Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta: Essays to Mark the Centennial of the Elaine Massacre has won the 2024 John William Graves Book Award from the Arkansas Historical Association.
Edited by Michael Pierce and Calvin White, 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.
Reviewing the book in the Journal of Southern History, Evan Howard Ashford wrote “Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta contributes to the fields of United States history, southern history, African American history, and Arkansas history by adding a much-needed intersectional analysis of the power struggle between Black and white in areas like gender, economics, and politics. The volume also connects Arkansas’s role in the Black freedom struggle to a larger narrative that expands the many ways to study African Americans’ quest for freedom and equality.”
Michael Pierce is associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He is the author of Striking with the Ballot: Ohio Labor and the Populist Party. Calvin White Jr. is associate dean of the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas, where he is also associate professor of history. He is the author of The Rise to Respectability: Race, Religion, and the Church of God in Christ.
The John William Graves Book Award was established in 2015 and is presented biennially for the best book-length historical study (nonfiction) whose primary focus is any aspect of the history of race relations in Arkansas or of the history of African Americans in Arkansas. It is given in honor of historian John William Graves, who received his B.A. and M.A. in history from the University of Arkansas in 1964 and 1967 and his Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia in 1978. He is a past president of the Arkansas Historical Association and the author of Town and Country: Race Relations in an Urban-Rural Context, Arkansas, 1865-1905, published by the University of Arkansas Press.