The end of slavery brought new injustices. Reconstruction helped lift black people to power, but the quick demise of that power brought more despair.
Within a decade of emancipation, a vicious system of sharecropping had already developed. It worked like this: At the end of the year, around Christmas, the sharecropper would be called to the plantation office to get paid for his year’s work. It was often a moment of bitterly dashed hope, as Nicholas Lemann writes. The sharecropper would be handed a piece of paper with a single number. Sometimes it represented the amount he owed the planter; other times, after a year’s worth of work, he’d earned just a few dollars. It could be fatal to ask for a detailed accounting. The false-promise aspect of sharecropping, the constant assertion by planters that your poverty was your own fault—you and he were simply business partners, your loss was right there in cold type on the statement—made it especially painful, Lemann writes. As a sharecropper, you found your life was organized in a way that bore some theoretical relation to that of a free American—and yet the reality was completely different. There were only two ways to explain it, and neither one led to contentment: either there was a conspiracy dedicated to keeping you down, or—the whites’ explanation—you were inferior, incapable.
The fever of a black emigration movement to Liberia testified to the desperation of rural black Southerners. Helena became the birthplace and hotbed of activists for this early Back-to-Africa Movement. The first convention of the Liberian Exodus Arkansas Colony took place in Helena, at the Third Baptist Church, in 1877. Still, very few would make it to Liberia—no more than one hundred people from Phillips County; they were too poor and too far inland, and white planters would not release them from their fabricated debts.
At around the same time that black people in Helena were organizing to get out, Frederick Douglass vigorously denounced any kind of movement in favor of migration, whether west, north, or to Africa. Great work, he exhorted, needed to be done in the South. For Douglass, the South was a home and homeland, a ground of his political powers and possibilities. In 1879, he declared, The colored people of the South, just beginning to accumulate a little property, and to lay the foundations of family, should not be in haste to sell that little and be off to the banks of the Mississippi. A man should never leave his home for a new one till he has earnestly endeavored to make his immediate surroundings accord with his wishes. The habit of roaming from place to place in pursuit of better conditions of existence is never a good one….It is a more cheerful thing to be able to say, I was born here and know all the people, than to say, I am a stranger here and know none of the people.
Douglass’s optimism fueled his insensitivity. If black people could fight and win the Civil War, they could fight and win their freedom now. For as much as black emigration reflected the assertion of power of individual black people, it also admitted the triumph of mean and lawless Southern states. Above all, Douglass was a dreamer: He believed in the promises of Reconstruction, refusing to accept that it was a dead project. He had not anticipated that black people would express freedom by abandoning the South he’d hoped to reconstruct. The world’s most famous fugitive wanted black people to stay in the South.
Douglass was in the minority. Other black leaders understood, more profoundly than he did, that the oppressive institutions of the South would continue unfettered and uncorrected.
This was true in Helena. Like other states across the South, Arkansas jailed ex-slaves as a way of extorting their labor. Before emancipation, jail populations were mostly white, as masters needed their slaves’ labor and bailed out any who were arrested. But after emancipation, these jails’ inhabitants were disproportionately black. Local courts acted as a conveyor belt for labor-starved employers throughout the state, as the historian David Oshinsky writes. Charges were minor, and sentences harsh. In Phillips County, two ex-slaves were convicted for forging orders for one quart of whiskey; one got eighteen years in prison, the other thirty-six.
One former slave described the new system as worse than slavery, because the freedom was fake and the game rigged. Ex-slaves and their children continued to do the same work that they’d always done: building levees, clearing swampland, and harvesting cotton. Industrialization soon made the work even more perilous. Coal mines, sawmills, and railroad camps had a high number of fatalities.
Still, other sources of dignity persisted and bloomed. Black parents started their own schools. In Phillips County, a shady grove served as a classroom. Another classroom was a floorless mule stable. Quakers from Indiana came to help; locals called them “nigger teachers and nigger spoilers.” Black soldiers stationed in Helena raised two thousand dollars to help the Quakers build Southland College, soon to become the first black institution of higher learning west of the Mississippi River. And there was always the blues. Saloons and juke joints were packed with people who danced, flirted, fell in love, and shared the bootlegged liquor that, in Arkansas, flowed more freely than in Prohibition-strict Mississippi.
But the blues and the free schools could not stop the violence propelled by white supremacy. From the end of Reconstruction to the Second World War, more lynchings occurred in Phillips County than in any other county in America. During the Elaine massacre, as the historian Nan Woodruff writes, one teacher in Phillips County witnessed twenty-eight black people killed, their bodies then thrown into a pit and burned; he saw sixteen more hanging from a bridge near Helena. Grif Stockley cites a Memphis newspaper’s account, Enraged citizens also fired at the bodies of the dead negroes, as they rode out of Helena toward Elaine. And a local resident testified, “When we saw them shooting and burning them we turned running and went to the railroad east from there, and the white people tried to cut us off. They were shooting at us all the time….By 5 o’clock that evening, there was near 300 more white people coming on with guns, shooting and killing men, women and children.”