Elaine Race Riot - NAACP Involvement

NAACP Involvement

The NAACP promptly released a statement from a contact in Arkansas providing an account of the origins of the violence: "The whole trouble, as I understand it, started because a Mr. Bratton, a white lawyer from Little Rock, Ark., was employed by sixty or seventy colored families to go to Elaine to represent them in a dispute with the white planters relative to the sale price of cotton." It referenced a story in the Commercial Appeal of Memphis, Tennessee on October 3 that quoted Bratton's father:

it had been impossible for to obtain itemized statements of accounts, or in fact to obtain statements at all, and that the manager was preparing to ship their cotton, they being sharecroppers and having a half interest therein, off without settling with them or allowing them to sell their half of the crop and pay up their accounts.... If it's a crime to represent people in an effort to make honest settlements, then he has committed a crime.

The NAACP sent its Field Secretary, Walter F. White, to Elaine in October 1919. White, who was of mixed heritage, blond, blue-eyed and able to pass for white, was granted credentials from the Chicago Daily News. This enabled him to obtain an interview with Governor Brough, who in turn gave him a letter of recommendation and an autographed photograph.

White was in Phillips County for only a brief time before his identity was discovered and took the first train back to Little Rock. The conductor told him that he was leaving "just when the fun is going to start," because they had found out that there was a "damned yellow nigger passing for white and the boys are going to get him." Asked what they would do to him, the conductor told White that "when they get through with him he won't pass for white no more!"

He was able to talk to members of both communities. White reported that he was told by local people that up to 100 blacks had been killed. White published his findings in the Daily News, the Chicago Defender and The Nation, as well as the NAACP's magazine The Crisis. Governor Brough asked the United States Postal Service to prohibit the mailing of the Chicago Defender and Crisis, while local officials attempted to enjoin distribution of the Defender. Years later, White said people in Elaine told him that up to 200 blacks had been killed.