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Grif Stockley.
Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919. University
of Arkansas Press, 2004
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*
Blood in Their Eyes
The Story of
The
Elaine, Arkansas Massacre of 1919
The tragedy of the Elaine massacres is not
only that they occurred but that we have ignored them.In late September
1919, black sharecroppers met to protest unfair settlements for their
cotton crops from white plantation owners. Local law enforcement broke
up the union's meeting, and the next day a thousand white men from the
Delta—and troops of the U.S. Army itself—converged on Phillips
County, Arkansas, to "put down" the black sharecroppers'
"insurrection."
In riveting, novelistic prose, writer and
Delta native Grif Stockley considers the evidence and tells the full
story of this incident for the first time, concluding that black people
were murdered in Elaine by white mobs and federal soldiers. Five white
men died as a result of the conflict; contemporary estimates of African
American deaths ranged from 20 to an even more horrifying 856. White
officials jailed hundreds of black workers, torturing some of them.
Twelve black men were charged with first-degree murder. Their legal
battles lasted six years, but national and local silence has persisted
much longer.
Stockley takes on this silence and shows that it
resulted from sustained official efforts to convince the public that
only blacks who had resisted lawful authority were killed. He shows too
that it is part of a larger silence in which the fear and terror that
were the daily staples of the African American experience have been
summed up all too easily in the term "Jim Crow" in a failure
to fully confront the anguish of the period.
Blood in Their Eyes is a relentless examination
of one of the bloodiest American racial repressions of the 20th century.
In retelling the story of the Elaine massacres of 1919 with moral fervor
and canny reinterpretation of sources, Grif Stockley has written a study
of collective barbarism in real time that deepens our knowledge of the
psychodynamics of white supremacy.
—David Levering Lewis Two-time Pulitzer Prize
winning author of
W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919
(1994) and
W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American
Century, 1919–1963 (2001)
"Meticulously researched and compellingly argued,
Blood in Their Eyes is the definitive history of the Elaine, Arkansas,
massacre . . . [which] was the bloodiest race war of the Red Summer of
1919. Compounding the violence by rampaging white mobs and army troops
was the torture of black survivors. Grif Stockley, a lawyer, has told
the whole story, and in doing so, he has deeply enriched our
understanding not only of America's violently racist past, but also of
the challenges which that history poses for the future."
—William M. Tuttle Jr. author of
Daddy's Gone
to War: The Second World War in the Lives of America's Children (1993)
and
Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (2nd ed., 1996).
6"
x 9"
272 pages
$29.95 cloth, 1-55728-717-1
Grif
Stockley
is a lawyer, the author of five murder mysteries (Expert
Testimony,
Probable Cause,
Religious Conviction,
Illegal Motion, and
Blind Judgment, all from
Simon & Schuster), and a longtime scholar of the Elaine race riots.
His new novel,
Salted with Fire,
(June 2001);
also
Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas (2005)
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I miss Gideon Page, the
hero of Grif Stockley's previous novels. Gideon Page is my kind of
lawyer standing alone against the odds, against the establishment and
winning for the little guy. That is what mainstream Arkansas lawyers do
today. So
Blood in Their Eyes is required reading for every
Arkansas lawyer, because this time Grif Stockley reviews the work of a
real Gideon Page, a black lawyer named Scipio Jones who read law to
become licensed and became one of Arkansas' outstanding lawyers. Jones
is credited with one of the most important cases in American history, Moore
v. Dempsey 261 U.S. 86(1923), and standing alone many times, saved
the lives of 12 innocent, albeit convicted, black sharecroppers from
Elaine, Arkansas.
The Elaine race riot, as history until now
has called it, is an awful blemish on Arkansas history. It is such a
blemish that most historians have treated it lightly or shied away from
it. But Grif Stockley, an outstanding Arkansas lawyer in his own right,
is not known for shying away from much of anything, and he tackles the
issue head on in his first writing on Arkansas history. In typical
lawyer fashion Stockley analyzes the facts and writes his brief in Blood
in Their Eyes.
The death toll of white citizens is easily verified
from the court and newspaper records. Five men were killed. According to
the trial transcripts, affidavits, and research by Stockley, some of the
white men were apparently killed by other white men in their frenzy to
shoot black citizens of Phillips
County.
The black death toll has never
been verified, and even Stockley's laborious analysis of the facts fails
to document the number. It is somewhere between 20 and 856; the total
will likely never be known. But Stockley, exhibiting his experience as a
lawyer, analyzes the facts and identifies the events as a massacre, not
a riot, because even 20 deaths fit that description in the events
Stockley brings to light, namely, shooting unarmed blacks with their
hands in the air, and burying many in unmarked graves. Without saying
so, Stockley's description of the events matches those recently reported
in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Blood in Their Eyes reports the
events which started on the night of September 30, 1919 at the Hopp Spur
Church in Phillips County, near Elaine, Arkansas, where a group of black
sharecroppers had gathered for a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and
Household Union. Farming conditions in the Arkansas Delta in 1919 are
not what they are today, and the sharecroppers, with grievances over
cotton prices paid by their white landlords, attended the meeting. Why
armed guards were posted outside the church is unclear.
An automobile
carrying a Deputy Sheriff, a Railroad Detective for the Missouri
Pacific, and a Trustee from the Phillips County Jail stopped in front of
the church about 11:00 p.m. and the shooting started. Who shot first and
why is unclear, but Stockley gives a trial lawyers' analysis of the
questions and answers. When the shooting stopped, a white peace officer
was dead. By morning hundreds, perhaps thousands, of armed men from both
sides of the Mississippi River converged on Elaine, and a group of armed
blacks exchanged gunfire. The following day battle-hardened veterans
from the battle of the Marne stationed at Camp Pike arrived, with
Governor Charles Borough in the lead.
Blood in Their Eyes sorts out many
of the historical reports of this event, and Stockley disagrees with
many of them unsupported by the evidence. But, his astonishing
conclusion that the Camp Pike veterans themselves participated in the
slaughter of innocent American citizens is a new chapter in this tragic
event.
Twelve sharecroppers were tried for murder
of five whites (no whites were arrested) and Stockley laboriously
reviewed trial transcripts, Supreme Court briefs, correspondence, and
court opinions to find historical facts and support his writing. His
legal analysis is a new and very much needed addition to the reports of
other historians. In several instances he demonstrates the power of
circumstantial evidence, and throughout his book, Stockley demonstrates
his outstanding skills as a lawyer in this analysis of the records.
Perhaps if historians had started where Stockley excels, much of the
written history of this event would be different. No lawyer, nor anyone
else who loves freedom in a democratic society, can read these events
without getting sick to their stomach. American Citizens were tried for
murder in an Arkansas courtroom less than 30 days after their arrest,
defended predominately by attorneys who called no witnesses, failed to
strike any juror for bias, and in general make no closing arguments.
The
jury was out for eight minutes on the first trial. As many as three
separate trials are held by the same judge in a single day and all
defendant's were found guilty and sentenced to death. One of the
Defendant's attorneys later urged the Governor to carry out the death
sentences.
A must read portion of the book is
Stockley's cross examination-like juxtaposition of Prosecutor John
Miller's statements in 1919 and his later statements as a retired U.S.
District Judge.
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The Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed all of
the convictions, and the fictional Gideon Page never had the challenges
that the real life Scipio Jones experienced. Jones was not hired until
late November, after all 12 have been convicted. He was retained by
black Little Rock citizens to work with a white attorney George W.
Murphy, employed by the NAACP, and later as co counsel with Edgar L.
McHaney, another white attorney. Although he was prohibited from arguing
the case, it was through Jones' efforts, that Moore
v. Dempsey,
for the first time, permitted collateral attack, thru habeas corpus, on
a state appellate court decision. All 12 Defendants were finally freed
five years after their conviction, through a maze of motions, appeals,
retrials, and executive clemency that only a skilled lawyer could
manage. |
The author frequently exhibits skill as an
historical novelist; as an example he inserts that the Governor's wife
"could have easily persuaded" the Governor to see
Birth of a Nation, which played in Little Rock at the time. Perhaps an historical
novel will be the next expression of his extraordinary talent. In the
meantime, Stockley's in depth research and compelling arguments make
Blood in Their Eyes worthwhile reading for every lawyer who aspires to
try lawsuits.
The Arkansas Lawyer
Vol.37
No.1/Winter
2002 |
