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The Elaine race riot, also called the Elaine massacre, took place on September 30, 1919 in the town of Elaine in Phillips County, Arkansas, in the Arkansas Delta. Sharecropping by African American farmers was prevalent on cotton plantations of white landowners, and blacks outnumbered whites in the rural county by a ten-to-one proportion. Approximately 100 African-American farmers, led by Robert L. Hill, the founder of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America, met at a church in Hoop Spur in Phillips County, near 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." Whites resisted such organizing by blacks, and two went to the meeting. In a conflict, guards shot one of the white men. Violence ensued in the town and county, leaving five whites and 100-200 blacks dead. The events of the following week in the Elaine area are subject to debate. "It is documented that five whites, including a soldier died at Elaine, but estimates of African American deaths, made by individuals writing about the Elaine affair between 1919 and 1925, range from 20 to 856; if accurate, these numbers would make it by far the most deadly conflict in the history of the United States.〔Grif Stockley, Blood in their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919 (Fayetteville, Arkansas: University of Arkansas Press, 2001), xiv.〕 The only men prosecuted in the events were 115 African Americans, of whom 12 were quickly convicted and sentenced to death for murder. Their cases went to the United States Supreme Court, where the convictions were overturned on appeal. In the closing days of Governor Thomas McRae's administration, he freed most of the defendants, who were helped to leave the state to avoid being lynched. ==Background== In the Arkansas Delta around the time of the Great War, most black farmers were sharecroppers. There were inequities and farmers started to organize to try to negotiate better conditions. Sharecropper organizations or unions were generally opposed by white landowners, who sometimes used violence to break up such meetings. About 100 black sharecroppers gathered at the Hoop Spur Church in Elaine, Arkansas, before dawn on October 1, 1919 to obtain better prices for their products from the white planters who controlled the land. They considered joining the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America and discussed filing a class action lawsuit against their landlords. Union members advocating for the union brought armed guards to protect the meeting: The landowners and sharecroppers did not go together to a market to sell the cotton when it was ready. Rather, the landowner sold the crop whenever and however he saw fit. At the time of settlement, neither an itemized statement of accounts owed nor an accounting of the money received for cotton and seed, was, in most cases, given or shown the Negroes. It was an unwritten law of the cotton country that the sharecroppers could not quit and leave a plantation until their debts were paid. Many Negroes in Phillips County whose cotton was sold in October 1918, did not get a settlement before July of the following year. According to the Historical Text Archive on ''Revolution in the Land: Southern Agriculture in the 20th Century,'' in a section called "The Changing Face of Sharecropping and Tenancy": The summer of 1919 had been marked by deadly race riots in numerous major cities across the country, including Chicago, Knoxville, and Washington, DC. In addition, postwar tensions were high because of labor unrest across the country. Added to labor tensions were racial ones — in Phillips County, a plantation area of the Mississippi Delta since before the Civil War, blacks outnumbered whites by ten to one. Whites feared resistance to their domination. They also wanted blacks out of the county or dead. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Elaine race riot」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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