Echoes of a century-old massacre
ELAINE, Ark. — J. Chester Johnson never heard about the mass killing of black people in Elaine, a couple hours away from where he grew up in Arkansas. Nobody talked about it, teachers didn’t mention it in history classes, and only the elderly remembered the bloodshed of 1919.
He was an adult when he found out about it. By then, his grandfather, Alonzo “Lonnie” Birch, was dead — perhaps taking a secret to his grave.
Johnson believes Birch took part in the Elaine massacre. And now he’s bent on telling the story of one of the largest racial mass killings in U.S. history, an infamous chapter in the “Red Summer” riots that spread in cities and towns across the nation.
“I feel an obligation,” said Johnson, who is white. “It’s hard to grow up in a severely segregated environment and for it not to affect you. If you don’t face it and deal with it in various ways, it becomes undiscovered.”
Johnson, who now lives in New York City, is co-chair of a committee overseeing construction of a memorial honoring those killed in 1919. He and others are hoping the structure, being built in a park across from the Phillips County Courthouse about a half-hour drive from Elaine, will bring attention to the massacre. Others say plans for a monument are a folly — starting with its location — and want commemoration efforts to focus instead on reparations to account for what they say was theft of blackowned land in the wake of the killings.
The violence unfolded on the evening of Sept. 30, 1919, as black sharecroppers had gathered at a small church in Hoop Spur, an unincorporated area about 2 1/2 miles north of Elaine. The sharecroppers, wanting to be paid better and treated more fairly, were meeting with union organizers when a deputy sheriff and a railroad security officer — both white — arrived.
Fighting and gunfire erupted, though it’s still not clear who shot first. The security officer was killed and the deputy wounded.
White men frustrated that the sharecroppers were organizing went on a rampage. Over several days, mobs from the surrounding area and neighboring states killed men, women and children.
More than 200 black men, women and children were killed, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, a Montgomery, Alabama-based nonprofit that has documented more than 4,400 lynchings of black people in the U.S. between 1877 and 1950. Five white people were killed. Hundreds of black people were arrested and jailed, many of them tortured into giving incriminating testimony. Some were forced to flee Arkansas and, according to the Legacy Center, had their land stolen.
Johnson said his grandfather, Alonzo “Lonnie” Birch, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and worked for the Missouri Pacific Railroad, the same company that employed the railroad security officer who was killed at the Arkansas church where the black sharecroppers had gathered to organize. Once the violence started, Johnson said, railroad officials urged workers to join the fighting. He said his grandfather likely responded to the call.
Narratives about the killings differ and records are not easy to find, said Brian Mitchell, an assistant professor of history at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock. “You have to understand that everybody that had some degree of power in the state was a part of the process of the massacre, so the people who would control all the records (were) actively suppressing the records,” Mitchell said.
Some residents think the death toll is highly exaggerated.
Poindexter Fiser, the mayor of Elaine from 1985 to 2007, said the accounts of a massacre are “somebody trying to make something out of nothing much to talk about.” Fiser, who is white, said his late fatherin-law put the number of those slain at only “about 25 people.”
Kyle Miller, director of the Delta Cultural Center in Helena-West Helena, Arkansas, said for many years, the violence “was not really acknowledged … it was something that was only talked about behind closed doors.” Miller is a descendant of the Johnston brothers, four wealthy, black siblings who he said were pulled off a train on their way back to Helena after a hunting trip and killed during the massacre.
“I’m really hoping (the memorial) is going to spark some conversations. That people will look at it and begin to ask questions and be able to learn some history of our community,” Miller said.