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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.

Winner of the 1994 Virginia C. Ledbetter Prize, this collection of wide-ranging essays is the first collaborative work to focus exclusively on the living and historical contradictions of the Arkansas portion of the Mississippi River delta. Individual chapters deal with the French and Spanish colonial experience; the impact of the Civil War, the roles of African Americans, women, and various ethnic groups; and the changes that have occurred in towns, in social life, and in agriculture. What emerges is a rich tapestry—a land of black and white, of wealth and poverty, of progress and stasis, f despair and hope—through which all that is dear and terrible about this often overlooked region of the South is revealed.