Equity or Diversity & Inclusion.
From California to Hilton Head.
What was the greatest contributing factor to the migration of Blacks from States within the U.S. since the early 1900’s with a vast majority of the migration occurring between 1915 to the 1930’s?
The following statement within the article still rings true today in 2022 as I’ve even talked to individuals from Arkansas.
“And there are still some Black and white people who say the incident should not be talked about….”
CDS Chair\CEO BEMA International
 Black Farmers in Arkansas Still Seek Justice a Century After the Elaine Massacre The long shadow of systemic racism
continues to harm generations of Black agricultural communities that face
entrenched economic obstacles to success. BY WESLEY BROWN JULY
27, 2022  Eugene “Butch” Flenaugh, Jr., on his farm in Arkansas. (Photo credit: Wesley Brown) Eugene “Butch” Flenaugh, Jr. came
back home to Phillips County, Arkansas about five years ago to care for the
family’s farm in the Mississippi River Delta bottomland. Today, when he looks
out over the 400-plus acres that his family owns, he’s often nostalgic about
the stories his father told him when the entire Delta River flatland was
tilled and owned by Black farmers and sharecroppers as far as the eye could
see. After World War I, he says, many came back from fighting overseas and
began to purchase the flood-prone land along the Mississippi River basin that
white farmers thought was inferior. The Flenaughs’ property, nearby
Holly Grove, and the former all-Black towns and communities date back more
than two centuries. Flenaugh and every Black farmer, former sharecropper, and
landowner across the Delta whisper about the missing, lost, or sham property
deeds at the Phillips County Courthouse at the county seat in Helena.
According to state officials, the county is one of just three in the state
that don’t have public online access to court and property records. All those deeds link to the
ghosts of the Elaine Massacre of 1919, which is by far the deadliest racial
confrontation in Arkansas and possibly the bloodiest racial conflict in
U.S. history. The events in Elaine, almost 103
years ago, stemmed from the state’s deepest roots of white supremacy, tense
race relations, and growing concerns about labor unions. In September 1919, a
shooting incident that occurred at a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and
Household Union—a Black-led organization that sought to improve life for
Black farmers and communities in the state—escalated into mob violence by
white people in Elaine and the surrounding area. Although the exact number is
unknown, estimates of the number of African Americans killed range in the
hundreds. Only five white people lost their lives, according to records from
the time. Even so, 12 Black men were arrested in the wake of the white-led
massacre and sentenced to death for murder charges. The Elaine 12, as they
came to be known, became part of a precedent-setting legal case with nearly
as long an impact as the massacre itself. Flenaugh says his family’s land
goes back to his great-grandfather, Cebron Johnson (Hall), who in the 1880s
left more than 30,000 acres in Monroe and Philips counties to descendants and
their families just east of the former all-Black town of Holly Grove. That
land, according to Butch’s father, Eugene, Sr., was owned by the family prior
to the massacre as Black farmers emerged from slavery in the late 19th
century. “This is part of that 30,000 [acres],” says the younger Flenaugh, a well-built, 50-year-old farmer, as he looks out over property that is part forest thicket, part nature preserve, and part family graveyard.  (Photo credit: Wesley
Brown)
What happened to the Johnson land
is a fate that befell countless Black farms during the early 20th century:
Land was taken through outright theft, intimidation, violence, and fraudulent
property records, with the end result of robbing generations of Black
families from the inherited wealth that comes from land ownership. And at a
time when the current administration has committed to advancing racial
equity, and efforts to provide debt relief to
Black farmers have been stymied by racist lawsuits, the scale of violent land
theft is coming to light in a powerful, galvanizing way. A Century of Land Theft in Arkansas Getting to the Flenaughs’ plot of
land in East Holly Grove confuses both Alexa and GPS. Driving 15 miles on
winding Arkansas Highway 146 takes you past the Big Slash Hunting Club, which
locals call “Jurassic Park” due to the habitat’s well-maintained property,
state-of-the-art security, and 10-foot barbed wire fence that screams “no
trespassing.” According to a recent real estate listing, the
1,650-acre preserve is up for sale for $11.1 million; that price tag includes
diverse waterfowl habitats such as flooded green timber, tupelo and cypress
brakes, wetland slashes, and more than 600 acres of agricultural fields. Meanwhile, most Black farmers’
experience in the region is similar to the Flenaughs’. When he first got to
his family’s place, Flenaugh says there was no wildlife in the area because
the rice farmers adjacent to the family’s property had killed off everything
with pesticides. Once he stopped the white farmers from spraying the
chemicals on his family’s property, Flenaugh’s land recovered. Today, it is
brimming with life; a wide variety of waterfowl make the region part of the “Duck-Hunting Capital of the World.”  (Photo CC-licensed by Jimmy Emerson on Flickr) “I can now walk out on my stand
and see the same duck and waterfowls, big game deer, wild pigs, snakes,
catfish, and other wildlife that can be found over there at Big Slash,” says
Flenaugh. The novice farmer told Civil Eats
that the legacy of the
Elaine Massacre is still “thick in the air,” because everyone knows
that thousands of acres of land that are now in the hands of white and
corporate landowners once belonged to Black farmers. “It doesn’t make any sense,
because if you go look at the records over the years, they kept changing the
[property] books,” he says, adding that most Black families were driven off
their land or “scattered” during the Red Summer of 1919. “If you look at those records, those whose [names] were penciled out
just disappeared; those that had red marks were burned on their land or in
their houses. The ones that had blue check marks on them are the ones that
they were after, or they just left and never came back,” he says. “The sad part about it is
that every last bit of property around here is ‘heir property.’ If more
people understood that, they could come back and get [their] land.”
According to a 2019 report
by the Equal Justice Initiative, the
racist attacks in 1919 were widespread and targeted the 380,000 Black veterans who
had just returned from the war. “Military service sparked dreams of racial
equality for generations of African Americans,” the report notes. However,
“during the lynching era, many Black veterans were targeted for mistreatment,
violence, and murder because of their race and status as veterans” and the
perceived threat they posed to Jim Crow and racial subordination. The report
goes on to note that “racial violence . . . reinforced a legacy of racial
inequality that has never been adequately addressed and continues to be
evident in the injustice and unfairness of the administration of criminal
justice in America.” Flenaugh says the Elaine Massacre
sent a message of intimidation that still affects the region today. And there
are still some Black and
white people who say the incident should not be talked about, even
after a local committee dedicated a memorial to those slain during the
100-year commemoration two years ago. “The sad part about it is that
every last bit of property around here is ‘heir property.’ If
more people understood that, they could come back and get [their] land,” he
says. Yet Flenaugh’s own family is
still in a fight to keep all their land. Flenaugh and his father, Eugene
Flenaugh, Sr., and two brothers, Johnathan and Eric, had a court date this
summer at the Phillip County Circuit Court in Helena-West Helena concerning
property line dispute with a white farmer seeking to plant rice on their
plot. The tense struggle has led to
confrontations with the Phillips County Sheriff’s Department and bad blood
with the white farmer. In June, the court allowed the white farmer to plant
on the disputed land, but the complaint still has not been fully settled.
Larry Hicks, a Little Rock-based NAACP attorney who has taken an interest in
the Flenaugh’s case and the plight of Black farmers in Arkansas, said the
family recently sent a letter to the court terminating the legal services of
their attorney following the court hearing in late June. For the Flenaughs, the dispute bring up memories of
Elaine and the repeating patterns of stolen Black wealth. “We just want them
to leave us alone,” the elder Flenaugh told Civil Eats. Working to Return Lands to Black Families One month before Flenaugh’s
hearing, Lisa Hicks-Gilbert of Elaine entered the same Phillips County
courthouse to research what happened to her relatives’ land. She first
learned about the massacre in 2008, while studying to be a paralegal, and
discovered the book Blood in Their Eyes. In hushed conversations with her
grandmother, she learned that she had a personal connection to the massacre:
She was related to three of the Elaine 12, including Frank and Ed Hicks. The
story goes that Frank had two families—one with his first wife, who died at
an early age, and another after he remarried. Hicks-Gilbert says she is a
granddaughter of one of the first sons but she has been trying to track down
more information about that side of the family since her grandmother passed
away in 2019, on the 100th anniversary of the massacre. Hicks-Gilbert says she promised
not to speak publicly about the massacre while her grandmother was alive. Now
the caretaker of the Descendants of the Elaine Massacre Facebook
group, Gilbert is on a mission to make sure that the heirs’
property belonging to Black descendants of the Elaine genocide is
restored to its rightful owners.  Lisa Hicks-Gilberts. (Photo credit: Wesley Brown) “The biggest endeavor we are
working on is creating a database of all those killed and the survivors.
We’re going to open it up [to the public] because we know that in finding
records and talking to families, a lot of them [left town] during the
massacre. They were scared,” says Hicks-Gilbert. She adds that many Black families
and single men who didn’t migrate to the Midwest or East stayed on as
sharecroppers in Arkansas or left for states like Louisiana, Alabama, and
Mississippi. Once there, they often sought out anonymity. “I found one family that changed
their last name after their grandfather escaped,” says Hicks-Gilbert. On that day at the courthouse,
she learned that her great-grandfather’s brother, Ed or Edd Hicks, one of the
Elaine 12, lost his land to a white landowner just two months after he and
the eleven other Black men were jailed and charged with murder and condemned
to death by all-white juries. Hicks-Gilbert says that seeing the deed itself helped her understand the “transgenerational trauma” she had seen in her grandmother’s face every day while she was alive. “She was friends with survivors who were in the choir with her, who went to church with her, and they all shared in this tragedy,” says Hicks-Gilbert, wiping tears from her eyes. “And I look at it now; it was all about surviving.”  Six of the Elaine 12 circa 1923: S. A. Jones, Ed Hicks, Frank
Hicks, Frank Moore, J. C. Knox, Ed Coleman and Paul Hall. Scipio Jones is at
left. (Photo courtesy of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, Central
Arkansas Library System.)
Like Flenaugh, Hicks-Gilbert says
the massacre was meant to put fear in the hearts of Black farmers across the
Arkansas Delta. Hicks-Gilbert’s main goal is to
get an accurate count all the Black people killed during the massacre. In
tracking coverage and mentions of the incident over time, she has noticed
that white newspapers have often minimized the Black death toll. At first,
local law enforcement set the official number at 26. In the years afterward,
however, some estimates have swelled to well over 800. “When I get with other
descendants, we’re talking, and everybody’s stories are syncing up, we know
there were upwards of a thousand [deaths],” says Hicks-Gilbert. She also believes the ghosts of
the Elaine Massacre are responsible for the feeling that time has been
standing still in Philips County for the last 100 years. She points to the
fact that it still has the state’s largest Black population, but the median
household income of $33,724 is 50 percent lower than
the national average $67,521, and 32 percent lower than the Arkansas median.
It is not only the poorest county in Arkansas but
also among the poorest counties in the U.S. by
household income. “At least three generations of Hicks worked on the land that was
stolen from my grandfather and my uncle. . . . Black families throughout
Phillips County were left with generations of poverty, oppression,
suppression, and depression akin to slavery.”
Hicks-Gilbert said the Black
sharecroppers that were a part of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union
at Hoop Spur were not just fighting for better pay for their crops at the
time. They were also banding together to buy land independently, as a path
toward community and generational wealth that would have enriched the lives
of many Black families in Phillips County and Arkansas. “At least three
generations of Hicks worked on the land that was stolen from my grandfather
and my uncle. My brother currently lives and works near Hoop Spur, yet we
have never owned any part of it,” she added. “Instead, Black families
throughout Phillips County were left with generations of poverty, oppression,
suppression, and depression akin to slavery.” Reconnecting to Farming—and to Racial Justice In New York City, Hazel
Adams-Shango also has a connection to these Arkansas farmers and
sharecroppers as the great-granddaughter of Scipio Africanus Jones, the
iconic civil rights attorney now getting renewed national attention for his
work defending the Elaine 12. Adams-Shango is a budding urban
farmer who began studying hydroponics at the beginning of the pandemic, after
she became concerned about food security. Her interest in farming turned
serious when she took a class on vertical farming at Farm.One, the
crowdfunded, antiracist, and antidiscrimination urban
farm in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood that supplies hydroponic greens and
edible flowers to many of the city’s top restaurants. “It has been calling us all this
time; we just had to listen,” says Adams-Shango of her farming roots. She
added that her journey into urban and vertical farming brings back memories
of her childhood visits to the South with her great aunt, who ran a homestead
farm in Vicksburg, Mississippi. “I would spend summers down there
. . . but I had forgotten all about that,” Adams-Shango recalls. While she was learning to farm,
her mother and 103-year-old aunt attended the unveiling of a life-size
portrait of her famous great-grandfather. In 1923, Jones filed an appeal with
the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the Elaine 12 were denied due process of
law. After reviewing the case, the Supreme Court agreed and overturned the
convictions. The precedent-setting Moore v. Dempsey changed
the nature of the 14th Amendment’s due process clause, allowing federal
courts to hear and examine evidence in state criminal cases to protect
defendants’ constitutional rights.  Scipio Africanus Jones. (Photo courtesy of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, Central Arkansas Library System.) For years, Adams-Shango says her
mother used to share stories about the famous lawyer, but she only now
understands the strong connection to farming. She is also excited about the
renewed interest in his life. That interest also led Hollywood’s Searchlight
Pictures last year to purchase the rights for The Defender, a
biopic about Scipio Jones. Meanwhile, Adams-Shango is taking
a leap and starting a farm with her three adult children, Kofi, Johnathan,
and Hazel. After an immersion program at Hartsfield Organic Farm in Vermont,
her family found a farm mentor, ordered non-GMO heirloom seeds, and made
plans to pay a financial backer $1,200 a year to bootstrap a 17.5-acre plot
called The Flying Buffalo. “I think this can work, and can
even do this as a family,” the former Chicago Mercantile Exchange broker
explains. Advancing Racial Equity Nationwide Returning land, or the wealth
that it would have generated, to Black families poses a monumental challenge.
This spring, a study out of the University of Massachusetts-Boston showed
that Black farmers lost more than $326 billion worth
of land during the 20th century. Dania Francis, the lead author of the study, told Civil Eats that Black agricultural land ownership peaked right after the turn of the 20th century, just ahead of the Elaine Massacre and the wave of others like it. W.E.B DuBois in 1907 estimated that Black families owned 3 million acres in 1875, 8 million in 1890, and 12 million in 1900. By 1910, African Americans had acquired more than 16 million acres. “This was the most land they would ever own in the United States; however, there was a nearly 90 percent decline in ownership from 1910 to 1997,” the report Francis said that total
represents the most conservative estimate possible. “We don’t include all the
additional life-reinforcing value that having that land would create,” she
told Civil Eats. “If you are a landowner, you are more able to send your kids
to college; you are more able to invest in other businesses. So, we didn’t
even model that in this estimate.” Francis and her team have already
started the second phase of the study, which will include research on the
potential wealth lost by Black farmers and their families. “We wanted to get
this estimate out there first, and now there is this ability to use this land
[as the baseline for calculating] capital and grow the [estimate] even
bigger.” The final piece of the study,
Francis acknowledged, is moving the national conversation on reparations that
was reignited following George Floyd’s murder forward. Francis, who
co-authored an influential 2003 paper on “The Economics of Reparations,” said
the key takeaway from the 2022 study is that the legacy of slavery and
post-Civil War state-sanctioned discrimination and ongoing institutional
inequities prevented the enslaved and their descendants from benefiting from
the growth of the U.S. economy. “The work that we are doing has
to be done directly in conversation with the work on reparations,” Francis
said. “A reparations program should be targeted to the current Black-white
wealth gap as a representation of all that harm.” Francis added that it is
important to have an estimate for not just Black agricultural losses but for
“all the individual harms” that have impacted African Americans, including
slavery, lynching, housing discrimination, and racism in the criminal justice
system. “Not that we are going to add up
all those harms, but it helps provide more evidence to say, ‘Look, this has
dollar value,’” said Francis. For descendants like Flenaugh, Adams-Shango, and Hicks-Gilbert—and their families and communities—that’s an important step forward. --------------------------------------------------------- 
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“Our lives are
not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and
every kindness, we birth our future.” David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
