[PDF] Race Labor And Violence In The Delta eBook

Author : Michael Pierce
Publisher : University of Arkansas Press
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 24,21 MB
Release : 2022-05-30
Category : History
ISBN : 1610757750

GET BOOK

Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta examines the history of labor relations and racial conflict in the Mississippi Valley from the Civil War into the late twentieth century. This essay collection grew out of a conference marking the hundredth anniversary of one of the nation’s deadliest labor conflicts—the 1919 Elaine Massacre, during which white mobs ruthlessly slaughtered over two hundred African Americans across Phillips County, Arkansas, in response to a meeting of unionized Black sharecroppers. The essays here demonstrate that the brutality that unfolded in Phillips County was characteristic of the culture of race- and labor-based violence that prevailed in the century after the Civil War. They detail how Delta landowners began seeking cheap labor as soon as the slave system ended—securing a workforce by inflicting racial terror, eroding the Reconstruction Amendments in the courts, and obstructing federal financial-relief efforts. The result was a system of peonage that continued to exploit Blacks and poor whites for their labor, sometimes fatally. In response, laborers devised their own methods for sustaining themselves and their communities: forming unions, calling strikes, relocating, and occasionally operating outside the law. By shedding light on the broader context of the Elaine Massacre, Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta reveals that the fight against white supremacy in the Delta was necessarily a fight for better working conditions, fair labor practices, and economic justice.

Author : Michael Pierce
Publisher : University of Arkansas Press
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 11,15 MB
Release : 2022-05-11
Category : History
ISBN : 1682262065

GET BOOK

"This essay collection grew out of a conference marking the hundredth anniversary of one of the nation's deadliest labor conflicts - the 1919 Elaine Massacre, during which white mobs ruthlessly slaughtered over two hundred African Americans across Phillips County, Arkansas, in response to a meeting of unionized Black sharecroppers. The essays here demonstrate that the brutality that unfolded in Phillips County was characteristic of the culture of race- and labor-based violence that prevailed in the century after the Civil War"--

Author : K. Rogers
Publisher : Springer
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 43,89 MB
Release : 2006-02-04
Category : History
ISBN : 1403982953

GET BOOK

Terrorism, black poverty, and economic exploitation produced a condition of collective trauma and social suffering for thousands of black Deltans in the Twentieth Century. Based on oral histories with African American activists and community leaders, this work reveals the impact of that oppression.

Author : Steven A. Anthony
Publisher :
Page : 217 pages
File Size : 31,20 MB
Release : 2019
Category : African American labor union members
ISBN :

GET BOOK

"This dissertation examines the racially motivated mob dominated violence that took place during the autumn of 1919 in rural Phillips County, Arkansas nearby Elaine. The efforts of white planters to supplant the loss of enslaved labor due to the abolition of American slavery played a crucial role in re-making the southern agrarian economy in the early twentieth century. My research explores how the conspicuous features of sharecropping, tenant farming, peonage, or other variations of debt servitude became a means for the re-enslavement of African Americans in the Arkansas Delta. However, as black sharecroppers faced economic, social, and political struggles rooted in racism and discrimination; they attempted to change their surroundings through activism and resistance. A point of interest in this work is World War I and how attitudes following the war shaped the ways in which sharecroppers in the Delta region of Arkansas engaged with race and the social order. The emergence of a labor movement became the catalyst for sharecroppers to form a labor union which represented a material threat to white hegemony. In general, this dissertation will explore the causal connections of the Elaine Riot of 1919 and the circumstances that eventually led to the landmark Supreme Court case Moore v. Dempsey (1923)"--Abstract.

Author : Clyde Woods
Publisher : Verso Books
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 15,56 MB
Release : 2017-05-02
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1844675610

GET BOOK

A new edition of a classic history of the Mississippi River Delta Development Arrested is a major reinterpretation of the 200-year-old conflict between African American workers and the planters of the Mississippi Delta. The book measures the impact of the plantation system on those who suffered its depredations firsthand, while tracing the decline and resurrection of plantation ideology in national public policy debate. Despite countless defeats under the planter regime, African Americans in the Delta continued to push forward their agenda for social and economic justice. Throughout this remarkably interdisciplinary book, ranging across fields as diverse as rural studies, musicology, development studies, and anthropology, Woods demonstrates the role of music—including jazz, rock and roll, soul, rap and, above all, the blues—in sustaining a radical vision of social change.

Author : Clyde Adrian Woods
Publisher : Verso
Page : 366 pages
File Size : 20,7 MB
Release : 1998
Category : History
ISBN : 9781859848111

GET BOOK

Development Arrested is a major reinterpretation of the two-centuries-old conflict between African American workers and the planters of the Mississippi Delta. Ranging across disciplines as diverse as rural studies, musicology, development studies and anthropology, it provides a unique assessment of the impact of the plantation system on those who suffered its depredations at first hand.

Author : Guy Lancaster
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 167 pages
File Size : 43,98 MB
Release : 2014-07-30
Category : History
ISBN : 0739195484

GET BOOK

Even before the end of Reconstruction in Arkansas, the state already possessed a long-standing reputation for violence, including lynchings, duels, and feuds. However, the years following Reconstruction witnessed the creation of new forms of mob violence. All across the state, gangs of whites sought to drive African Americans from their homes, their jobs, and their positions of authority, creating communities shamelessly advertised as “100% white.” This happened not only in the highland regions, the Ozarks and the Ouachitas, where the expulsion of African Americans created so-called “sundown towns,” but it also occurred in the low-lying Delta lands of eastern Arkansas, where cotton was king and where masked mobs of landless “whitecappers” and “nightriders” regularly dealt terror and murder to black sharecroppers. Racial Cleansing in Arkansas, 1883–1924: Politics, Land, Labor, and Criminality by Guy Lancaster is the first book to examine the phenomenon of racial cleansing within the context of one particular state, illustrating how violence relates to geography and economic development. Lancaster analyzes the wholesale expulsion of African Americans and the emergence of “sundown towns” together with a survey of more limited deportations, including those with blatant political goals as well as vigilante violence. The book has broader implications not only for the study of Southern and American history but also for a deeper understanding of ethnic and racial conflict, local politics, and labor history

Author : Eric Arnesen
Publisher :
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 33,4 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN :

GET BOOK

Contains eleven essays that address issues faced by African-American workers since the late-nineteenth century, such as economic insecurity, the rise and fall of NAACP, and the civil rights movement.

Author : John DeSantis
Publisher : Arcadia Publishing
Page : 173 pages
File Size : 20,83 MB
Release : 2013-04-16
Category : History
ISBN : 1439658676

GET BOOK

On November 23, 1887, white vigilantes gunned down unarmed black laborers and their families during a spree lasting more than two hours. The violence erupted due to strikes on Louisiana sugar cane plantations. Fear, rumor and white supremacist ideals clashed with an unprecedented labor action to create an epic tragedy. A future member of the U.S. House of Representatives was among the leaders of a mob that routed black men from houses and forced them to a stretch of railroad track, ordering them to run for their lives before gunning them down. According to a witness, the guns firing in the black neighborhoods sounded like a battle. Author and award-winning reporter John DeSantis uses correspondence, interviews and federal records to detail this harrowing true story.

Author : Nan Elizabeth Woodruff
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 21,6 MB
Release : 2009-07-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0674045335

GET BOOK

This is the story of how rural Black people struggled against the oppressive sharecropping system of the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta during the first half of the twentieth century. Here, white planters forged a world of terror and poverty for Black workers, one that resembled the horrific deprivations of the African Congo under Belgium’s King Leopold II. Delta planters did not cut off the heads and hands of their African American workers but, aided by local law enforcement, they engaged in peonage, murder, theft, and disfranchisement. As individuals and through collective struggle, in conjunction with national organizations like the NAACP and local groups like the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, Black men and women fought back, demanding a just return for their crops and laying claim to a democratic vision of citizenship. Their efforts were amplified by the two world wars and the depression, which expanded the mobility and economic opportunities of Black people and provoked federal involvement in the region. Nan Woodruff shows how the freedom fighters of the 1960s would draw on this half-century tradition of protest, thus expanding our standard notions of the civil rights movement and illuminating a neglected but significant slice of the American Black experience.