Located in Philips County,Arkansas,in 1919 Elaine was a small town mostly inahabited by African American sharecroppers.Robert L.Hill,a 26 year-old African American man from Winchester,Arkansas visited Elaine and realize that the sharecroppers were being consistently exploited and cheated by the landlords.He founded the Organization of the Progressive Farmers' and Household Union of America as an alliance of African American tenant Farmers.
With the support of the Union (which had several lodges around Elaine) African American were able to organize acts resistance among cotton farmers.
These included the refusal of Elaine sawmill workers to let the women of their families work for whites,and demand for higher wages for cotton pickers.Union members hired lawyers (from the firm of Bratton Bratton & Casey,based in Little Rock) to sue for money that the landlords owned them for cotton.
Robert Hill began to insist that Union meetings should be secure and guarded in order to keep out all whites.In a meeting on a Wednesday,October 1st,1919,at a church in Hoop Spur,guards armed with rifles and shotguns circled in the building in order to protect those meeting inside.A car stopped close to the building and white "man said to the guards."Going coon hunting,boys?"Although the guards did not reply,a shot was quickly fired.Each side blamed the other for firing the first shot,but shots began to fly everywhere and the meeting quickly dispersed.Special Agent W.A.Adkings of the Missouri Pacific Railroad was one of the men in the car,and was killed in this initial cxchange of gunfire.By the morning October 2nd,whites from Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee had flocked to the area and were confiscating and using the guns of any African American they encountered fighting flared in the streets of Elaine,as African Americans assembled and attacked whites,while whites ransacked the homes of African American residents.Governor Brough sent troops to the scene on the request of Sheriff Kitchen.Elaine was placed under martial law.
A few days after the initial shooting began,285 African Americans were taken to the jail in nearby Helena.The condition that had to endure in jail were horrendous,as the jail had only room for only 48 inmates.Two whites officers in the county sheriffi's office declared in sworn statements that and other officers tortured many of the African American inmates whey they were in jail.On October 31,A Philip County grand jury handed down indictments and charged 122 African Americans with crimes orignating from the racial indictments in Elaine.Many were charged with murder while some were charged crimes relating to terrorist activities.The trial which
began a week later was akin to a circus.The judge appointed white attroneys from
Helena to represent the first 12 defendants.Attroney Jacob Fink was appointed to defend Frank Hicks,one of the African American defendants.Jacob told the jury that he had not interviewed his client and did not know really know the details of the case.Jacob did not challenged any prospective jurors and agreed to the first 12 jurors called.As a result,the first 12 men to go on trial were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to the death penalty by electric chair.When word of the sentence got out,the next 65 inmates to face trial chose the plea bargain of second-degree murder ranther than face a jury trial.They were sentenced to 21 years in jail.The rest were either never prosecuted or had the charges dismissed.
The NAACP also took on the task of organizing the defendants' appeal.The NAACP for a time attempted to conceal its role in the appeal,given the hostile reception its report on the violence and the trials had received.Once it undertook to organize the defense,it went to work vigorously,raising more $50,000 and hiring Scipio Africanus Jones,a highly respected African-American attorney,from Arkansas,and Colonel George Washing Murra,a Confederate veteran,former Attroney General of for the state of Arkansas an unsuccessful candidate for Governor on the Progressive Party Ticket.
The defendants'lawyers were able to obtain reversal of the verdicts by the Arkansas Supreme Court in six of the twelve cases in which death sentences had been handed down.The grounds were that the jury had failed to specify whether the defendants were guilty of murder in the first or second degree;Those cases were accordingly sent back for retrial.
The Arkansas Supreme Court upheld the death sentence of the six other defendants,rejecting the challenge to the all white untimely and finding the mob atmosphere and the use of coerced testimony did not deny the defendants the due process of law.Those defendants unsuccessfully petitioned the United States Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari from the Arkansas Supreme Court's decision.
The dfendants next petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus,alleging that
the proceedings that took place in the Arkansas state court,while ostensibly complying with the requirements of a trial,were in fact only a form.They argued that the accused were convicted under the pressure of the mob,with blatant disregard for their constitutional rights.The defendants originally intended to file their petition in Federal Court,but
the only sitting judge was assigned to other judicial duties in Minnesota
at the time and would not return to Arkansas until after the defendants'scheduled execution date.Judge John Ellis Martineau of the
Pulaski County chancery court issued the writ.Although the writ was later overturned by the state Supreme Court,his action postponed the
execution date long enough to permit the defendants to seek habeas corpus relief in Federal Court,where U.S.District Judge Jacob Trieber issued another writ.
The State of Arkansas took a narrowly legalistic position,based on the United States Supremes Court's earlier decision in Frank v.Mangum.It
did not dispute the defendants' evidence of torture used to obtain,confessions or mob intimidation,but the state simply argued that,even if true,this did not amount to a denial due process.The United States district court agreed,denying the writ,but also found that there was probable cause for an appeal and allowed the defendants to take their cast to the U.S.Supreme Court.
In Moore v.Dempsey,the United States Supreme Court vacated six of the convictions 261 U.S.86 (1923) on the grounds that the mob dominated atmosphere of the trial and the use of testimony coerced by torture denied the defendants' due process required by the fourteenth Amendment to the U.S.Constitution.The other six men went back to trial and received sentences of 12 years.
Prominent Little Rock attorney George Rose a letter to outgoing Governor Thomas McRae requesting that he find a way to release the remaining defendants if they agreed to plead guilty.George's letter was an attempt to prevent Governor-Elect Thomas Jefferson Terral,a known member of the Ku Klux Klan,from getting involved the matter.
Just hours before Governor McRae,left office,he contacted Scipio Jones
to inform him that indefinite furloughs had been issued for the remaining defendants.Scipio used the furloughs to obtain release of the prisioners under cover of darkness.The defendants were quickly escorted out of state to prevents their being lynched.
Within a month,Scipio also obtained the release of the other defendants
who had pled guilty or been convicted of lesser offenses.
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