U.S. democracy owes much to fearless Black journalists like Ida B. Wells and Walter White. At a time when white newspaper leaders in the U.S. South helped plan and build the violent political, economic, and social systems of white supremacy that hardened into Jim Crow, Black journalists used their newspapers to document the fight for a multiracial, inclusive democracy.
Their work reminds us that the press has long been a powerful actor in struggles for democracy.
For instance, in the fall of 1919 a rumor spread through the white community of Elaine, Ark.: Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers were plotting an insurrection. According to whispers, Black sharecroppers were planning to murder the “best citizens” of the small Delta town and confiscate their land, plantations, and stores.
It had been a bumper cotton season and prices were high. Black men, it was said, intended to take the profits and the means of cotton production and sale for themselves. They were amassing arms. They had set the date. But white leaders thwarted their plans at the last second. This, at least, was the story the New York Times reported on its front page.
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But it was an entirely false report, the result of a disinformation campaign strategically crafted under Governor Charles Hillman Brough’s direction and spread nationwide by powerful newspapers. This fake news gave white authorities the pretense to quash Black organizing and control Black labor. White mobs also used the rumors to justify hunting Black citizens in the area for days, murdering men, women, and children and pillaging and burning their property.
The misleading story from the The New York Times story echoed local reporting in Little Rock’s competing newspapers of record, the Arkansas Gazette and the Arkansas Democrat, whose correspondents were on the scene in Elaine and Phillips County. These reporters at the Gazette and the Democrat witnessed first-hand how white mobs attacked Black citizens. In fact, historians believe these reporters knew that the story of the “Negro insurrection” was concocted by the Committee of Seven, a large group of Phillips County landowners the governor appointed to investigate events and maintain economic control over Black farmers who worked on their plantations. But these white journalists still reported the false story as truth.
Based on our original research, we found that the so-called “Elaine riot” published in the Gazette and Democrat demonstrated a vivid instance of a disinformation campaign crafted in real time as events played out; the lies were a calculated effort to shape public opinion, serve the special interests of the white elite in Arkansas, and mislead the outside world. The Democrat and the Gazette even blamed the Black residents of Elaine for the violence and the Black periodicals the Chicago Defender and The Crisis (the NAACP’s magazine) for inciting racial hatred. As a result of this coordinated cover up, 12 Black men were framed as insurrectionists and sentenced to death in sham trials. Governor Charles H. Brough banned the Defender and The Crisis in Arkansas.
Journalist and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells took action. In December 1919, she published a letter in the Defender—the most popular Black newspaper of the day with a circulation of 130,000 and a readership much larger—asking for donations to fund her travel to Arkansas to investigate what happened in Elaine. She also called for sustained Black efforts to defend the Elaine Twelve. She was prepared to pursue justice all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary. And it was.
Wells’ letter reached deep into Arkansas, finding its way to the imprisoned men. One wrote to Wells to thank her and the city of Chicago for their help.
Wells arrived in Little Rock in January 1920, the first time she had returned South in 28 years. She had been forced to flee Memphis in 1892 after she published an exposé about lynching in her newspaper The Free Speech and Headlight when she was 29 years old. As the wives and mothers of the Elaine Twelve provided cover, Wells interviewed the men through the bars of their jail cells, documenting their accounts of what really happened two months earlier.
The traumatized men told of their efforts to organize a union of Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers to gain economic independence. They recounted how white men, outraged at their plans, fired into a union meeting at a church late one evening, and union members fired back, resulting in the death of a white man. They recalled vengeful white armed posses, more than 1,000 strong, and 550 soldiers battle-hardened during WWI, hunting, shooting, burning and killing Black men, women, and children who were hiding in terror for days in canebrakes and swamps. They spoke of false confessions coerced through torture—beatings, floggings, fake hangings and electrocutions—and white landowners taking their crops, homes, livestock and possessions, leaving their families homeless and penniless.
During that week of racial violence, white terrorists killed likely hundreds of Black people, the exact number lost to history, in one of the most horrific racial massacres in the history of the United States.
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Wells published a story about her trip in a February issue of the Defender, launching a new fundraising effort to pay for her pamphlet, published in May, titled “The Arkansas Race Riot.” Here, she provided the most comprehensive and accurate account of the massacre at the time, recording testimony from the twelve men as well as the harrowing experiences of their families. Wells sent 1,000 copies of her pamphlet to Arkansas.
Walter White, the 27-year-old assistant secretary of the NAACP who would later go on to lead the organization, also worked to correct the account of the Elaine Massacre. Then a 27-year-old assistant secretary for the NAACP, he traveled to Arkansas posing as a white reporter for the Chicago Daily News to investigate the “Arkansas riots.” White, who was white-passing, incredibly (and bravely) interviewed the Governor, who told him the white people of the Delta had put down the “uprising” with “remarkable restraint and kindness.” It was a bald-faced lie. White was on his way to interview the prisoners when a local Black man told him his cover was blown and a lynching was in the works. He barely escaped Arkansas alive.
White published his investigation in several sympathetic white outlets like the Chicago Daily News and the Nation and, of course, The Crisis and the Defender. His reporting showed that, in contravention of law, more than 1,000 Black people had been captured, abused, and held in deplorable conditions in the immediate aftermath of the massacre. They were released only if a white planter or employer vouched for them and were then forced to carry passes signed by military officers.
Wells’ and White’s reporting was essential to the NAACP’s case for legal justice, pursued all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1923, the Court ruled that the trial of the Elaine Twelve had been a travesty of due process and justice under mob rule. The Elaine Twelve were finally freed.
Today, descendants of those killed and harmed by the Elaine Massacre, still are working to correct the historical record, tell their own stories, and demand reparations for crimes and cover-ups for which no white perpetrator was ever truly held accountable. Today, the Elaine Legacy Center preserves oral histories while advancing Elaine’s transformation into a cultural hub that merges historical reckoning with economic justice.
While justice for such violence has not been fully legally delivered, the lesson for today is clear: If we are ever to achieve the inclusive and just democracy of our country’s highest aspirations, we need a press willing to stand up for that democracy.
Christmaelle Vernet is a senior majoring in journalism and legal studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Kathy Roberts Forde is professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
