Elaine Race Riot

The Elaine Race Riot, also called the Elaine Massacre, occurred September 30, 1919 in the town of Elaine in Phillips County, Arkansas, in the Arkansas Delta, where sharecropping by African American farmers was prevalent on plantations of white landowners. Approximately 100 African-American farmers, led by Robert L. Hill, the founder of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America, met at a meeting at a church in Hoop Spur in Phillips County, nearby Elaine. The purpose was "to obtain better payments for their cotton crops from the white plantation owners who dominated the area during the Jim Crow era. Black sharecroppers were often exploited in their efforts to collect payment for their cotton crops."

Read more about Elaine Race Riot:  Background, Events, Press Coverage, NAACP Involvement, The Trials, The Appeals, The Aftermath

Famous quotes containing the words race and/or riot:

    The Laws of Nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Nature—were Man as unerring in his judgments as Nature.
    Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)

    The bowl will ensnare and enchant
    men who crouch by the hearth
    till they want
    but the riot of stars in the night;
    those who dwell far inland
    will seek ships.
    Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)