Union-organizing Black sharecroppers were massacred for defending their own meeting

Evidence

In Arkansas that year, African American sharecroppers in the town of Elaine placed armed sentries outside a church to guard their union-organizing meeting. They knew, as one of the Black men declared, that if their effort to join a labor union was discovered “the whites…are going to kill us.” Despite the sharecroppers’ stealth, as feared, the wealthy landowners had caught wind of the mobilization and sent a local deputy, a detective for the railroad, and a Black prison trusty, Kid Collins, as one participant in the meeting said, “to break up the meeting or to shoot it up.” The sentries spotted them. The ensuing gun battle left one white man dead, the other wounded, and Kid Collins running back to town to alert the authorities. The political leaders defined the Black sharecroppers’ act of self-defense as the onset of a plot to kill all the white people in the county and, perhaps, the state. The governor called in the U.S. Army, which machine-gunned and shot hundreds of Black residents. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 809

Categorization

• SEED: The Elaine massacre case is a sharp instance for an essay on how self-defense by the oppressed is reclassified as offensive conspiracy by authorities.
• CANDY: The detail of the Black prison trusty sent to ‘shoot up’ a union meeting is a striking, tweetable nugget.