Ruled by Race: Black/White Relations in Arkansas From Slavery to the Present

8. The Elaine Race Massacres

C H A P T E R 8 The Elaine Race Massacres In his first successful race for governor in 1916, Charles Hillman Brough was ambushed by an opponent, secretary of state Earl Hodges, for being too soft on the race question. As a professor at the University of Arkansas, Brough had become chairman in 1912 of a commission that brought together eleven Southern universities to devise a scientific approach to the study of the race question in the South. Hodges thought he had found Brough’s weak spot, for a 1915 article in the Arkansas Gazette had retrieved Brough’s work and could be twisted to make it appear that as chairman he was supporting racial equality. In fact what Brough had preached back then was no more than what a number of racial conservatives had been saying for an entire generation : the present problem with race relations in the South was that there was no longer a healthy interaction between the races as there had been during slavery. Then, whites had taught blacks, had civilized them in effect, and blacks being the highly imitative creature-like persons they were had made real progress. According to Brough the work of the university race commission performed the role of an “intellectual aristocracy” that blacks in the South so badly needed to make their way from “the immediate, passionate, and unreflective life of the African savage toward a social order the nexus of which is rational rather than emotional or instinctive.”1 Brough had written in 1914, 153 1STOCKLEY_pages_i-250.qxd 10/7/08 12:06 AM Page 153 This close social contact of the races has now almost entirely disappeared. In the Southern states generally there are today no points of social contact whatever where the two races meet and exchange ideas. Separate schools, separate churches, separate telephones, the “Jim Crow” car, restrictions of the ballot, not to mention violent anti-negro political agitation in at least two of the states, have produced an alienation of the two races without parallel.2 Eureka! Brough had advocated “close social contact.” Brough was for race mixing; the egg-headed professor with all the fancy degrees including a doctorate from Johns Hopkins was for social equality; there was no telling what mileage Hodges could get out of it. The Education of Charles Hillman Brough Brough was unlike most, if not all, gubernatorial candidates in the South in this era due to his educational background and the amount of time he had devoted to the issue of race and race relations. Of all Arkansas’s governors, whatever the subject, he was the most intellectually prepared: not only did he have a doctorate in “economics, history and jurisprudence” from leading national university Johns Hopkins, where one of his professors was none other than future president Woodrow Wilson, but he had also picked up a master of arts degree in psychology at Mississippi College and a law degree from the University of Mississippi. By 1903, moving from Mississippi, he had become a professor at the University of Arkansas. In his dissertation on Brough, Charles Orson Cook points out his appeal to Arkansans, which was no more in evidence than at his death in 1935 when there was an outpouring of emotion and affection for the former governor. Arkansans, defensive as ever about their state’s image, were proud to have a well-spoken, erudite, and gentlemanly orator for their chief executive, someone who valiantly 154 THE ELAINE RACE MASSACRES 1STOCKLEY_pages_i-250.qxd 10/7/08 12:06 AM Page 154 defended the state against the writer H. L. Mencken who delighted in exposing the state’s political, economic, and cultural shortcomings to America. Mencken once wrote, “Not even the Red Cross, with all its munificence, could prevent the inhabitants [of Arkansas] from starving to death from congenital ignorance.”3 At all times, Brough above all was a booster of his adopted state, a proponent of the “New South,” which had been in vogue for over a generation with its emphasis on attracting hands-on venture capitalists in order to remake the South into a paradise ripe for exploitation of its abundant natural resources and labor force. The issue, as Brough saw it, was that “large numbers of semi-literate, sub-moral, and barbaric Negroes without the benefit of education and guidance from more advanced whites, threatened to debase southern society, or worse, jeopardize its...