

53. Michael Pierce, “Great Women All, Serving a Glorious Cause: Freda Hogan Ameringer’s Reminiscences of Socialism in Arkansas,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 69 (Winter 2010): 304–5, 324; J. Blake Perkins, Hillbilly Hellraisers: Federal Power and Populist Defiance in the Ozarks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 75; Brecher, Strike!, 102; Sellars, Oil, Wheat & Wobblies, 87–88, 91; Hall, Labor Struggles, 188–89; Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 288–302, 326–28.

CHAPTER 2

1. “A Bad State of Affairs in a Portion of Lawrence County,” Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock), October 14, 1887, 4.

2. Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 182.

3. Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 5–6.

4. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 19–28.

5. Kidada E. Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 40.

6. William F. Holmes, “Whitecapping: Agrarian Violence in Mississippi, 1902–1906,” Journal of Southern History 35 (May 1969): 166.

7. Guy Lancaster, Racial Cleansing in Arkansas, 1883–1924: Politics, Land, Labor, and Criminality (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 45–82.

8. Claudia Card, Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 166.

9. Public and Private Acts and Joint and Concurrent Resolutions and Memorials of the General Assembly of the State of Arkansas, 1909 (Little Rock: Secretary of State, 1909), 778–80.

10. Jeannie M. Whayne, “What Is the Mississippi Delta? A Historian’s Perspective,” in Defining the Delta: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Lower Mississippi River Delta, ed. Janelle Collins (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2015), 128.

11. “Jonesboro White-Caps,” Arkansas Gazette, April 5, 1893, 2.

12. “Jonesboro Whitecaps,” Arkansas Gazette, April 19, 1894, 8.

13. “A Whitecapper Killed,” Osceola (AR) Times, May 5, 1894, 3. Brief though this newspaper report was, it offers some interesting contrasts with how accounts of Black transgression are typically understood. According to one accounting, in the 1890s in Arkansas, fifty-five African Americans were lynched for having allegedly committed murder and nineteen for sexual crimes, and so the killing of Colbert would seem to offer motive enough for the members of the band to lynch Louis White. Randy Finley, “A Lynching State: Arkansas in the 1890s,” in Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas, 1840–1950, ed. Guy Lancaster (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2018), 61–62. But this newspaper report also frames the interracial relationship as mutual—the white woman was visiting the Black man, and the band of vigilantes showed up at his place expecting to find her. This runs in stark contrast to accounts of how the discovery of interracial relationships were often framed as rape to justify the lynching of the Black transgressor. Ed Coy, lynched in Texarkana in 1892 for having allegedly raped a white woman, was, according to some accounts of the event, actually in a consensual relationship with the woman, who was compelled to make the accusation against him. Larry LeMasters, “Ed Coy (Lynching of),” CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, accessed March 19, 2020, https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/edward-coy-7035/.

14. “Whitecaps Threaten,” Helena (AR) Weekly World, November 15, 1899, 3.

15. “Whitecappers at West Point,” Southern Standard (Arkadelphia, AR), May 31, 1900, 1; untitled, Arkansas Democrat (Little Rock), May 26, 1900, 4; “State News,” Fort Smith Times, May 28, 1900, 2.

16. “Arkansas News,” Arkansas Gazette, March 25, 1894, 1.

17. “Excitement in St. Francis County,” Osceola Times, April 7, 1894, 3.

18. “St. Francis County Whitecaps,” Arkansas Gazette, October 24, 1894, 1.

19. Untitled, Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, October 30, 1894, 3; “Whitecaps Acquitted,” Arkansas Gazette, November 7, 1894, 6.

20. Untitled, Helena Weekly World, September 1, 1897, 1; “Whitecaps,” Helena Weekly World, September 1, 1897, 4.

21. “Notice!” Helena Weekly World, September 8, 1897, 4.

22. “Whitecaps,” Helena World, February 23, 1898, 3.

23. “Arkansas State News,” Southern Standard, April 22, 1898, 1.

24. “Whitecaps at Work,” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, January 20, 1902, 8.

25. “Brief Mention,” Osceola Times, February 1, 1902, 3.

26. “Warned to Leave,” Arkansas Gazette, January 29, 1898, 5. Other violence in the area around the same time included the murder of a schoolteacher and further attempts to drive off all African Americans from the area. See Nancy Snell Griffith, “Lonoke County Race War of 1897–1898,” CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, accessed March 19, 2020, https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/lonoke-county-race-war-of-1897-1898-7459/.

27. “Negroes Much Alarmed,” Arkansas Gazette, January 3, 1905, 2; “Negroes Will Be Protected,” Arkansas Democrat, January 6, 1906, 1.

28. “Monroe Whitecaps,” Arkansas Democrat, February 11, 1898, 4.

29. “Growers Are Threatened,” Arkansas Gazette, September 15, 1908, 2; “Alleged Night Riders,” Batesville (AR) Guard, September 18, 1908, 1.

30. Untitled, Arkansas Democrat, September 16, 1908, 4. Interestingly, the Southern Standard suggested on September 24 that recent reports of nightriding had been exposed as resulting from a practical joke played upon William Craddock of Lake City, who owned a horse that had allegedly created a disturbance in town, leading “some of the residents of that place to remark, in a joking manner, that they intended to have an ordinance passed in the city council prohibiting the animal from appearing on the streets.” Shortly afterward, “switches,” one of the symbols used by nightriders, “were found by Mr. Craddock pinned on the door of his barn in which the horse was kept.” This, according to the newspaper, spurred reports of nightriding. However, as later events reveal, nightriders were active in the area. See “News of Arkansas,” Southern Standard, September 24, 1908, 1.

31. “Night Riding Arouses Town,” Arkansas Democrat, September 28, 1908, 1.

32. “Buying of Cotton Is to Be Resumed,” Arkansas Gazette, October 1, 1908, 1.

33. “Merchants Reject the Union’s Plan,” Arkansas Gazette, October 2, 1908, 1, 10.

34. Charley Sandage, “Arkansas Farmers Union,” CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, accessed March 20, 2020, https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/arkansas-farmers-union-6232/; Matthew Hild’s essay in this volume.

35. “R. B. Snell May Leave the Union,” Arkansas Democrat, October 1, 1908, 1.

36. “Night Riding Must Not Be Tolerated in Arkansas,” Arkansas Gazette, October 9, 1908, 4. An editorial in The Home Magazine reprinted in the Batesville Daily Guard also used developments in Tennessee and Kentucky as a warning for Arkansans: “If the conditions which have prevailed in the twenty-odd counties of the dark tobacco district in Tennessee and Kentucky were to spread throughout the vast cotton country of the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas, with all the attendant circumstances of midnight terror, arson, feud and murder, not only would fifteen million people have a little taste of hell on earth but the development of the entire south would be set back a good ten years before the time the flame could be got under control.” “How the Trust Escapes the Night Riders,” Batesville Daily Guard, February 17, 1909, 1.

37. “Night Riders Close 12 Cotton Gins,” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, October 8, 1908, 1.

38. “Night Riders Near This City,” Arkansas Gazette, October 10, 1908, 1. The same issue reported on a union meeting in Garland County, located just west of Saline County, which resulted in a resolution by county union members to condemn nightriding. “Unions Condemn Night Riding,” Arkansas Gazette, October 10, 1908, 1.

39. “Sheriff Ready to Show Mailed Hand,” Arkansas Gazette, October 11, 1908, 1.

40. “News from All over Arkansas,” Arkansas Gazette, October 15, 1908, 3.

41. “Union Endorsed by Business Men,” Arkansas Gazette, October 20, 1908, 1.

42. “Governor Pindall Willing,” The Monticellonian (Monticello, AR), October 29, 1908, 1.

43. “Farmers’ Union Offers Reward,” Arkansas Gazette, November 8, 1908, 1.

44. “Stop Night Riders,” Fort Smith Times, January 17, 1909, 1. Representative Little served in the Arkansas House of Representatives from 1909 to 1912; Historical Report of the Secretary of State 2008 (Little Rock: Arkansas Secretary of State’s Office, 2008), 685.

45. “Among the Law Makers,” Arkansas Democrat, January 21, 1909, 6.

46. Christopher Waldrep, Night Riders: Defending Community in the Black Patch, 1890–1915 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 8.

47. Suzanne Marshall, Violence in the Black Patch of Kentucky and Tennessee (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994), 98.

48. Holmes, “Whitecapping,” 167.

49. According to sociologist Mattias Smångs, lynching, like the formal Jim Crow system, constituted a means of generating white racial identity across class boundaries after a Reconstruction period that “destroyed the institutionalized antebellum system of symbolic and social race boundaries, categories, and identities”; Mattias Smångs, Doing Violence, Making Race: Lynching and White Racial Group Formation in the U.S. South, 1882–1930 (New York: Routledge, 2017), 9.

50. The Judiciary Committee reported favorably on the bill on January 26, 1909, and it passed the House on January 29. It was first read in the Senate on February 23, 1909 and was voted upon on March 16, 1909. “House Is Peer of Senate,” Arkansas Gazette, January 27, 1909, 3; “In the House, Friday, January 29, 1909,” Arkansas Gazette, January 30, 1909, 3; “House Wrangles over Farm Schools,” Arkansas Democrat, January 30, 1909, 1; “In the Senate, Tuesday, February 23, 1909,” Arkansas Gazette, February 24, 1909, 3; “The Senate,” Arkansas Democrat, March 17, 1909, 2; “Tilt over Liquor Bill,” Arkansas Gazette, March 17, 1909, 3; “Night Riding Bill a Law,” Arkansas Democrat, April 7, 1909, 6.

51. Acts of Arkansas of the General Assembly of the State of Arkansas, 1909 (Little Rock: General Assembly of the State of Arkansas, 1909), 315–17.

52. “Perils of the Night Riders,” Arkansas Gazette, April 20, 1909, 4.

53. See, for example, “To Suppress Night-Riding,” Osceola Times, January 28, 1909, 2.

54. “May Prosecute under New Act,” Arkansas Gazette, May 16, 1909, 1.

55. “Continue ‘Rider’ Case at Lonoke,” Arkansas Gazette, August 14, 1909, 2; “Circuit Court Is Over,” Lonoke (AR) Democrat, August 19, 1909, 1.

56. “Alleged Night Riders,” Arkansas Democrat, August 11, 1909, 10; “Twenty-Seven Indictments,” Lonoke Democrat, August 12, 1909, 1.

57. “Continued to Suit Sen. Davis’ Convenience,” Arkansas Democrat, February 11, 1910, 7; “Many Criminal Cases,” Arkansas Democrat, August 1, 1910, 5.

58. “News of the State,” Nashville (AR) News, August 13, 1910, 3; “Circuit Court,” Lonoke Democrat, August 4, 1910, 1.

59. “Bush Taken to the State Prison,” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, October 14, 1910, 6.

60. “Charged with Nightriding,” Arkansas Gazette, October 10, 1911, 2; “Acquitted of Nightriding,” Arkansas Gazette, October 17, 1911, 2.

61. “Forty-Eight Farmers Arrested,” Batesville Daily Guard, May 31, 1912, 1; “Four Held for ‘Night Riding,’” Arkansas Gazette, August 26, 1913, 1.

62. “Citizens Join to Protect Negroes,” Jonesboro (AR) Evening Sun, April 18, 1912, 1; “Citizens Join to Protect Negroes,” Arkansas Gazette, April 19, 1912, 2; “Whites Dynamite Home of Negro,” Arkansas Gazette, April 21, 1912, 1, 3; “Walnut Ridge Negroes Ordered to Leave by Whites, Militia Called,” Jonesboro Evening Sun, April 22, 1912, 1; “Militia in Camp at Walnut Ridge,” Arkansas Gazette, April 22, 1912, 2; “Four More Held at Walnut Ridge,” Arkansas Gazette, May 1, 1912, 1; “Alleged Night Rider Acquitted,” Arkansas Gazette, May 2, 1912, 2.

63. “Four Held for ‘Night Riding,’” Arkansas Gazette, August 26, 1913, 1.

64. “Night Riding Is Charge against Lonoke Men,” Arkansas Democrat, March 3, 1914, 5.

65. “Held for Night Riding,” Arkansas Gazette, March 8, 1915, 8.

66. “Night Riding Charged,” Batesville Daily Guard, January 5, 1915, 3; “Seven Held for ‘Night Riding,” Arkansas Gazette, January 10, 1915, 17.

67. “Six Awarded Damages,” Arkansas Gazette, September 24, 1916, 1.

68. “Accused of Night Riding,” Arkansas Gazette, May 30, 1913, 2.

69. “100 Implicated in Nightrider Cases,” Arkansas Gazette, March 16, 1915, 2; “Night Riders in Mississippi County,” Osceola Times, March 19, 1915, 1; “Faces Term in Pen in Nightrider Case,” Arkansas Gazette, March 24, 1915, 14; “Jury Says Guilty of Night Riding,” Osceola Times, March 26, 1915, 1; “Captain of ‘Riders’ Gets 8-Year Term,” Arkansas Gazette, March 26, 1915, 2; “Two Letters—A Contrast,” Osceola Times, March 26, 1915, 4; “Rogers Given Seven Years and a Half,” Osceola Times, April 2, 1915, 1; Mississippi County Circuit Court Criminal Record, Osceola District, Book 2, 258–59.

70. “Night Riding Charged,” Arkansas Gazette, March 22, 1915, 2.

71. “More Night Riding Charge,” The Monticellonian, April 29, 1915, 4.

72. “Indict Six Men for Night Riding,” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, May 27, 1915, 2; “Indictments Number 52,” Arkansas Gazette, June 3, 1915, 1.

73. “Governors Take Hand in Checking Outrages,” Arkansas Democrat, October 12, 1920, 1. Among the incidents cited by Brough was the murder “of a negro guard at a cotton gin in Arkansas” that occurred after the gin’s owner received “warnings to discontinue operations until the staple reaches a price of 40 cents a pound.” However, according to news reports, the murder had nothing to do with the warnings. Two African Americans were soon arrested—and one allegedly confessed—to carrying out the murder for the purpose of robbing the guard of cash he was known to carry. See “Two Negroes Are Held in Murder at Gin: One Denies Night Riding Was Cause,” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, October 12, 1920, 1.

74. “Farmers Justified in Holding Cotton, Gov. Brough Believes,” Arkansas Democrat, October 16, 1920, 1.

75. “Night Riding Giving South ‘Black Eye,’ Says Mr. Ferguson,” Arkansas Democrat, October 23, 1920, 1.

76. “Urge Decreased Cotton Acreage,” Arkansas Democrat, October 25, 1920, 2. An editorial in the Pine Bluff Daily Graphic the following year applauded such efforts by farmers to decrease cotton acreage collectively, comparing such cooperative efforts to labor unions and medical associations who work to protect their profession from “quacks”; “Night Riding,” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, February 9, 1921, 4.

77. “Fires May Cause Loss of Insurance,” Arkansas Gazette, October 24, 1920, 29 (quotations); “Insurance Companies May Cancel Policies Where Night-Riding Does Not Keep to a Minimum.” Arkansas Democrat, October 22, 1920, 1.

78. “Seven White County Farmers Confess to Night-Riding Charge,” Arkansas Democrat, October 15, 1920, 1.

79. “Light Sentences for Night Riders,” Arkansas Gazette, January 26, 1921, 5. The statute in question was likely Act 512 of 1919, a so-called criminal anarchy law passed during the Red Scare of 1919–20; Jamie Kern, “The Price of Dissent: Freedom of Speech and Arkansas Criminal Anarchy Arrests” (master’s thesis, University of Arkansas, 2012).

80. “Jail Sentences for Terrorists,” Arkansas Gazette, October 23, 1920, 1.

81. “More Night Riding Arrests Are Made,” Arkansas Democrat, April 12, 1921, 1.

82. “19 Arrests Made in Night Riding Cases,” Arkansas Democrat, April 13, 1921, 1; “Eight More Held for Night Riding,” Arkansas Gazette, April 13, 1921, 1.

83. “20 Men Are Held as Night Riders,” Arkansas Gazette, April 15, 1921, 10; “26 Are Now Held for Night Riding,” Arkansas Gazette, April 16, 1921, 8.

84. “30 Men Indicted for Night Riding,” Arkansas Gazette, April 19, 1921, 14.

85. “Saw Schoolhouse Fired, He Declares,” Arkansas Gazette, April 23, 1921, 1; “Tell of Assisting in Burning House,” Arkansas Gazette, April 24, 1921, 1.

86. “Indictment Flaw Holds up Hearing,” Arkansas Gazette, April 22, 1921, 5; “Tells of Receiving Written Threats,” Arkansas Gazette, April 26, 1921, 1. DeWitt Garrett was initially found not guilty on the basis of a faulty indictment that accused him of burning of H. H. McAdams’s house, when, in fact, the house was jointly owned by N. A. Stroud and McAdams, but a new indictment was produced within thirty minutes. See “Indictment Flaw Holds up Hearing,” Arkansas Gazette, April 22, 1921, 5. His attorneys later insisted that “the destroyed building was not a dwelling house as contemplated by the law,” and thus the indictment continued to be faulty, but the court overruled the motion to instruct the jury to deliver a verdict of not guilty. See “Tells of Receiving Written Threats,” Arkansas Gazette, April 26, 1921, 1.

87. “Accused Farmers Say Plead Guilty,” Arkansas Gazette, April 27, 1921, 1; “20 To Plead Guilty to Night Riding,” Arkansas Gazette, April 28, 1921, 1; “Nightriders Given Prison Sentences,” Arkansas Gazette, August 2, 1921, 12; “Nightriders Reach Pen to Begin Terms,” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, August 11, 1921, 2. The stated number of indictments (thirty-one) does not equal the number of guilty pleas (twenty) plus the number of exonerations (ten). A follow-up article also strangely fails to do the proper math: “Thirty-one were arraigned in Circuit Court here last week, and 20 of them pleaded guilty, while 10 were discharged.” “To Arrest Others for Night Riding,” Arkansas Gazette, May 1, 1921, 11. Another report gave the number of guilty pleas for the main band as twenty-seven, adding that some three hundred “lesser offenders” also entered pleas of guilty, and that the incidents of arson carried out by this band smashed the national record. “Night Riders Working Hard for the State,” Little Rock Daily News, May 5, 1921, 7.

88. “To Arrest Others for Night Riding,” Arkansas Gazette, May 1, 1921, 11.

89. “Pardons Granted Two Night-Riders,” Little Rock Daily News, August 5, 1922, 9. On Tom Slaughter, see Jerry D. Gibbens, “Tom Slaughter,” CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, accessed March 20, 2020, https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/tom-slaughter-1765/.

90. “Hold Alleged Night Rider,” Arkansas Democrat, August 25, 1921, 9.

91. “Farmer to Spend His Life in Pen,” Arkansas Gazette, September 15, 1921, 8.

92. “Night Riding in Lonoke Leads to Arrest of Seven,” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, November 25, 1922, 1.

93. Jeannie M. Whayne, A New Plantation South: Land, Labor, and Federal Favor in Twentieth-Century Arkansas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 52. The case of striking workers to which Whayne refers is no doubt the charges of nightriding laid against workers along the Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad in 1923. See “M. & N. A. Strikers Indicted at Searcy,” Arkansas Democrat, January 16, 1923, 1.

94. Grif Stockley, Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001), 109. Robert Whitaker, in a footnote, overgeneralizes regarding the motivation underlying anti-nightriding laws, claiming that “they had been enacted by Southern states to prevent whites from riding around at night and terrorizing Blacks in order to drive them from the land,” thus ignoring the inter-class conflict among white Arkansans; On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation (New York: Crown, 2008), 168.

95. Brian K. Mitchell, “When the Depths Don’t Give up Their Dead: A Discussion on New Primary Sources and How They Are Reshaping Debate on the Elaine Massacre,” in The Elaine Massacre and Arkansas: A Century of Atrocity and Resistance, 1819–1919, ed. Guy Lancaster (Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2018), 213. The list of indictments runs pp. 216–37 of Mitchell’s chapter.

96. Wanda Gray, “Catcher Race Riot of 1923,” CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, accessed March 20, 2020, https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/catcher-race-riot-of-1923-5885/.

97. Johnson v. State, 198 Ark. 871 (1939); Southern Tenant Farmers Union Records on Microfilm, Reel 9, Item 2, Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY, accessed March 6, 2019, http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/KCL05204mf.html.

98. Michael G. Hanchard, The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 6.

CHAPTER 3

1. Hodges v. United States, 203 U.S. 1 (1906); William H. Pruden III, “Hodges v. United States,” CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, accessed August 12, 2020, https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/hodges-v-united-states-7404/; Jeannie Whayne, A New Planation South: Land, Labor, and Federal Favor in Twentieth-Century Arkansas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 49–50. On nightriding in Arkansas more generally, see Guy Lancaster’s essay in this volume.

2. Whayne, A New Planation South, 50; Hodges v. United States; “White Cap Cases Now on Trial,” Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock), March 17, 1904, x.

3. Pruden, “Hodges v. United States.”

4. Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905).

5. Pamela S. Karlan, “Contracting the Thirteenth Amendment: Hodges v. United States,” Boston University Law Review 85 (2005): 783–809.

6. Karlan, “Contracting the Thirteenth Amendment”; David Bernstein, “Thoughts on Hodges v. United States,” Boston University Law Review 85 (2005): 811–12.

7. See, e.g., Helena Weekly World, September 1, 1897, 1.

8. United States v. Morris, 125 F. 322 (1903).

9. “White Cap Cases Now on Trial”; Carolyn Gray LeMaster, “Jacob Trieber,” CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, accessed August 12, 2020, http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=26; Brent J. Aucoin, A Rift in the Clouds: Race and the Southern Federal Judiciary, 1900–1910 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007).

10. United States v. Morris, 325.

11. Karlan, “Contracting the Thirteenth Amendment,” 786–87.

12. Martha R. Mahoney, “What’s Left of Solidarity? Reflections on Law, Race, and Labor History,” Buffalo Law Review 57 (2009), 1515, http://www.buffalolaw.org/past_issues/57_5/Mahoney%20Web%2057_5.pdf; Richard Niswonger, “James Paul Clark,” accessed August 12, 2020, CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/james-paul-clarke-93/; Raymond Arsenault, Wild Ass of the Ozarks: Jeff Davis and the Social Bases of Southern Politics (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988). Davis also represented nightriders accused of running off Black labor; see Guy Lancaster’s essay in this volume.

13. Karlan, “Contracting the Thirteenth Amendment,” 787.

14. “Statutes Will Be Put to Test,” Times (Shreveport, LA), March 20, 1904, 1.

15. United States v. Morris.

16. Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883); United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876); Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall (83 U.S.) 36 (1866).

17. United States v. Rhodes, F. Cas. 785, 794 (C.C. Ky. 1866).

18. United States v. Rhodes, 794.

19. Slaughter-House Cases.

20. United States v. Cruikshank, 25 F. Cas. 707, 711 (C.C. La. 1874).

21. Blyew v. United States, 80 U.S. 581, 601 (1871).

22. Civil Rights Cases, 24.

23. Civil Rights Cases, 22.

24. Civil Rights Cases, 25.

25. United States v. Waddell, et. al., 112 U.S. 76 (1884); Guy Lancaster, “United States v. Waddell et al.,” CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, accessed August 12, 2020, http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=7387.

26. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), 542.

27. Plessy v. Ferguson, 543.

28. Hodges v. United States, 17.

29. Hodges v. United States, 18.

30. Hodges v. United States, 19.

31. Hodges v. United States, 20.

32. Pamela Brandwein, “Features of Conventional Scholarly Wisdom about the Thirteenth Amendment” (unpublished manuscript, https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1122&context=schmooze_papers), accessed August 15, 2020, Microsoft Word file.

33. Hodges v. United States, 17–18.

34. J. Gordon Hylton, “The Judge Who Abstained in Plessy v. Ferguson: Justice David Brewer and the Problem of Race,” Mississippi Law Journal 61 (1991), 353.

35. Hodges v. United States, 17–18.

36. Hodges v. United States, 19.

37. Hodges v. United States, 17.

38. James Gray Pope, “Thirteenth Amendment Optimism and Its Critics: A Sesquicentennial Assessment” (unpublished manuscript, accessed August 15, 2020, http://law.seattleu.edu/Documents/13thamendment/Pope,%20James%20Gray%20-%20Thirteenth%20Amendment%20Optimism%20and%20Its%20Critics%20-%20Copy.pdf), PDF file.

39. Pope, “Thirteenth Amendment Optimism and its Critics,” 23.

40. Hodges v. United States, 17.

41. Hodges v. United States, 18.

42. Frederick Douglass, “Reconstruction,” Atlantic Monthly (December 1866), accessed August 12, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1866/12/reconstruction/304561/.

43. Hodges v. United States, 32.

44. Hodges v. United States, 33–34.

45. D. J. Brewer, “Protection to Private Property from Public Attack: An Address Delivered before the Graduating Classes at the Sixty-Seventh Anniversary of the Yale School of Law on June 23, 1891” (New Haven: Hoggson and Robinson, 1891), 4. See also Linda Przybyszewski, “Judicial Conservatism and Protestant Faith: The Case of Justice David J. Brewer,” Journal of American History 91 (September 2004): 471–96.

46. Lochner v. New York, 53; Melvin Urofsky, Dissent and the Supreme Court: Its Role in the Court’s History and the Nation’s Constitutional Dialogue (New York: Pantheon Books, 2015), 141.

47. Hodges v. United States, 35.

48. Lochner v. New York, 75.

49. Lochner v. New York, 75.

50. Karlan, “Contracting the Thirteenth Amendment,” 809.

51. Boyett v. United States, 207 U.S. 581 (1907).

52. Mahoney, “What’s Left of Solidarity?” 1530.

53. Hodges v. United States, 20.

54. “Among the Lawmakers,” Arkansas Democrat, January 21, 1909, 6; “The House,” Arkansas Democrat, January 23, 1909, 1; “Pass Night Rider Bill,” Arkansas Democrat, March 17, 1909, 2; “Stop Night Riders,” Fort Smith Times, January 17, 1909, 1; Guy Lancaster, “Act 112 of 1909,” CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, accessed August 12, 2020, https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/act-112-of-1909-14368/; Acts of Arkansas of the General Assembly of the State of Arkansas, 1909 (Little Rock: General Assembly of the State of Arkansas, 1909), 315–17.

55. Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 502n49.

56. United States v. Carolene Products Company, 304 U.S. 144 (1938), 153n4. The literature on the Carolene Products footnote is extensive, but Louis Lusky’s “Footnote Redux: A ‘Carolene Products’ Reminiscence,” Columbia University Law Review 82 (October 1982): 1093–1109, is a good starting place.

CHAPTER 4

1. On the Elaine Massacre, see Grif Stockley, Brian K. Mitchell, and Guy Lancaster, Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Massacre of 1919, rev. ed. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, 2020); Jeannie M. Whayne, “Low Villains and Wickedness in High Places: Race and Class in the Elaine Riots,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 58 (Autumn 1999): 285–313.

2. While a substantial historiography on the Elaine Massacre exists, only a few scattered treatments of the Lowery lynching have been rendered by historians. Jeannie Whayne, Delta Empire: Lee Wilson and the Transformation of Southern Agriculture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 117–19, 127–34; Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 110–14. The historiography on lynching is extensive. For some of the most important works, see W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Karlos K. Hill, Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).

3. “An American Lynching: Being the Burning at Stake of Henry Lowry [sic] at Nodena, Arkansas, January 26, 1921, as Told in American Newspapers” (New York: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, n.d.); Hill, Beyond the Rope.

4. Walter F. White, “Massacring Whites in Arkansas,” The Nation, December 13, 1919, 714–16.

5. William Pickens, “The American Congo—The Burning of Henry Lowery,” The Nation, March 23, 1921, 426–28; For more information on Pickens, see his autobiographies: The Heir of Slaves: An Autobiography (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1911), and Bursting Bonds: An Autobiography of a “New Negro” (1923; reprint, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).

6. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2015); Pickens, “American Congo.”

7. Michaeline A. Crichlow, Patricia Northover, and Juan Giusti-Cordero, eds. Race and Rurality in the Global Economy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018); Frank Uekötter,, ed., Comparing Apples, Oranges, and Cotton: Environmental Histories of the Global Plantation (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 2014).

8. Pickens, “American Congo,” 426. The historiography on sharecropping, tenancy, and debt peonage is extensive. A good beginning would consist of the following: Pete Daniel, Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901–1969 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972); Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Leon Litwack, Been in a Storm so Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979); and Harold Woodman, New South, New Law: The Legal Foundations of Credit and Labor Relations in the Postbellum Agricultural South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995).

9. For the decrease in the Black population in Phillips County and the increase in the Black population in Mississippi County between 1920 and 1930, see Valerie J. Farris, “After the Storm: Race Relations in Phillips County Arkansas after 1919” (honors thesis, University of Arkansas, 2006), 29, in possession of author.

10. Arkansas Democrat, January 26, 1921, 9.

11. W. David Baird, “Thomas Chipman McRae, 1921–1925,” in The Governors of Arkansas: Essays in Political Biography, Timothy P. Donovan, Willard B. Gatewood Jr., and Jeannie M. Whayne, eds. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1995), 157–64; Derek Allen Clements, “Thomas Chipman McRae,” CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, accessed August 3, 2017, http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=114. For correspondence involving Knollenberg, the NAACP, and the two governors, see Hill, Beyond the Rope. See also Papers of the NAACP, Part 7, The Anti-Lynching Campaign, 1912–1955, Series A: Anti-Lynching Investigative Files, 1912–1953 (University Publications of America, 1987), and for information specifically having to do with the Lowery Lynching, see Reel 2, Group I, Box C-338 cont., Subject File—Lynching, Mob Violence, and Race Riots cont., Frames 0791 to 0805; and Reel 8, Group 1, Box C-350, Subject File—Lynching—Arkansas cont., Frames 0523 to 0628.

12. Hill, Beyond the Rope, 60.

13. Pickens, “American Congo,” 426; Nancy Snell Griffith, “William Pickens,” CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, accessed August 3, 2017, http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=5891; Pickens, Bursting Bonds.

14. Memphis Press, January 27, 1921, n.p., in “An American Lynching.”

15. Pickens, “American Congo,” 426–27.

16. Pickens, “American Congo,” 420–21. For R. E. L. (Lee) Wilson, see Whayne, Delta Empire. For the reference to Magnolia, Mississippi, see Memphis Press, January 27, 1921. For cotton prices, see Alan M. Omstead and Paul W. Rhode, “Cotton, Cottonseed, Shorn Wool, Tobacco—Acreage Production, Price, and Cotton Stocks, 1790–1999,” in Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present: Millennial Edition, ed. Susan B. Carter et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), table Da755–765, 4–11. Cotton would slightly recover but then sink to new lows at the end of the decade (9.6 cents in 1930, 5.7 cents in 1931, and 6.5 cents in 1932).

17. Pickens, “American Congo,” 427.

18. El Paso Herald, January 26, 1921, 1.

19. Memphis Press, January 26, 1921, in “An American Lynching.”

20. El Paso Herald, January 19, 1921, 4.

21. Will Guzman, Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands: Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon and Black Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015); “Death Takes Well-Known Attorney,” El Paso Times, June 21, 1951; “Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon, Biography,” accessed September 29, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20150912155913/http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~txharris/Bios/NixonDrLawrenceA.htm; and “Lawrence Nixon Advocated the Right to Vote,” African American Registry, accessed September 29, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20170212094647/http://www.aaregistry.org/historic_events/view/lawrence-nixon-advocated-right-vote.

22. For correspondence involving Knollenberg, the NAACP, and the two governors, see Hill, Beyond the Rope.

23. Karlos Hill describes a harried Governor McRae making frantic efforts to convey the orders to the Arkansas officers. Hill concludes that the governor’s request was delivered. Hill, Beyond the Rope, 53–54.

24. Anitra Van Prooyen, “Henry Lowery (Lynching of),” CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, accessed September 4, 2019, https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/henry-lowery-7064/; Memphis Press, January 26, 1921, in “An American Lynching.”

25. Commercial Appeal (Memphis), January 27, 1921, 92.

26. Commercial Appeal, January 28, 1921, 12.

27. For information on the governor’s instructions and their delivery, see Hill, Beyond the Rope, 53–54.

28. Memphis Press, January 26, 1921, in “An American Lynching.”

29. New York Times, January 27, 1921, 1.

30. New York Times, January 27, 1921, 1; Commercial Appeal, January 27, 1921, 2; Memphis News-Scimitar, January 26, 1921 (quotation), in “An American Lynching.”

31. Osceola Times cited in Chicago Defender, February 5, 1921, 1.

32. New York Times, January 27, 1921, 1.

33. Arkansas Gazette, January 27, 1921, 1.

34. Hill argues that Black narratives of lynchings fall into two types: (1) Blacks as victims and (2) Blacks as “exemplars of heroic manhood.” He sees the NAACP’s pamphlet, “An American Lynching,” as falling into the first category. But the facts can be read another way, and certainly Pickens’s essay in The Nation suggested the latter. See Hill, Beyond the Rope, 5, 11; Pickens, “American Congo”; “An American Lynching.”

35. Chicago Defender, February 5, 1921, 1.

36. Arkansas Gazette, January 27, 1921, 1.

37. Osceola Times, January 28, 1921, 1.

38. At one point, the governor complained that he did not send state troops to Mississippi County, because “I can’t get in touch with Sheriff Blackwood of that county, so I wouldn’t know who to send the troops to. I understand that Sheriff Blackwood is at the Peabody hotel in Memphis and I have tried to telephone him there, but they say he is not in his room. What’s the sheriff doing in Memphis? Why isn’t he on the job? It’s the worst outrage in the world to put a man to death without giving him a trial, and the sheriff of that county should be getting busy. He hasn’t called me for assistance.” Blackwood responded, “Nearly every man woman and child in our county wanted the negro lynched. When public sentiment is that way, there isn’t much chance left for the officers.” Memphis Press, January 26, 1921, in “An American Lynching”; New York Times, January 27, 1921, 1.

39. Whayne, Delta Empire, 170–72. It might be supposed that no judge would have had the nerve to issue a warrant for Lee Wilson’s arrest, but Circuit Court Judge R. H. Dudley had stood shoulder to shoulder with Sheriff Blackwood in the hours after Lowery’s lynching to protect the two prisoners held in Blytheville. Indeed, the next day, prior to beginning proceedings in his courtroom, he took the opportunity to address those in the court. He denounced the lynching of Lowery and called for those present to “to declare their position as being either for or against the sanctity and supremacy of law and constituted civil authority.” The situation in the room was tense, “with every ear bent upon hearing the stirring statements of the convincing speaker.” Upon closing his remarks, a local attorney “asked every person present who indorsed the courts stand to rise in approbation. A room-full of stalwart Mississippians arose with alacrity to attest their hearty response to the timely utterances of the gifted jurist”; Commercial Appeal, January 28, 1921, 12.

40. Arkansas Democrat, January 27, 1921, 1.

41. Memphis Press, January 26, 1921, in “An American Lynching.”

42. Commercial Appeal, January 28, 1921, 12

43. Year: 1930; Census Place: Center, Sebastian, Arkansas; Page: 4A; Enumeration District: 0009; FHL microfilm: 2339829. As found in Ancestry.com, 1930 United States Federal Census (online database), Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2002, accessed September 4, 2019, https://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?indiv=1&dbid=6224&h=85823686&tid=&pid=&usePUB=true&_phsrc=tco4&_phstart=successSource.

44. Memphis Press, January 26, 1921, in “An American Lynching.”

45. Memphis Press, January 26, 1921, in “An American Lynching.”

46. Whayne, Delta Empire, 134–35; Kenneth Barnes, “Inspiration from the East: Black Arkansans Look to Japan,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 69 (Autumn 2010): 203. See also Mary Rolinson, Grassroots Garveyism: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in the Rural South, 1920–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

47. Donald Holley, The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They Shaped the Modern South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000).

CHAPTER 5

1. “Mrs. Conner Replies to Recent Attack by Rotary Club Committee,” Arkansas Democrat (Little Rock), July 9, 1922, 5.

2. Ryan Anthony Smith, “Gendered Confines: Women’s Prison Reform in 1920s and 1930s Arkansas” (master’s thesis, Arkansas State University, 2017), 13; Ryan Anthony Smith, “Laura Conner and the Limits of Prison Reform,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 77 (Spring 2018): 52–63; “Mrs. Conner Replies,” 5.

3. “Horton Confident of Vindication, He Says,” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, October 5, 1921, 1.

4. Smith, “Gendered Confines,” 18.

5. Interview with Toressia Dancler McDowell, October 8, 1921, Laura Cornelius Conner Papers Digital Content, Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, Central Arkansas Library System, Little Rock, accessed May 17, 2021, https://arstudies.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15728coll3/id/13947/rec/1.

6. Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 25.

7. Interview with Toressia Dancler McDowell.

8. Smith, “Gendered Confines,” 18; “Mrs. Conner Replies,” 5.

9. “Silence Greets Expose of Tucker Farm Conditions by Woman Board Member,” Arkansas Democrat, August 8, 1921, 1; “Tucker Farm Visited by Grand Jury—All There Are Questioned,” Little Rock Daily News, October 21, 1921, 1.

10. “Mrs. Conner Replies,” 5; Smith, “Laura Conner and the Limits of Prison Reform,” 61–62.

11. Talitha LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 22.

12. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence, 22.

13. Haley, No Mercy Here, 33.

14. Mary Dewees, “The Training of the Delinquent Woman,” in Proceedings of the Annual Congress of the American Prison Association (New York: American Prison Association, 1922), 90.

15. “Pen Population Gains,” Daily Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock), May 8, 1919, 14.

16. Haley, No Mercy Here, 29.

17. Kali Nicole Gross, “Exploring Crime and Violence in Early-Twentieth-Century Black Women’s History,” in Contesting the Archives: Finding Women in the Sources, ed. Nupur Chadhuri, Shelly J. Katz, and Mary Elizabeth Perry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 56.

18. Deborah Gray White, “Mining the Forgotten: Manuscript Sources for Black Women’s History,” Journal of American History 74 (June 1987): 237.

19. Cherisse Jones-Branch, “Women and the 1919 Elaine Massacre,” in The Elaine Massacre and Arkansas: A Century of Atrocity and Resistance, 1819–1919, ed. Guy Lancaster (Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2018), 183, 184–85.

20. Cheryl Hicks, Talk With You Like A Woman: Justice and Reform in New York, 1890–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 126.

21. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence, 14.

22. “Pearline Moss,” Arkansas Democrat, September 8, 1922, 4.

23. “Two Negro Women Break into the Holdup Game,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, November 15, 1919, 9.

24. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 213.

25. “Attempt to Burn Home Thwarted,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, October 9, 1921, 1.

26. “Negro Women Attempt to Set Fire to Home,” Arkansas Democrat, October 9, 1921, 8.

27. Mary Ellen Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama 1865–1900 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 113.

28. “Negro Women Still at Large,” Arkansas Democrat, March 31, 1919, 5.

29. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross, A Black Women’s History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2020), 132.

30. “Negro Woman Jailed,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, March 6, 1920, 18.

31. “Negro Women Are Held on Charge of Transporting,” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, May 15, 1921, 3.

32. Sharon Harley, “ ‘Working for Nothing but for a Living’: Black Women in the Underground Economy,” in Sister Circle: Black Women and Work, ed. Sharon Harley (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 50–51.

33. “Negro to Serve Year on Roads,” Arkansas Democrat, December 6, 1922, 4.

34. “Alberta Forrest, Negro Girl Charged,” Arkansas Democrat, November 12, 1922, 6.

35. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 242–43.

36. “Vagrancy Is Charged,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, February 9, 1921, 8.

37. “Fine Negro Women $50.00 and Costs,” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, May 14, 1919, 3.

38. “Seems Winner Was the Loser in This Battle,” Arkansas Gazette, May 27, 1920, 2. For other arrests of Black women on charges of “disturbing the peace,” see “Six Arrests Made,” Arkansas Gazette, April 5, 1920, 10; “Many Arrests Made,” Arkansas Gazette, May 7, 1920, 16.

39. “Negro Girl Held for Man’s Death,” Arkansas Democrat, June 22, 1920, 8.

40. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence, 41.

41. “Negro Women Fight,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, November 2, 1920, 8.

42. “Arrests of Five Follow Robberies,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, August 14, 1921, 5.

43. “Negro Women Administer Severe Beating to Negro Wife Deserter,” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, June 24, 1921, 3.

44. “Timber Worker Held on Negro Girl’s Charge,” Arkansas Democrat, June 7, 1922, 5.

45. “Around the City,” Arkansas Democrat, December 1, 1922, 7.

46. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 28.

47. “Municipal Court Is Pervaded with Christmas Spirit,” Arkansas Democrat, December 24, 1922, 1.

48. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 256.

49. “Soldiers Charged With Hold Ups Held,” Little Rock Daily News, February 8, 1921, 8.

50. Berry and Gross, Black Women’s History of the United States, 131.

51. “Around the City,” Arkansas Democrat, June 3, 1920, 12.

52. “Around the City,” Arkansas Democrat, January 31, 1921, 6.

53. “Walls May Be Made Venereal Hospital Now,” Little Rock Daily News, February 16, 1921, 8; LeFlouria, Chained in Silence, 48–49.

54. Susan K. Cahn, Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 46–47.

55. Cahn, Sexual Reckonings, 46.

56. “Around the City,” Arkansas Democrat, December 8, 1922, 11; “Undertaker Is Sued for $5000 Damages,” Little Rock Daily News, September 16, 1921, 8.

57. Cherisse Jones-Branch, “The Arkansas Association of Colored Women and Early Twentieth-Century Maternalist Political Activism,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 79 (Autumn 2020): 218–30.

58. “Farm Sentence for Negro Girl,” Arkansas Democrat, June 22, 1922, 8.

59. “And the Chief Is Happy, His ‘Pet Revolver” Returns Home,” Arkansas Democrat, July 25, 1921, 10.

60. “Baptist Women Ask New Rights,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, April 8, 1922, 4; “Contract Let for New Building at Industrial School,” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, May 7, 1922, 1; “Senate Completes Warren Aid Bill: Budge Group Favors Raising Some Appropriations, Hope Star, January 21, 1949, 1.

61. Gross, “Exploring Crime and Violence,” 67.

CHAPTER 6

1. “Flood, 1927 Mississippi River,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, eds. Ted Ownby and Charles Reagan Wilson (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 438; Stephen Ambrose, “Man vs. Nature: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927,” National Geographic Magazine, May 2001, accessed April 2, 2020, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2001/05/mississippi-river-flood-culture/ (first quotation); John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 201 (second quotation).

2. Walter White to Herbert Hoover, June 14, 1927, box I, C-380, folder 17, 2, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Records, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter “NAACP Records”).

3. Roy Wilkins with Tom Mathews, Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 126. Wilkins assumed the executive secretary position upon Walter White’s death in 1955. See Wilkins with Mathews, Standing Fast, 219–20.

4. Wilkins with Mathews, Standing Fast, 126–27.

5. Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981).

6. Jim Barnett and H. Clark Burkett, “The Forks of the Road Slave Market at Natchez,” accessed September 29, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20210914192809/http://mshistorynow.mdah.state.ms.us/articles/47/the-forks-of-the-road-slave-market-at-natchez (all quotations).

7. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935), 30 (first quotation), 432 (second quotation), 449 (third quotation), 696 (fourth quotation).

8. Daily Clarion-Ledger, September 26, 1890, 2.

9. Neil McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 123.

10. Robyn Spencer, “Contested Terrain: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 and the Struggle to Control Black Labor,” Journal of Negro History 79 (Spring 1994): 170. See also Barry, Rising Tide; Richard M. Mizelle Jr., “Black Levee Camp Workers, the NAACP, and the Mississippi Flood Control Project, 1927–1933,” Journal of African American History 98 (Fall 2013): 513–15.

11. “Death and Famine Grip Delta Section as Surging Rivers Take Frightful Toll,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 7, 1927, 8.

12. Myles McMurchy, “ ‘The Red Cross Is Not All Right’: Herbert Hoover’s Concentration Camp Cover-Up in the 1927 Mississippi Flood,” Yale Historical Review 5 (Fall 2015): 88.

13. “Conscript Labor Gangs Keep Flood Refugees in Legal Bondage, Claimed,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 14, 1927, 1.

14. “Conscript Labor Gangs,” 8 (all quotations). See also Walter White, “The Negro and the Flood,” box I, C-380, folder 16, 6–8, NAACP Records.

15. White, “The Negro and the Flood,” 11. For examples of the brutalities African Americans suffered, see Barry, Rising Tide, 315–16.

16. J. Winston Harrington, “Deny Food to Flood Victims in Mississippi,” Chicago Defender, June 4, 1927, 1.

17. “Confidential Statement of Observations Made in Mississippi Delta: Conditions Affecting Laborers on Government Projects,” Investigation # 1, December, 1932, box I, C-381, folder 3, 2–3, NAACP Records.

18. William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1941), 251 (first quotation); J. Winston Harrington, “Work or Go Hungry Edict Perils Race: Flood Victims Driven by Labor Bosses,” Chicago Defender, June 11, 1927, 1 (second quotation).

19. Harrington, “Deny Food to Flood Victims in Mississippi,” 1 (first through fifth quotations); Percy, Lanterns on the Levee, 253 (sixth and seventh quotations); Spencer, “Contested Terrain,” 174.

20. J. Winston Harrington, “Deny Food and Clothing to Refugees in Mississippi,” Chicago Defender, June 4, 1927, 2.

21. J. Winston Harrington, “Flood Refugee Shot to Death: ‘Work or Die’ Edict Again Perils Race,” Chicago Defender, July 23, 1927, 1 (first, fourth, fifth, and sixth quotations); Barry, Rising Tides, 332 (second and third quotations). See also Percy, Lanterns on the Levee, 266–68.

22. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “Flood Refugees Are Held as Slaves in Mississippi Camp,” Chicago Defender, July 30, 1927, A11; “John Jones” was an alias Wells-Barnett used to protect his identity.

23. Wells-Barnett, “Flood Refugees Are Held.”

24. Walter White to Herbert Hoover, June 14, 1927, 1, box I, C-380, folder 17, NAACP Records. See also Walter Wilson, “Storms and Floods Help Uncover Peonage: Writer Tells How Act of God Reveal Slavery in America’s Dixieland,” Chicago Defender, May 6, 1933, 10.

25. J. Winston Harrington, “Use Troops In Flood Area to Imprison Farm Hands: Refugees Herded Like Cattle to Stop Escape from Peonage,” Chicago Defender, May 7, 1927, 1.

26. Spencer, “Contested Terrain,” 171.

27. Harrington, “Use Troops In Flood Area,” p. 2.

28. Barry, Rising Tide, 313–14. See also Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, “Mississippi Delta Planters and Debates over Mechanization, Labor, and Civil Rights in the 1940s,” Journal of Southern History 60 (May 1994): 264.

29. White, “The Negro and the Flood,” 5 (quotation); White to Hoover, 1–2. See also Wilson, “Storms and Floods Help Uncover Peonage.”

30. John L. Spivak, “Shady Business in the Red Cross,” American Mercury 33 (November 1934): 273. See also “Red Cross Exposed by Writer as Greatest Aide to Dixie Peonage,” Chicago Defender (National Edition), November 24, 1934, 10.

31. White, “The Negro and the Flood,” 5–6.

32. The Final Report of the Colored Advisory Commission, Mississippi Valley Flood Disaster, 1927, NAACP Peonage, Labor, and New Deal Files: Mississippi Flood Control Folder, October 1, 1927–December 31, 1927, Papers of the NAACP, Part 10: Peonage, Labor and New Deal, 1913–1939, online folder number 001418-013-0611, Library of Congress, NAACP Records, 11 (all quotations); Spencer, “Contested Terrain,” 171.

33. “Vicksburg: A Victory for the South,” p. 7. (quotations), 3–4, box I, C-380, folder 18, NAACP Records, 7; White to Hoover, 1–2. See also White, “The Negro and the Flood,” 9–10.

34. White to Hoover, 1 (quotation); “Vicksburg: A Victory for the South,” 3–4.

35. Walter White, “In the Flood District,” Chicago Defender, July 2, 1927, A1 (quotation).

36. Matthew T. Pearcy, “After the Flood: A History of the 1928 Flood Control Act,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 95 (Summer 2002): 176.

37. “Text of Coolidge’s Message Giving His Views on the Needs of the Nation,” New York Times, December 7, 1927, 24.

38. “Laud and Criticize Coolidge Message: Senators and Representatives from Mississippi Valley Caustic in Comment,” New York Times, December 7, 1927, 25 (quotation); Karen M. O’Neill, Rivers by Design: State Power and the Origins of U.S. Flood Control (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 146. See also Pearcy, “After the Flood,” 190.

39. Walter White to Bishop John Hurst, July 18, 1928, 1–2, NAACP Administrative File, January–July 22, 1928, Papers of the NAACP, Part 02: 1919–1939, Personal Correspondence of Selected NAACP Officials, July 25, 1928–August 3, 1928, online folder number 001469-011-0107, NAACP Records.

40. Walter White to Morefield Storey, July 22, 1928, 1, Papers of the NAACP, Part 02: 1919–1939, NAACP Records.

41. White to Storey, 1–2 (quotation). However, Smith did not sign the “pro-Negro statement,” a decision he would later regret. See Robert A. Slayton, Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith (New York: Free Press, 2001), 286, and Walter White, A Man Called White, 99–101.

42. American Federation of Labor Report, December 5, 1931, 1, 3, box I, C-380-A, folder 1, NAACP Records.

43. Wilkins with Mathews, Standing Fast, 119; Roy Wilkins, “Mississippi Slavery in 1933,” The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races (April 1933): 82. For a timeline of events occurring as a result of Boardman’s investigation, see “Investigation of Labor Camps in Federal Flood Control Operations,” September 30, 1932, box I, C-380-A, folder 4, 1–4, NAACP Records.

44. NAACP, “Investigation of Labor Camps in Federal Flood Control Operations,” August 1932, Helen Boardman Report, 1, 6, 8 (quotations), box I, C-380-A, folder 1, NAACP Records.

45. For examples of such letters, see box I, C-380-A, folders 1 and 2, NAACP Records. See also NAACP, “Investigation of Labor Camps Along the Mississippi Flood Control Project,” box I, C-380-A, folder 4, NAACP Records.

46. Robert F. Wagner to Walter White (all quotations), September 10, 1932, box I, C-380-A, folder 4, NAACP Records. Wagner acknowledged in his letter that if the accounts were true, “every method of correction, whether legislative of administrative, must be employed.” However, if what was described did not in fact exist, then the public was “entitled to receive that assurance” as well. For newspaper accounts regarding Black labor exploitation and Sen. Robert F. Wagner’s promise to put forth a resolution and call for an investigation, see box I, C-381, folder 5, NAACP Records. See also NAACP Press Release, “Wagner Promises Negroes Resolution for Senate Probe of Mississippi Project,” box I, C-380-A, folder 4, NAACP Records.

47. Wilkins with Mathews, Standing Fast, 119 (quotations), 121. See also Mizelle, “Black Levee Camp Workers,” 524.

48. Wilkins, “Mississippi Slavery in 1933,” 82.

49. Wilkins, “Mississippi Slavery in 1933,” 82.

50. Wilkins, “Mississippi Slavery in 1933,” 82 (first and third quotations); “Confidential Statement of Observations Made in Mississippi Delta: Conditions Affecting Laborers on Government Projects,” Investigation #2, December 1932, 1–2, box I, C-381, folder 3, NAACP Records (second quotation).

51. Newspaper clipping, Denver Rocky Mountain News, November 1, 1932, Mississippi Flood Control Project, NAACP Peonage, Labor, and New Deal Files: Mississippi Flood Control News Clippings, September 24–December 23, 1932, online folder number 001418-014-0535, Papers of the NAACP, Part 10: Peonage, Labor, and the New Deal, 1913–1939 (quotation).

52. General Brown sent a scathing letter to Walter White, then NAACP executive secretary, challenging the accuracy of the reports as well as the legitimacy of the investigator. In response, White defended the investigation and suggested Brown’s willingness to overlook what was happening to Negroes may be linked to the fact that he was “a native of Nashville, Tennessee.” Lytle Brown to Walter White, August 25, 1932, and White to Brown, August 29, 1932, 3, box I, C-380-A, folder 2, NAACP Records (quotation).

53. Wilkins, “Mississippi Slavery in 1933,” 82 (quotation).

54. “Charge Gen. Pillsbury Misrepresents Testimony on Mississippi Peonage: Negro Aid Reports War Dept. Plan to Whitewash by Alleging ‘Insufficient Details,’” undated press release, box I, C-380-A, folder 5, NAACP Records (quotation).

55. Wilkins, “Mississippi Slavery in 1933,” 82 (all quotations).

56. “Levy Camp Workers Get More Pay: War Department Head Makes Announcement,” Chicago Defender, October 14, 1933, 3.

57. For additional discussions of legislative economic changes and the continued financial issues levee workers faced afterward, see Mizelle, “Black Levee Camp Workers,” 525–26.

58. Walter White, A Man Called White, 104 (quotation).

59. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Hoover: Du Bois Takes Pointed Issue with President: Here They Are—In Which One Do You Believe,” Pittsburgh Courier, October 29, 1932, A1, 8 (quotation).

60. White, A Man Called White, 139 (quotation).

61. Franklin Roosevelt, “Presidential Nomination Address,” July 2, 1932 (first and second quotations) and “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1933 (third quotation), Pepperdine School of Public Policy, accessed May 1, 2020, https://publicpolicy.pepperdine.edu/academics/research/faculty-research/new-deal/roosevelt-speeches/.

62. “Levee Camp Workers to Get Higher Pay, Shorter Hours: Payroll Rise of $75,000 Weekly,” Pittsburgh Courier, October 14, 1933, A1.

63. Lewis Caldwell Jr., “What the NRA Is Doing to the Race! ‘New Deal’ Rapidly Becoming ‘Raw Deal’ for Dark Americans, Say Experts Who Have Checked on Recent Developments,” Chicago Defender, May 26, 1934, 10.

64. Wilkins with Mathews, Standing Fast, 127–28.

65. “An Oral History with Mr. & Mrs. Charlie Smith,” transcript of an oral history conducted in 1976 by Dr. Orley Caudill, USM Special Collections, University of Southern Mississippi, 1976, 51 (quotation).

CHAPTER 7

1. Ernest Valachovic, “New Subjects for King Cotton,” Arkansas Gazette Sunday Magazine, July 14, 1957, 1.

2. Ethel Dawson to Don F. Pielstick, November 27, 1951, Pielstick to Dawson, December 4, 1951, record group 7, box 8, folder 9, National Council of Churches of Christ, Division of Home Missions Papers, 1950–1964 (hereafter “Division of Home Mission Papers”), Presbyterian Historical Society Archive, Philadelphia, PA. Lincoln County is just south of the city of Pine Bluff. Only part of Lincoln County—the area running along the Arkansas River—is in the Delta and home to large cotton operations. The rest of the county is in the Gulf Coast Plain and had mixed agricultural—mostly corn, soybeans, hogs, and cattle—in the 1950s. “Lincoln County Agricultural Program, 1954: A Report of the Lincoln County Agricultural Planning Committee” (pamphlet) in box 2, folder “Lincoln County,” Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service Records, Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville.

3. Between 1950 and 1960, Lincoln County’s “non-white” population fell by 22.8 percent from 9,089 to 7,017, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. This led to Lincoln County having a white majority for the first time in the twentieth century. In 1950, 53.3 percent of Lincoln County was “non-white” and 46.7 percent white. Ten years later, whites constituted 51.4 percent of the population and “non-whites” 48.6 percent. Overall, the county’s population dropped by 15.4 percent from 17,079 to 14,447. U.S. Census Bureau, Census of Population and Housing, 1950, accessed May 19, 2021, https://www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html; U.S. Census Bureau, Census of Housing and Population, 1960, accessed May 19, 2021, https://www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html.

4. This work is informed by Greta de Jong’s You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). de Jong details efforts in Mississippi and Louisiana during the 1960s and 1970s to push out Black laborers made jobless by mechanization and empowered by the legal successes of the Civil Rights Movement. Like those in Lincoln County, the white leaders in these areas undermined federal antipoverty programs that would have helped the Black workers remain on the land they considered to be home.

5. Mrs. D. A. Wooten to J. William Fulbright, July 8, 1956, BCN 18, folder 47, J. William Fulbright Papers, Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville.

6. Julie M. Weise, “Braceros and Jim Crow in Arkansas,” in ¿Que Fronteras? Mexican Braceros and a Re-examination of the Legacy of Migration, ed. Paul Lopez (Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2010), 197–213 (republished as Julie M. Weise, “The Bracero Program: Mexican Workers in the Delta, 1948–1964,” in Race and Ethnicity in Arkansas: New Perspectives, ed. John A. Kirk [Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2014], 125–40); Julie M. Weise, Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 83–117 (second quotation, 91–92; third quotation, 92). See also J. Justin Castro, “Mexican Braceros and Arkansas Cotton: Agricultural Labor and Civil Rights in the Post-War War II South,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 75 (Spring 2016): 27–46.

7. Weise, “Braceros and Jim Crow in Arkansas,” 198 (first quotation); Weise, Corazón de Dixie, 91 (second quotation), 92 (third quotation). The unnamed Lincoln County resident whose testimony Weise dismisses is George Stith, a former Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union activist then working for the National Farm Labor Union (AFL). It appears that Weise did not read Stith’s entire testimony, though. The citation is to a secondary source—Jeannie Whayne’s A New Plantation South—that actually contradicts Weise’s larger point, with Whayne arguing that significant numbers of African Americans in the Arkansas Delta fought hard to remain on the land even in the face of Jim Crow, mechanization, and opportunities offered in urban areas. “Statement of George Stith, Gould, Ark., Agricultural Worker, Cotton Plantation,” in Migratory Labor, Hearings before the [Senate] Subcommittee on Labor and Labor-Management Relations, United States Senate, 82nd Congress (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1952), 226–29; Weise, Corazón de Dixie, 259n57; Jeannie M. Whayne, A New Plantation South: Land, Labor, and Federal Favor in Twentieth-Century Arkansas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 226. On Stith and his centrality to the struggles of workers in the Delta, see Bud Schultz and Ruth Schultz, The Price of Dissent: Testimonies to Political Repression in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 25–33; “The Great Depression: Episode 5, Mean Things Happening,” videorecording (Alexandria, VA: PBS Video, 1993).

8. “Church Leaders Discuss Basis For Making Brotherhood Work,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 26, 1947, 12 (first quotation); Mrs. O. G. Dawson interview with Pine Bluff Women’s Center, no date [1976], box 2, tape 6, Pine Bluff Women’s Center Records, Special Collections, University of Central Arkansas Library, Conway (second quotation); “Fear Barrier to Brotherhood, Church Leaders Told,” Baltimore Afro-American, April 26, 1947, 7. Dawson was born Ethel Bernice Ross in 1907. She married Oscar G. Dawson, who worked in Pine Bluff for the Missouri Pacific Railroad, in 1933. The couple did not have children. Cherisse Jones-Branch, Better Living by Their Bootstraps: Black Women’s Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1914–1965 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2021), 119–29. On the ability of Black women in Lincoln County to stand up to powerful planters in ways that would be dangerous to Black men, see Ozell Sutton interviewed by Alice Bernstein, November 15, 2005, The Force of Ethics in Civil Rights Oral History Project, accessed February 10, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P97lXb1Mk4.

9. Valachovic, “New Subjects for King Cotton,” p. 1; J. William Fulbright to Mrs. D. A. Wooten, July 13, 1956, BCN 18, folder 47, Fulbright Papers. On Fulbright’s dependence on Delta planters for votes, see Michael Pierce, “How to Win a Seat in the U.S. Senate: Carl Bailey to Bill Fulbright, October 20, 1943,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 76 (Winter 2017): 334–61.

10. Ethel Dawson to Don F. Pielstick, November 27, 1951 (first and third quotations), Ethel Dawson to Don F. Pielstick, December 3, 1951, Ethel Dawson to Pielstick, January 20, 1951, record group 7, box 8, folder 9, Division of Home Missions Papers; Dawson interview with Pine Bluff Women’s Center (second quotation). For a first-person account of a Lincoln County sharecropper, see Vic Carter, “From Yonder to Here”: A Memoir of Dr. Ozell Sutton (n.p.: Lee-Com Media, 2008), 9–30.

11. Ethel Dawson to Don F. Pielstick, November 27, 1951, Ethel Dawson to Don F. Pielstick, October 4, 1952, record group 7, box 8, folder 9, Division of Home Missions Papers.

12. Dawson, “Report of the Town and Country Church Rural Life Improvement Institute, Gould, Arkansas, May 7–8, 1954,” pp. 8, 14 (quotation), record group 7, box 8, folder 9, Division of Home Missions Papers.

13. “Lincoln County Agricultural Program, 1954,” 2, 3–4 (quotation); “From Mule to Machine . . . in Cotton,” Pine Bluff Commercial Farm Life (monthly magazine), June 1955, 3; “Lincoln Farmers to Use Federal Classing Program,” Pine Bluff Commercial, July 17, 1955, 15; “Cotton in Lincoln County Averaged High Grade in ’54,” Pine Bluff Commercial, January 16, 1955, 18. Some Lincoln County cotton operations were fully mechanized by 1950, and a state report concluded that the labor needs on such plantations were just 5 percent of non-mechanized operations: “One man in this type of operation does as much and accomplishes as much as twenty men could formerly accomplish”; Donald Holley, The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They Shaped the Modern South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000), 136–39; “Statement of the Arkansas State Department of Public Welfare of Substantiating Reasons for Surplus-Commodities-Only Program in Arkansas,” December 20, 1956, series 9, subseries 1, box 334, folder 5, Orval Eugene Faubus Papers, Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville.

14. “Lincoln County Agricultural Program, 1954,” 15; “1955 Agricultural Statistics for Arkansas” (Little Rock: Agricultural Marketing Service USDA, 1956), 19. The federally enforced reduction in cotton acreage made it difficult for Lincoln County’s African American workers to pick up extra money on the side. Before the reduction, it was a common practice for day laborers to cultivate cotton on vacant lots and fields and take it to the gin at the end of the season. But the new regulations prevented ginners from accepting such cotton, and domestic workers lost an important source of income. Dawson, “Report of the Town and Country Church Rural Life Improvement Institute, Gould, Arkansas, May 7–8, 1954,” record group 7, box 8, folder 9, Division of Home Missions Papers.

15. “From Mule to Machine . . . in Cotton,” 3; “Lincoln Farmers to Use Federal Classing Program”; “Lincoln County Agricultural Program, 1954.”

16. Donald Holley, “Leaving the Land of Opportunity: Arkansas and the Great Migration,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 64 (Autumn 2005): 245–61.

17. C. A. Vines to Elveria Heard, February 8, 1957, box 8, folder 3, Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service Records.

18. Charles S. Aiken, The Cotton Plantation South, since the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 131; Richard H. Day, “The Economics of Technological Change and the Demise of the Sharecropper,” American Economic Review 57 (June 1957): 427–49. Gavin Wright endorses Day’s findings in Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 241–49.

19. “Statement of George Stith, Gould, Ark.,” 226–29; Victor K. Ray, “The Hungry People II—Who’s the Villain in Cotton Country? The Mexican, the Machine or Dirt,” Arkansas Gazette, February 15, 1954, 1–2. See also Victor K. Ray, “The Hungry People I—It’s Hard Times for Only a Few Folk but for Them It’s Awfully Hard Times,” Arkansas Gazette, February 14, 1954, 1–2.

20. Weise, Corazón de Dixie, 111; Ray, “The Hungry People II”; “Statement of the Arkansas State Department of Public Welfare.”

21. Dawson interview with Pine Bluff Women’s Center; “Statement of Farish R. Betton, St. Louis, Mo., First Vice President, National Farm Labor Union, AFL,” in Migratory Labor Hearings of the Subcommittee on Labor and Labor-Management Relations, 231–33; Day, “The Economics of Technological Change.” For an account of how Lincoln County’s largest landowner controlled the daily lives of Black sharecroppers and how one Black family sought autonomy by becoming day laborers, see Ozell Sutton interviewed by Alice Bernstein, The Force of Ethics in Civil Rights Oral History Project.

22. Wiley A. Branton interviewed by James Mosby, January 16, 1967, Civil Rights Documentation Project, Ralph Bunche Oral History Collection, Howard University, Washington, DC, copy in box 9, folder 14, Southern Regional Council—“Will the Circle Be Unbroken” Program Files, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, GA. On planters “voting” their sharecroppers, see V. O. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Knopf, 1949), 196–97, 203. On Black voting in 1946 in Little Rock and Hot Springs, see “Nation Focuses Attention on Arkansas Voting: Labor Issue and Negro Balloting Closely Watched,” Arkansas Democrat, July 28, 1946, 1–2.

23. Dawson interview with Pine Bluff Women’s Center (first quotation), “The Progressive Women Voters Association of Lincoln County,” flier, n.d. [1953], “News of Christianity at Work” (newsletter written by Dawson), April 6, 1955 (second quotation); Ethel Dawson to My Dear Friend (circular letter), May 11, 1955, record group 7, box 8, folder 9, Division of Home Missions Papers.

24. “Statement of George Stith, Gould, Ark.,” 227. For 1954 wages for Lincoln County pickers, see Mexican Farm Labor Program. Hearings before the Subcommittee on Equipment, Supplies, and Manpower of the Committee on Agriculture, House of Representatives, 1955, 84th Cong., 1st sess., 19. For drop in wages paid during chopping season, see “Statement of H. L. Mitchell, President, National Agricultural Workers Union, AFL-CIO,” Farm Labor. Hearings before the Subcommittee on Equipment, Supplies, and Manpower of the Committee on Agriculture. 1958, 85th Cong. 2nd sess. On Lincoln County’s per capita income, see “Statement of the Arkansas State Department of Public Welfare.” For national per capita income, see “Income of Persons in the United States,” Current Population Reports series p-60, no. 16 (May 1955): 11, accessed February 14, 2020, https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/1955/demographics/p60-16.pdf.

25. “Human Interest Story” [December 2, 1953] (first quotation), record group 7, box 8, folder 9, National Council of Churches of Christ, Division of Home Missions Papers, 1950–1964; Glenn E. Garrett et al., Mexican Labor Program Consultants Report (Washington, DC: Department of Labor, 1959), 4 (second quotation).

26. Dawson, “Report of the Town and Country Church Rural Life Improvement Institute, Gould, Arkansas, May 7–8, 1954,” 14; Ben F. Johnson III, Arkansas in Modern America, since 1930 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2019), 111.

27. Louisa Shotwell to Don F. Pielstick and Dr. Nace, May 11, 1951, Don F. Pielstick to Ethel Dawson, November 19, 1951, record group 7, box 8, folder 9, Division of Home Missions Papers.

28. Ethel Dawson to Don Pielstick, November 24, 1951, record group 7, box 8, folder 9, Division of Home Missions Papers. For an analysis of how work to improve “race relations” undermines efforts to promote justice and equality, see Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (New York: Verso, 2012).

29. Don F. Pielstick to Ethel Dawson, November 19, 1951; Don F. Pielstick to Ethel Dawson, May 3, 1951, record group 7, box 8, folder 9, Division of Home Missions Papers.

30. Ethel Dawson to Don F. Pielstick, May 11, 1955, Don F. Pielstick to Ethel Dawson, November 19, 1951; Don F. Pielstick to Ethel Dawson, May 19, 1955, record group 7, box 8, folder 9, Division of Home Mission Papers; Ethel Dawson to Philip Weightman, March 3, 1955, box 1, folder 5, Philip Weightman Papers, Tamiment Library, New York University, New York. On Weightman’s activities in Arkansas, see “CIO Maps Plans for 100,000 More Voters for Arkansas at Two-Day Meeting,” Arkansas State Press, January 21, 1955, 1; Michael Pierce, “Odell Smith, Teamsters Local 878, and Civil Rights Unionism in Little Rock, 1943–1965,” Journal of Southern History 84 (November 2018): 938. On Weightman, see Rick Halpern and Roger Horowitz, Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality (Boston: Monthly Review Press, 1999), 30–41.

31. Philip Weightman to Ethel Dawson, June 3, 1955, Ethel Dawson to Philip Weightman, June 8, 1955, box 1, folder 5, Weightman Papers; Ethel Dawson to Don F. Pielstick, May 11, 1955, Ethel Dawson to My Dear Friend (circular letter), May 11, 1955, record group 7, box 8, folder 9, Division of Home Missions Papers.

32. “Paul F. Sifton, 74, Ex-Lobbyist, Reuther Aide and Writer, Dead,” New York Times, April 7, 1972, 39; “Anna Douglas Rejoins Staff Nat’l CP FEPC,” Arkansas State Press, October 17, 1947, 1.

33. “Statement of Paul Sifton, National Legislative Representative, UAW, CIO,” in Migratory Labor, Hearings before the [Senate] Subcommittee on Labor and Labor-Management Relations, 408–9.

34. Paul Sifton to Roy L. Reuther, May 24, 1955, box 23, folder 20, United Automobile Workers Political Action Department, Roy L. Reuther Files (hereafter “Roy Reuther Files”), Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI; Roy L. Reuther to Emil Mazey, June 10, 1955, box 7, folder 28, Roy Reuther Files; Roy L. Reuther to William Kimberling, June 24, 1955, box 1, folder 6, Weightman Papers.

35. Philip Weightman to Ethel Dawson, June 3, 1955, box 1, folder 5, Weightman Papers; Mrs. D. A. Wooten to J. William Fulbright, July 8, 1956; J. William Fulbright to Mrs. D. A. Wooten, July 13, 1956.

36. Paul Sifton to Roy L. Reuther, May 24, 1955, Paul Sifton to Robert Oliver, June 14, 1955, box 23, folder 20, Roy Reuther Files; Paul Sifton to Ethel Dawson, June 20, 1955, box 23, folder 21, Roy Reuther Files; “Extension of Mexican Labor Act,” Congressional Record, July 6, 1955, 84th Cong., 1st sess., vol. 101, part 8, 10006–24 (quotation p. 10015); Ellis Hawley, “The Politics of the Mexican Labor Issue,” Agricultural History 40 (July 1966): 157–76, see esp. 161; Castro, “Mexican Labor and Arkansas Cotton,” 41–42. Significant changes to the bracero program would not come until 1963, when a Democratic administration much more sympathetic to the labor movement negotiated with Congress the end of the program the following year.

37. Paul Sifton to Roy L. Reuther, June 20, 1955, box 23, folder 21, Roy Reuther Files; Reuther to Kimberling, June 24, 1955. On Faubus crediting the CIO for his victory, see “Governor Calls for Decent Wage,” Arkansas Democrat, January 15, 1955, 1.

38. J. L. Bland to Orval E. Faubus, September 28, 1955 (quotation), Orval E. Faubus to J. L. Bland, October 7, 1955, Louie Hoffman to J. L. Bland, September 27, 1955, series 7, subseries 2, box 209, folder 1, Faubus Papers; “New Subjects for King Cotton.”

39. Ethel Dawson to Paul Sifton, June 8, 1955 (quotation), folder 21, box 23, Roy Reuther Files; “$15,000 to Display Hogs; Naught to Feed Humans Reported from Lincoln County,” Arkansas State Press, July 22, 1955, 1; Carl Adams to Orval E. Faubus, August 8, 1955, series 9, subseries 1, box 333, folder 8, Faubus Papers.

40. Philip Weightman to Ethel Dawson, June 3, 1955, box 1, folder 5, Weightman Papers.

41. Richard O. Comfort to Ethel Dawson, January 9, 1956, record group 7, box 8, folder 9, Division of Home Missions Papers; “Rev. Don Pielstick, Church Official, 48,” New York Times, June 28, 1955, 27; Dawson interview with Pine Bluff Women’s Center; Randy Finley, “Crossing the White Line: SNCC in Three Delta Towns,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 65 (Summer 2006): 127.

42. Olivia A. Draper to Louisa Shotwell, February 4, 1958, Olivia A. Draper to Mrs. Evans, November 29, 1956, record group 7, box 9, folder 5, Division of Home Missions Papers; Helen Kindt to Richard O. Comfort, January 23, 1956, record group 7, box 8, folder 9, Division of Home Missions Papers; “Ministry to Migrants,” record group 7, box 7, folder 21, Division of Home Missions Papers. While the National Council of Churches took steps to make the bracero program operate more efficiently, a group of Catholic bishops demanded the program’s immediate end and the resignation of the U.S. secretary of labor who oversaw it. The Bishops’ Committee for the Spanish Speaking criticized the program for having “supplant[ed] colored workers” across the entire South and insisted the problem was most acute in Arkansas. “Catholic Bishops Urge Secretary of Labor to Resign: Southern Work Trend Criticized,” Baltimore Afro-American, July 12, 1958, 3.

43. Roy Reed, “Amid Hoots, Jeers, Unionist Urges Bracero Wage Raise,” Arkansas Gazette, March 3, 1962, 1–2; “Statement Made by J. Bill Becker before the United States Department of Labor Committee Hearing at West Memphis, Arkansas, in Support of the Proposed Wage Increase for Mexican Nationals under PL78,” in part 2, box 36, folder 36, National Sharecroppers Fund Papers, Reuther Library. Becker led the coalition of trade unionists, African Americans, and urban liberals that abolished the state’s poll tax in 1964 and began to open places like Lincoln County to Black political participation. J. Bill Becker, interview with Jack Bass and Walter De Vries, June 13, 1974 (interview A-0025), 9–10, 13–4, Southern Oral History Project, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

44. Laura Foner, “82% Negro; 100% White,” Justice (Brandeis University), October 26, 1965, clipping in box 1, folder 4, Arkansas SNCC Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison; Laura Foner, “Arkansas SNCC Memories,” in Arsnick: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas, ed. Jennifer Jensen Wallach and John A. Kirk (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2011), 148–54. See also “Excerpts from an Interview with Bob Cableton,” in Wallach and Kirk, Arsnick, 128–31; Finley, “Crossing the White Line,” 116–37.

CHAPTER 8

1. C. D. Wright, One with Others [a little book of her days] (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2010).

2. See James H. Meredith, Three Years in Mississippi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966); William Doyle, An American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962 (New York: Doubleday, 2001); Charles W. Eagles, The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); and Henry T. Gallagher, James Meredith and the Ole Miss Riot: A Soldier’s Story (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012).

3. On Meredith’s March against Fear, see Aram Goudsouzian, Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March against Fear (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).

4. On the Elaine Massacre and its aftermath, see Richard C. Cortner, A Mob Intent on Death: The NAACP and the Arkansas Riot Cases (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1988); Grif Stockley, Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001); and Robert Whitaker, On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice that Remade a Nation (New York: Crown, 2008).

5. Studies of lynching have proliferated. See, for example, Michael Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006); William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Amy Kate Bailey and Stewart E. Tolnay, Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Tameka Bradley Hobbs, Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015); Karlos K. Hill, Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Donald G. Mathews, At the Altar of Lynching: Burning Sam Hose in the American South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

6. Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).

7. Michael R. Belknap, Federal Law and Southern Order: Racial Violence and Constitutional Conflict in the Post-Brown South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 229 (second quotation), 234 (third quotation), 250 (first quotation).

8. Gail Williams O’Brien, The Color of the Law: Race, Violence, and Justice in the Post–World War II South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 1 (quotation). O’Brien sketches out her arguments in the introduction and conclusion.

9. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (March 2005): 1233–63.

10. Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement,” Commentary 39 (February 1965): 25–31.

11. On the “long” Civil Rights Movement in Arkansas, see John A. Kirk, Redefining the Color Line: Black Activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1940–1970 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002).

12. Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement.”

13. On the Red Summer, see, for example, Jan Voogd, Race Riots and Resistance: The Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Peter Lang, 2008); Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (New York: Henry Holt, 2011); and David F. Krugler, 1919, the Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

14. On the Ku Klux Klan nationwide in the 1920s, see Thomas R. Pegram, One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2011). In Arkansas, see Kenneth C. Barnes, The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas: How Protestant White Nationalism Came to Rule a State (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2021).

15. Useful starting points on the New Deal and civil rights include Ralph J. Bunche, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973); Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue: Volume 1: The Depression Decade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); John B. Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era: Liberalism and Race (Knoxville: Tennessee University Press, 1980); Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); and Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

16. Useful starting points on World War II and civil rights include Neil R. McMillen, ed., Remaking Dixie: The Impact of World War II on the American South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997); Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State during World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Charles D. Chamberlin, Victory at Home: Manpower and Race in the American South during World War II (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003); Kevin M. Kruse and Stephen Tuck, eds., Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Kimberley L. Phillips, War! What Is It Good For? Black Freedom Struggles and the U.S. Military from World War II to Iraq (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Paul Alkebulan, The African American Press in World War II: Toward Victory at Home and Abroad (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014); and Christine Knauer, Let Us Fight as Free Men: Black Soldiers and Civil Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).

17. Useful starting points on the intersections of the Cold War, international relations, foreign policy, and civil rights include Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and US Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-Colonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and John Munro, The Anticolonial Front: The African American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization, 1945–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

18. For a discussion on this point, see Grif Stockley and Jeannie M. Whayne, “Federal Troops and the Elaine Massacres: A Colloquy,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 61 (Autumn 2002): 272–83.

19. Belknap, Federal Law and Southern Order, chapter 10.

20. On the events surrounding the 1957 desegregation of Central High School, see, for example, Tony A. Freyer, Little Rock on Trial: Cooper v. Aaron and School Desegregation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007); Elizabeth Jacoway, Turn away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis that Shocked a Nation (New York: Free Press, 2007); and Karen Anderson, Little Rock: Race and Resistance at Central High School (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

21. “WR in Arkansas: The Story of Win Rockefeller’s Campaign for Governor 1966,” 105, in record group IV, box 115, folder 2, Winthrop Rockefeller Collection, Center for Arkansas History and Culture, Bobby L. Roberts Library of History and Art, Little Rock, Arkansas.

22. Winthrop Rockefeller, “Rebel with a Cause,” 1970, 3, unpublished book manuscript, record group IV, box 54, folder 4c, Winthrop Rockefeller Collection.

23. On Winthrop Rockefeller and civil rights see John A. Kirk, “A Southern Road Less Travelled: The 1966 Arkansas Gubernatorial Election and (Winthrop) Rockefeller Republicanism in Dixie,” in Painting Dixie Red: When, Where, Why, and How the South Became Republican, ed. Glenn Feldman (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 172–97.

24. Minister Sukhara A. Yahweh (formerly known as Lance Watson) interview with John A. Kirk, January 16, 2019, Forrest City, Arkansas. Interview in author’s possession. See also Memphis Police Department, “Lance Watson, Criminal Arrest Record,” in record group IV, box 128, folder 9, Winthrop Rockefeller Collection.

25. Yahweh interview. On the Poor People’s Campaign, see Ronald L. Freeman, The Mule Train: A Journey of Hope Remembered (Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, 1998); Hilliard Lawrence Lackey, Marks, Martin and the Mule Train (Jackson: Town Square Books, 1998); and Gerald D. McKnight, The Last Crusade: Martin Luther King Jr., the FBI, and the Poor People’s Campaign (Denver: Westview Press, 1998). On King in Memphis, see Michael K. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).

26. On the background to civil rights struggles in Forrest City, see Michael R. Deaderick, “Racial Conflict in Forrest City: The Trial and Triumph of Moderation in an Arkansas Delta Town,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 69 (Spring 2010): 1–27.

27. Wayne Jordan, “Police, Reporters Outnumber Blacks as March Begins,” Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock), August 21, 1969, 1B; Maurice Moore, “Negroes Step Out on Hike,” Arkansas Democrat (Little Rock), August 20, 1969, 1A, 2A.

28. John Bennett, “ ‘Fear’ March Is Due Today; Brooks Delays Trek by Poor,” Commercial Appeal (Memphis), August 20, 1969, 3A; Moore, “Negroes Step Out on Hike,” 2A; Jordan, “Police, Reporters Outnumber Blacks as March Begins.”

29. Jordan, “Police, Reporters Outnumber Blacks as March Begins”; Moore, “Negroes Step Out on Hike,” 2A.

30. Moore, “Negroes Step Out on Hike,” 2A.

31. Jordan, “Police, Reporters Outnumber Blacks as March Begins.”

32. Moore, “Negroes Step Out on Hike,” 2A; Jordan, “Police, Reporters Outnumber Blacks as March Begins” (quotations).

33. Jordan, “Police, Reporters Outnumber Blacks As March Begins.”

34. The role of the media in the Civil Rights Movement remains a relatively understudied topic. Useful starting points include Allison Graham, Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Brian Ward, ed., Media, Culture, and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2001); Brian Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004); Alan Nadel, Television in Black-and-White America: Race and National Identity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005); Aniko Bodroghkozy, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Darryl Mace, In Remembrance of Emmett Till: Regional Stories and Media Responses to the Black Freedom Struggle (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014); and Gayle Wald, It’s Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).

35. Jordan, “Police, Reporters Outnumber Blacks as March Begins.”

36. Moore, “Negroes Step Out on Hike,” 2A.

37. Maurice Moore, “Tight Security for Walkers,” Arkansas Democrat, August 21, 1969, 1A, 2A.

38. Jordan, “Police, Reporters Outnumber Blacks as March Begins.”

39. Jordan, “Police, Reporters Outnumber Blacks as March Begins.”

40. Maurice Moore, “She Backs Negroes, Loses White Friends,” Arkansas Democrat, August 24, 1969, 1A.

41. Jordan, “Police, Reporters Outnumber Blacks as March Begins.”

42. Jordan, “Police, Reporters Outnumber Blacks as March Begins.”

43. Jordan, “Police, Reporters Outnumber Blacks as March Begins.”

44. Jordan, “Police, Reporters Outnumber Blacks as March Begins.”

45. George Douthit, “Rockefeller Says He Vetoed Plan to Jail Leaders of Walkers,” Arkansas Democrat, August 21, 1969, 1A.

46. Matilda Tuohey, “Hazen Shuts Down; Armed Citizens Block Entry, Mayor Mobilizes, Waits for Watson, 4 Others,” Arkansas Gazette, August 21, 1969, 1B. See also John Bennett, “Arkansas Town Arms, Barricades in Path of ‘March Against Fear,’” Commercial Appeal, August 21, 1969, 3A.

47. Matilda Tuohey, “Hazen Shuts Down.”

48. Wayne Jordan, “Watson, Group Reach Brinkley on ‘Fear Walk,’” Arkansas Gazette, August 22, 1969, 1B (quotations); Moore, “Tight Security for Walkers,” 2A.

49. Moore, “Tight Security for Walkers,” 2A.

50. Jordan, “Watson, Group Reach Brinkley on ‘Fear Walk.’”

51. Moore, “Tight Security for Walkers,” 2A.

52. Jordan, “Watson, Group Reach Brinkley on ‘Fear Walk.’”

53. Jordan, “Watson, Group Reach Brinkley on ‘Fear Walk.’”

54. Jordan, “Watson, Group Reach Brinkley on ‘Fear Walk.’”

55. Maurice Moore, “ ‘Walk against Fear’ Starts at Brinkley about an Hour Late,” Arkansas Democrat, August 22, 1969, 6A.

56. Wayne Jordan, “White Teen-agers at Hazen Flash ‘V’ as Watson Passes,” Arkansas Gazette, August 23, 1969, 3A.

57. John Bennett, “Hazen Mayor Removes Barricades and Guards,” Commercial Appeal, August 22, 1969, 3A; Jordan, “Watson, Group Reach Brinkley on ‘Fear Walk,’” (quotations); “Blacks in Arkansas Conclude 140-mile ‘Walk against Fear,’” New York Times, August 25, 1969, 25A.

58. Maurice Moore, “Watson Says He’d Boycott Hazen Stores,” Arkansas Democrat, August 23, 1969, 2A.

59. Jordan, “White Teen-agers at Hazen Flash ‘V’ as Watson Passes.”

60. John Bennett, “Marchers Find Hazen Relaxed,” Commercial Appeal, August 23, 1969, 3A; Yahweh interview.

61. Jordan, “White Teen-agers at Hazen Flash ‘V’ as Watson Passes”; “Four March in Arkansas; Town Police Threat Ends,” New York Times, August 23, 1969, 33A.

62. John Woodruff, “ ‘Beautiful,’ Says Wine as Walkers Reach NLR Edge,” Arkansas Gazette, August 24, 1969, 2A.

63. Woodruff, “ ‘Beautiful,’ Says Wine as Walkers Reach NLR Edge”; George Douthit, “ ‘March against Fear’ Ends,” Arkansas Democrat, August 25, 1969, 1A.

64. Woodruff, “ ‘Beautiful,’ Says Wine as Walkers Reach NLR Edge,” 2A.

65. “Secret Force Reportedly Keeping Marchers under Constant Watch,” Commercial Appeal, August 24, 3A.

66. Woodruff, “ ‘Beautiful,’ Says Wine as Walkers Reach NLR Edge,” 2A; “Bobby Brown Joins Sweet Willie Wine’s ‘Walk against Fear’,” Arkansas Democrat, August 24, 1A.

67. Woodruff, “ ‘Beautiful,’ Says Wine as Walkers Reach NLR Edge,” 2A.

68. Bob Sallee, “Walk’s Last Leg Draws Onlookers,” Arkansas Democrat, August 25, 1969, 2A.

69. Douthit, “ ‘March against Fear’ Ends.”

70. Mike Trimble and Ernest Dumas, “Capitol Rally Ends ‘Walk’; Brooks, Cooley Criticized,” Arkansas Gazette, August 25, 1A, 2A.

71. Trimble and Dumas, “Capitol Rally Ends ‘Walk,’” 1A; “Blacks in Arkansas Conclude 140-mile ‘Walk against Fear.’”

72. Deaderick, “Racial Conflict in Forrest City,” 16.

73. “Watson, 2 Whites Attacked by Crowd at Forrest City,” Arkansas Gazette, August 27, 1969, 1A; “Beaten Watson Retraces His Steps,” Commercial Appeal, August 28, 1969, 23C.

74. “Guard Seals Off Forrest City Area,” Arkansas Gazette, August 28, 1A; John Bennett, “Guard, State Policemen Clear Downtown Area in Tense Forrest City,” Commercial Appeal, August 28, 1A; Martin Waldron, “Troops Disperse Arkansas Whites,” New York Times, August 28, 1969, 26A.

75. Editorial, “When Patience Snaps,” Arkansas Democrat, August 28, 4A.

76. Martin Waldron, “Whites in Arkansas Town Cry for ‘Law and Order,’” New York Times, August 29, 14A.

77. “Forrest City Crowd Beats Negro Leader,” Arkansas Democrat, August 27, 1A.

78. “Watson Plans Freedom Rally September 14,” Arkansas Gazette, August 31, 1969, 2A.

79. “Watson Agrees to Arrest; Forrest City Rally Quiet,” Arkansas Gazette, September 15, 1969, 1A.

80. Deaderick, “Racial Conflict in Forrest City,” 21–27.

81. Yahweh interview.

CHAPTER 9

1. Freedom Information Service, “Notes on the Condition of the Mississippi Negro—1966,” pp. 1, 3, folder 5, box 1, Freedom Information Service Records, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison.

2. Robert Conn, “MD Finds Children Starving,” Charlotte Observer, June 16, 1967, 1A, 2A.

3. Alex Waites and Rollie Eubanks, “Mississippi: Poverty, Despair—A Way of Life,” Report Prepared for 58th Annual Convention [of the NAACP], July 13, 1967, pp. 4–5, folder “NAACP National Convention, Boston, Mass., July 10–15 [1967],” box 5, Program Records of the Assistant Director for Civil Rights, 1965–68, Office of Civil Rights, Office of Economic Opportunity, Record Group 381, National Archives, College Park, MD.

4. [Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party], “A Statement,” n.d. [ca. 1966], p. 1, item 2, reel 2, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Records, microfilm, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison.

5. Kenneth G. Slocum, “Ballots and Jobs,” Wall Street Journal, May 7, 1965, 1, 18, esp. 18.

6. Joseph Meissner and Steven R. Nelson, “The Mississippi Challenge: Some Questions and Answers,” August 8, 1965, p. 4, item 2, reel 2, MFDP Records.

7. Joseph Brenner et al., “Children in Mississippi: A Report to the Field Foundation,” June 1967, p. 7, encl. in William Ling to Jule Sugarman, memorandum, June 27, 1967, folder “Administrative—Mississippi—1967,” box 16, State Files, 1965–68, Records of the Director, Community Action Program Office, Office of Economic Opportunity, Record Group 381, National Archives, College Park, MD.

8. Testimony of Raymond Wheeler, Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Hunger and Malnutrition in America, 90th Cong., 1st sess., July 11–12, 1967, p. 8.

9. Greta de Jong, You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 34–35, 41–43.

10. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Random House, 1967), 4.

11. Coretta Scott King, “Solidarity Day Address to the Poor People’s Campaign,” June 19, 1968, 15:50–16:42, accessed May 18, 2021, https://pastdaily.com/2013/06/19/solidarity-day-coretta-scott-king-june-19-1968/.

12. de Jong, You Can’t Eat Freedom, 62–87.

13. Strom Thurmond, “ ‘Poor’ Excuse for Revolution,” Citizen, December 1967,

14. Copies of Citizen can be found at Archives and Special Collections, University of Mississippi, Oxford. 14. Anthony Harrigan, “Producers Dwindle as Drones Multiply,” Citizen, June 1972, 19–21.

15. George W. Shannon, “U.S. Blacks on Relief Shun Work; Jamaicans Take Jobs,” Citizen, November 1977, 11–4.

16. George Andrews to G. P. Brock, July 28, 1964, p. 1, folder “Correspondence, July 28, 1964,” box 27, George W. Andrews Papers, Special Collections and Archives Department, Draughon Library, Auburn University, Alabama.

17. Thomas G. Abernethy to C. B. Curlee, July 29, 1965, p. 1, cons. w/ Abernethy to Curlee, August 2, 1965, folder “Office of Economic Opportunity, General, 1965–1966,” box 161, Thomas G. Abernethy Papers, Archives and Special Collections, University of Mississippi, Oxford.

18. Pearl Rodgers to John C. Stennis, April 14, 1967, p. 1, folder “Economic Opportunity, General Correspondence,” box 2, ser. 25, John C. Stennis Collection, Congressional and Political Research Center, Mississippi State University Libraries, Starkville.

19. Walter D. Smith, Executive Director, “Overall Summary Statement,” in Mississippi Action for Progress, Comprehensive Narrative Report, October 31, 1966–April 28, 1967, p. 2, unfoldered, box 1, 1998 Addition, Hodding Carter III Papers, Special Collections Department, Mississippi State University Libraries, Starkville.

20. Gloster B. Current, “Death in Mississippi,” Crisis, February 1966, 103–6; “Another Murder in Mississippi,” Delta Ministry, January 1966, 2, folder 6, box 2A, Allen Eugene Cox Collection, Special Collections Department, Mississippi State University Libraries, Starkville.

21. Citizens’ Board of Inquiry, Citizens’ Crusade Against Poverty, “Final Report on the Child Development Group of Mississippi,” n.d. [October 1966], p. 15, folder 18, box 23, Papers of the Scholarship, Education and Defense Fund for Racial Equality, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison.

22. John Zippert to Robert Owen, June 15, 1966, pp. 1–2, folder 11, box 42, Records of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA.

23. “St. Helena School Aud. Burned Down,” Louisiana Weekly, June 11, 1966, sect. 1, p. 7.

24. Noel H. Klores to Theodore Berry, memorandum, March 13, 1967, p. 1, folder “Lowndes Co. Christ. Mvmt.,” box 6, Grant Files, 1966–71, Migrant Division, Office of Operations, Office of Economic Opportunity, Record Group 381, National Archives, College Park, MD.

25. Selma Inter-Religious Project, Newsletter, April 12, 1967, p. 2, folder “Southwest Ala. Farmers Co-op (Shirley Mesher),” box 12, ser. 81-4, William F. Nichols Papers, Special Collections and Archives Department, Draughon Library, Auburn University, AL.

26. Theo James Pinnock and G. W. Taylor, “Tuskegee Institute–OEO Seasonally Employed Agricultural Workers Educational Project, Summary of Accomplishments and Disappointments, November 1, 1966–October 31, 1967,” pp. 20–21, folder “Miscellaneous Alabama 8539,” box 3, Migrant Division, Office of Operations.

27. Grady Poulard to Maurice A. Dawkins, memorandum, April 4, 1967, p. 1, folder “CVR: Poulard (in-office memos),” box 7, Program Records of the Assistant Director for Civil Rights.

28. “Text of President’s Civil Rights Message to Congress Asking Open Housing Law,” New York Times, February 16, 1967, 28–29.

29. Civil Rights Act of 1968, Pub. L. No. 90–284, 82 Stat. 73, accessed May 18, 2021, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-82/pdf/STATUTE-82-Pg73.pdf.

30. “Freedom Candidates,” MFDP News Letter, June 22, 1968, p. 2, item 11, reel 3, MFDP Records.

31. “West Point Mayoral Runoff,” Delta Ministry Reports, August/September 1970, 2; “Self-Defense?” Delta Ministry Reports, November 1971, p. 2, both in folder 19, box 1, 1972 Addendum, Cox Collection.

32. Donald T. Moss to John Mitchell, July 23, 1971, p. 1, folder “Community Action Program of Caddo and Bossier Parishes,” box 2, Inspection and Investigation Files, 1969–74, General Counsel, Office of Economic Opportunity, Record Group 381, National Archives, College Park, MD.

33. P. G. Tunde Balogun to Edward Levi, June 28, 1976, p. 3, folder “7 Department of Justice (General),” box 5, ser. 82-1, Nichols Papers.

34. “A Letter from the Director,” The Council Newsletter, November 1978, p. 1, folder 13, box 14, Marjorie Baroni Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of Mississippi, Oxford.

35. “Sumrall Convicted,” Hinds County FDP News Letter, July 21, 1967, p. 1, item 12, reel 3, MFDP Records.

36. Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, “Issues in 1968 for Mississippi,” p. 1, pamphlet, item 2, reel 2, MFDP Records.

37. Sargent Shriver quoted in Leon Howell, Freedom City: The Substance of Things Hoped For (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1969), 121.

38. King, “Solidarity Day Address,” 22:06–23:53.

39. Ashton P. Roberthon to Russell B. Long, August 10, 1967, p. 5, folder 5, box 103, Russell B. Long Papers, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.

40. Dorothy E. Fanyo to Thomas Abernethy, March 18, 1966, p. 1 and Abernethy to Fanyo, March 22, 1966, p. 1, folder “Office of Economic Opportunity, General, 1965–1966,” box 161, Abernethy Papers.

41. John Stennis, “Address to Joint Session of Mississippi Legislature,” January 27, 1966, p. 8, folder 10, box 119, Paul B. Johnson Family Papers, McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg.

42. Stephen Daggett, Costs of Major U.S. Wars (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, June 29, 2010), https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RS22926.pdf, 2.

43. “Federation/LAF History from the 25th Annual Report (1992),” Federation of Southern Cooperatives website, accessed October 3, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20121004004152/http://www.federationsoutherncoop.com/fschistory/FSC25hist.pdf.

44. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1980 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1980), 261 (Table 436).

45. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1990 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1990), 310–11 (Table 499).

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48. “ ‘Welfare Queen’ Becomes Issue in Reagan Campaign,” New York Times, February 15, 1976, 51; “Negro ‘Welfare Queen’ Found Guilty of Fraud,” Citizen, November 1977, 21.

49. George W. Shannon, “New Welfare Queen’s Story Spotlights National Fraud,” Citizen, May 1979, 4–5.

50. “New Hope for America,” Editorial, Citizen, December 1980, 2.

51. Dan Donahue quoted in Thomas Byrne Edsall with Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 6.

52. Bill Clinton, “The New Covenant: Responsibility in the American Community,” speech at Georgetown University, October 23, 1991, 11:34–13:28, transcript, accessed May 18, 2021, https://www.c-span.org/video/?23518-1/clinton-campaign-speech.

53. Lawrence Mishel and Julia Wolfe, “CEO Compensation Has Grown 940% Since 1978,” Economic Policy Institute, August 14, 2019, accessed May 18, 2021, https://www.epi.org/files/pdf/171191.pdf, 1.

54. Chuck Collins and Josh Hoxie, Billionaire Bonanza: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us, Economic Policy Institute, November 2019, accessed May 18, 2021, https://inequality.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/BILLIONAIRE-BONANZA-2017-Embargoed.pdf, 2, 14, 16.

55. Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2018, Executive Summary, May 2019, accessed May 18, 2021, https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2019-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2018-executive-summary.htm.

56. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, quoted in Jeff Guo, “The Disease Killing White Americans Goes Way Deeper than Opioids,” Washington Post, March 24, 2017, accessed May 18, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/24/the-disease-killing-white-americans-goes-way-deeper-than-opioids/.

57. Neta C. Crawford, “United States Budgetary Costs and Obligations of Post–9/11 Wars through FY2020: $6.4 Trillion,” November 13, 2019, Costs of War Project Website, Watson Institute of International & Public Affairs, Brown University, accessed May 18, 2021, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2019/US%20Budgetary%20Costs%20of%20Wars%20November%202019.pdf, 1, 6; Heidi Garrett-Peltier, “War Spending and Lost Opportunities,” March 2019, Costs of War Project Website, Watson Institute of International & Public Affairs, Brown University, accessed May 18, 2021, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2019/March%202019%20Job%20Opportunity%20Cost%20of%20War.pdf, p. 2.

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EPILOGUE

1. Lyrics used by permission from My Daddy’s Blues CD, Doctor G and the Mudcats, Cheatham Street Records, San Marcos, TX. Gregg’s most recent book is My Daddy’s Blues: A Childhood Memoir from the Land of Huck and Jim (San Marcos: Mudcat Press, 2019). His other books include Shoulder to Shoulder? The American Federation of Labor, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1924 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); City of Dust: A Cement Company Town in the Land of Tom Sawyer (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996); Insane Sisters: Or, the Price Paid for Challenging a Company Town (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999); and Thyra J. Edwards: Black Activist in the Global Freedom Struggle (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011).

2. David F. Kugler, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

3. Robert Whitaker, On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation (New York: Crown, 2008), tells the story in the most cinematic way. Other sources include Grif Stockley, Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacre of 1919 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001); Robert C. Cortner, A Mob Intent on Death: The NAACP and the Arkansas Riot Cases (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1988); Guy Lancaster, ed., The Elaine Massacre and Arkansas: A Century of Atrocity and Resistance, 1819–1919 (Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2018), especially Cherisse Jones-Branch, “Women and the 1919 Elaine Massacre,” 176–200. A treatment still worth reading is Kieran Taylor, “ ‘We Have Just Begun’: Black Organizing and White Response in the Arkansas Delta, 1919,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 58 (Autumn 1999): 264–85. Michael Honey, “Class, Race, and Power in the New South: Racial Violence and the Delusions of White Supremacy,” in Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy, ed. David Cecelski and Timothy Tyson, with a Foreword by John Hope Franklin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 163–84; David Zucchino, Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020). The racial violence in Elaine is all too American, as Walter Johnson details in The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2020).

4. Martin Luther King Jr., “Showdown for Nonviolence,” Look, April 16, 1968, 23–25; Tom Hanks, “You Should Learn the Truth about the Tulsa Greenwood Massacre,” New York Times, June 4, 2021.

5. Moon Ho-Jung, ed., The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements across the Pacific (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014); Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).

6. Joe William Trotter Jr., in Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), places American racial violence in the context of Black proletarianization and labor organizing.

7. Scott Elsworth, The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice (New York: Dutton, 2021); Tim Madigan, The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1927 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001).

8. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935).

9. Roger Horowitz, Negro and White, Unite and Fight! A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930–90 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1905–54 (University of Illinois Press, 1997); Rick Halpern and Roger Horowitz, Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999).

10. See, e.g., Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990, 2015), and Michael K. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).

11. See Michael K. Honey, Sharecropper’s Troubadour: John L. Handcox, the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, and the African American Song Tradition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), for song lyrics, poems and details that follow. See also the book’s bibliography on the STFU and its history in the Arkansas Delta.

12. See Jeannie Whayne’s “Henry Lowery Lynching: A Legacy of the Elaine Massacre?” in this volume, and Nan Woodruff, American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 92–105, 110–12, 132, 136.

13. Honey’s notes in Sharecroppers’ Troubadour provide a sampling of the literature on the Southern Farmers’ Tenant Union, including Donald Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and the New Deal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971); Woodruff, American Congo; Jeannie M. Whayne, A New Plantation South: Land, Labor, and Federal Favor in Twentieth-Century Arkansas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996); Jarod Roll, A Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010); and James D. Ross, The Rise and Fall of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Arkansas (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2018).

14. Matt Simmons, “Revolt in the Fields: Building the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union in the Old Southwest” (PhD diss., University of Florida, 2019).

15. Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie, Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People (New York: Oak Publications, 1967).

16. Ed King quoted in Sharecroppers’ Troubadour, 154.

17. Michael Honey, “Earle Reacts to Desegregation,” Southern Patriot, October 1970, 8.

18. Michael K. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights; Honey, Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001); Honey, To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice (New York: W. W. Norton: 2018).

19. Michael Pierce, “Odell Smith, Teamsters Local 878, and Civil Rights Unionism in Little Rock,” Journal of Southern History 84 (November 2018): 925–58.

20. Elaine had a population as high as 1,200 as recently as 1970, but this number has dropped to about 500 people at the centennial of the massacre in 2019; U.S. Bureau of the Census, “2019 Gazetteer Files,” accessed May 19, 2021, https://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/maps-data/data/gazetteer/2019_Gazetteer/2019_gaz_place_05.txt. Rev. Mary Olson, president of the Elaine Legacy Center, and others are trying to mark the racial disasters but struggling with collapsing buildings and fleeing people. “More Than Memorials in Elaine,” Arkansas Times, August 4, 2019, accessed May 19, 2021, https://arktimes.com/news/cover-stories/2019/08/04/more-than-memorials-in-elaine. The Legacy Center was the group that, in August 2019, had planted the tree that got cut down. In the same period, vandals once again shot holes in the marker of the Emmett Till lynching in Mississippi. Lateshia Beachum, “A Massacre of Blacks Haunted This Arkansas City. Then a Memorial Tree Was Cut Down,” Washington Post, August 30, 2019, accessed May 19, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/08/30/massacre-blacks-haunted-this-arkansas-city-then-someone-cut-down-memorial-tree/.