Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919

Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919 by Stockley, Grif. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781557287175.

In late September 1919, black sharecroppers met in Elaine, Arkansas, to protest unfair settlements for their cotton crops from white plantation owners. Local law enforcement broke up their meeting, and the next day a thousand white men from the Delta - and troops of the U. S. Army - converged on the area. The result was a massacre. Contemporary estimates of African American deaths ranged from 20 to an even more horrifying 856. And white officials jailed hundreds of black workers, torturing some of them. Yet it was twelve black men who were charged with first-degree murder. The official story was that only blacks who had resisted lawful authority were killed, that white defenders had to "put down" the black sharecroppers "insurrection." Grif Stockley tells the full story of this incident for the first time. Also a lawyer, he weighs the evidence in letters, interviews, newspapers, and trial transcripts. He makes a clear and powerful case that white mobs and federal soldiers murdered black citizens of Elaine.