Elaine Massacre Memorial remembers hundreds murdered in 1919 violence
HELENA-WEST HELENA — As Arkansans mark Black History Month during February, they can visit a new monument that recalls the most savage episode in the state’s race-relations history.
Dedicated in late September, the Elaine Massacre Memorial in downtown Helena’s Court Square Park is as stark and chilling as the racial hatred that drove armed white mobs in 1919 to kill 200 or more of their black fellow citizens.
There were just five white fatalities in the several days of Phillips County mayhem, during which the 500 U.S. soldiers sent by the governor also took part in the violence. Hundreds of black Arkansans were jailed, but no white ones. Then 122 black citizens were charged with crimes and most of them convicted.
Designed and built by Amos Eckerson, a local artist and craftsman, the memorial is a sobering structure, befitting its subject matter. For visitors who have been to Washington, the Vietnam War Memorial may come to mind as an inspiration.
In Sept. 29’s dedication story by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Sean Clancy, Eckerson described his design as “kind of a modern interpretation of a church, specifically the chancel of a church where the altar is. The cenotaph is the focus of the whole thing. It is the monument.”
A cenotaph is erected to honor a group of people whose remains lie elsewhere. In the case of the Elaine Massacre, few burial sites are known. In fact, historians have tracked down the names of only a small number of murdered victims, many of whom were sharecroppers.
That explains why this design, unlike the Vietnam War Memorial with its seemingly endless listing of more than 58,000 U.S. fatalities, bears no names. Inside the marble-smooth concrete of the monument’s black walls, there’s simply an etched message: “Dedicated to those known and unknown who lost their lives in the Elaine Massacre.”
Engraved on the floor is a map
of Phillips County that puts Elaine 25 miles southwest of Helena-West Helena. The map also pinpoints other tiny communities where the violence occurred. Among them were Hoop Spur, where the troubles began, along with Ratio, Modoc, Lambrook and other locales.
For decades, as Clancy’s enlightening story reported, the 1919 violence “was mostly told through a white narrative as a revolt by black people who were out to kill whites.”
The visual impact of the massacre memorial rectifies that false notion. No printed information about the killings is posted at the location. But visitors may be inspired to look up the topic on their digital hardware and learn what actually seems to have happened.
Black History Month can inspire visits to other Arkansas locations related to slavery before the Civil War, the Jim Crow era of enforced segregation from the 1870s through the 1950s, the civil rights movement, and today’s often complicated race relations. Here are some notable examples:
■ Masonic Templars Cultural Center, Little Rock. At 501 W. Ninth St., this ranks as the state’s most thorough museum relating the history of black Arkansans. The personal touches are often compelling.
■ Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site. Arkansas’ most indelible civil-rights story is told at 2120 W. Daisy Bates Drive, across from the high school whose first nine black students were initially barred in 1957.
■ Centennial Baptist Church, Helena-West Helena. This Gothic Revival house of worship is the only known example in Arkansas of a church designed by a black architect (Henry James Price) for a black congregation.
■ University Museum and Cultural Center, Pine Bluff. On the campus of the state’s traditionally black university, a panoply of exhibits reminds visitors of the challenges its staff and students faced in segregated Arkansas.
■ John H. Johnson Cultural and Educational Museum, Arkansas City. The future founder of Ebony and Jet magazines grew up poor in this Mississippi River town. His boyhood bungalow tells the inspiring story.
■ Lloyd Brown-Fargo Agricultural Museum, Fargo. This site in Monroe County preserves a pioneering residential high school for black students, whose class photographs beam with evident eagerness for learning.
■ Southern Tenant Farmers Museum, Tyronza. A highly unlikely alliance of white and black sharecroppers formed this racially integrated labor union in 1934. The Poinsett County effort had some success before fading away.
■ Scott Joplin Mural, Texarkana. This black composer, known as the “Father of Ragtime Music,” is honored with a handsome piece of outdoor art at Third and Main streets. Joplin attended Texarkana’s Orr School.