HISTORY

GET READY FOR THE FUTURE

IT IS MURDER.

BY GUY LANCASTER

This piece is inspired by Guy Lancaster’s new book, “American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching,” available locally at Wordsworth Books, through the website of the University of Arkansas Press, or wherever else you might buy good books.

In June 1897, a white mob in Lonoke County kidnapped a Black teacher named D.T. Watson and gave him a thorough beating. Local African Americans were warned “that they had education enough” and were only needed for chopping cotton. A few months later, Watson went missing, only to be found hanging from a tree with a sign pinned to him: “A warning to ‘nigger’ schoolteachers. We want none of this kind of people in this country; others beware.”

Watson was but one of 97 Black people lynched in Arkansas in the decade spanning 1891 to 1900 — 93 males and 4 females. By contrast, 16 white males were lynched during the same time. This was a real change from the previous decade. From 1881 to 1890, there were 36 Black males lynched in the state, compared to 27 white males. While every lynching was an evil, comparing the numbers raises the question of what exactly happened to foster this spike in anti-Black violence.

The answer is rather simple: the perfection of a one-party state through the scapegoating of Black political and economic power.

And African Americans in Arkansas had real power during the Reconstruction era and beyond. Textbooks of a previous generation loved to portray newly emancipated slaves as disastrously unready for the “burdens of freedom.” For example, the 1966 textbook “Historic Arkansas” by John L. Ferguson and J.H. Atkinson reads thus: “After the war, the Arkansas Negro became a ‘freedman’ who had to provide for his own needs and those of his family. Not only was he poorly prepared to look out for himself, but the poverty of his surroundings gave him little opportunity. The outlook for the freedman in Arkansas and other Southern states was made darker by the fact that his former owners had been killed in the war or were now too poor to help him.”

But such assertions prove utterly laughable in the face of actual history. Before the year 1865 even came to a close, freed Black men in Little Rock organized the Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of Arkansas, which met from Nov. 30 to Dec. 3, in large part to advocate for equality before the law in the government to come, as well as to implore the government for educational opportunities for freed people. And the eight Black men who participated in the 1868 Arkansas constitutional convention included some particularly well-educated and cosmopolitan figures. Among them was Helena businessman William Henry Grey, born a free man in Washington, D.C., who would later become the first Black man to address a national presidential nominating convention when he seconded the nomination of Ulysses S. Grant at the 1872 Republican convention. Alongside him was James W. Mason. Born a slave in Chicot County but acknowledged by his father (and owner), Mason was educated at Oberlin College in Ohio and later in France, and became the first African American appointed to serve WILLIAM GREY: A prominent Black leader during Reconstruction.

as a postmaster in the United States.

Grey and Mason were among the 35 Black men who served in the Arkansas Legislature between 1868 and 1874, the year “redeemer” Democrats were able to push through a new constitution and drive Republicans (the party to which most African Americans were loyal) from statewide office. Black men continued to be elected under the Republican (and occasionally Democratic) banner in the coming years, but in much smaller numbers, and increasingly limited to Delta counties where the Black population was highest. And when white Democrats could not successfully connive their way into office, they used violence.

The 1898 coup d’état in Wilmington, North Carolina, has been popularly portrayed as the first such overthrow of a government to occur in the United States. But 10 years before the violence in Wilmington, white Democrats carried out a similar strategy in Marion, in Crittenden County. The population in Marion was 80% Black by the year 1880. Despite their overwhelming numerical advantage, Black Republicans engaged in “fusion” politics with local Democrats, which entailed the local parties meeting before the election and working out for which offices each would field a candidate. This allowed something of a balance, but it was not enough for white Democrats.

Early in the summer of 1888, a group of prominent local Democrats (including the sheriff) met across the river in Memphis. They cooked up a scheme to indict the county judge, D.W. Lewis, and County Clerk David Ferguson, both Black men, on charges of public drunkenness. On the date of the trial, July 12, numerous prominent white residents announced they had received letters threatening their lives if they did not leave the

county. You might recognize this as all part of the reactionary playbook — accuse your opponents of what you yourself are planning. Using these allegations, Sheriff W.F. Werner and other wellarmed white men went to the courthouse and confronted Lewis and Ferguson, as well as J.L. Flemming, publisher of the Marion Headlight, a Black Republican newspaper. According to a federal investigation of what happened that day, one man in the crowd yelled at them: “God damn you, you’ve got to leave this county, this is a white man’s government and we are tired of negro dominance; we have been planning this for the past two years, and no more negroes or Republicans shall hold office in this county.”

The expulsion didn’t stop there. These men rounded up other Black political leaders and forced them over the bridge to Memphis. They then set their sights on Black landowners and other prominent figures of the community and forced them over the bridge. The newly installed white power structure informed Gov. Simon P. Hughes that all the offices previously held by Black Republicans were now vacant, and he obligingly appointed white Democrats to fill those roles.

What happened in Marion reverberated to other Arkansas counties.

In St. Francis County’s November 1888 election, Black Republicans won the offices of county assessor, treasurer and coroner, while their white allies in the Union Labor Party won county judge, clerk and sheriff. As could be predicted, Democrats there began warning of “negro domination” if nothing was done, and by the time the May 1889 school board election rolled around, their fear of Democratic failure reached fever pitch. On May 18, the day of the election, school board president James Fussell knocked down Americus Neely, a Black Republican board member, near a polling place. An outbreak of violence between the factions resulted in the death of a Democratic city marshal and a Republican/Union Labor sheriff. In the midst of the violence, the Democratic school board candidates were elected.

The following day, with the state militia in town to “restore order,” armed whites gunned down Neely in the office of the Advocate, a newspaper he managed. A group “of some 100 leading citizens” decided that Ambrose Gentry, a “leading negro,” and other Black Republican politicians and their white allies should depart town immediately. Vacancies created by this expulsion necessitated the holding of a special election in July, granting white Democrats the chance to seize yet another county for their own ends.

Even in the face of growing violence, however, Black Arkansans remained politically active. The real blow came in 1891 with the passage of an election law aimed at cutting Black voters out. This law did a few things that might be familiar to those who have observed the deeds of Republican-dominated state legislatures this past year. For example, it gave state officials greater control over local elections, creating a state election board composed of the governor, auditor and secretary of state to appoint the judges for every voting precinct. The law also tried to make voting as uncomfortable as possible for certain people. Illiteracy remained high in Arkansas at the time, higher among Blacks than whites, but people who could not read had been able to vote for their desired candidates with the assistance of a friend or through the use of party symbols on

the ballot. The new law took away those symbols and mandated that only election judges could assist an illiterate man; the voter would have to apply to two of the judges, who would then have to order the facility vacated while he voted. Such a system, one might well imagine, discouraged most illiterate voters and also created more opportunities for fraud.

In the election of 1892, the estimated Black vote dropped by more than 30 percent. That same year, a poll tax was added to the requirements to vote. In 1894, not one African American was elected to service in the state legislature. The Democratic Party had achieved complete and total control of the state and would pass more Jim Crow legislation in the coming years.

Let us return to the beginning of this essay and ask: What does all of this have to do with the lynching of D.T. Watson in rural Lonoke County?

The 1880s and 1890s constituted a period of fractured interests among the white population. Third-party and labor organizations such as the Union Labor Party, the Agricultural Week, the Brothers of Freedom, the Knights of Labor and the Greenbackers threatened to splinter the white vote along class lines, and some of these groups even included among their number African Americans, or allied themselves strategically with Republicans, both Black and white, in order to extend their influence. To combat this threat to their hegemony, Democratic elites raised the specter of “negro domination” again and again, as we have seen, in order to keep white voters in the Democratic fold.

The reaction to this favorite nightmare of “negro domination” manifested not only in the forced takeover of local governments or the passage of bills disenfranchising African Americans, but also in the lynching of men like schoolteacher D.T. Watson. As the sociologist Mattias Smångs writes in his book, “Doing Violence, Making Race,” the “formal practices of racial group domination such as disenfranchisement and informal practices such as public lynchings complemented each other in promoting and enacting white group unity and power” in the emerging Jim Crow South.

Lynchings were partly a product of political rhetoric aimed at disempowering African Americans. And the lack of political and economic power made African Americans all the more vulnerable to the whims of the mob.

And what do we have today? Once again, elites, dreading their power might be waning, are drumming up white group unity and power. They are passing laws (including redistricting maps) to limit the electoral efficacy of people of color. We also see these elites openly entertaining proposals to overturn elections they don’t like. Granted, this party’s adherents don’t run around shrieking about “negro domination” at every turn. They have moved on to more sophisticated bluster about “critical race theory,” while many among both the leadership and the rank and file openly fantasize about butchering people like you and me in order to “take back our country.”

Is it a pessimistic conclusion to draw? Sure. But consider the exonerations of George Zimmerman and countless white police officers who killed unarmed black people and suffered no legal consequences. The parallels to what happened in the past is impossible to ignore.

As Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Or perhaps more appropriate at this juncture are the words of Leonard Cohen: “Get ready for the future: It is murder.”

YOU MIGHT RECOGNIZE THIS AS ALL PART OF THE REACTIONARY PLAYBOOK — ACCUSE YOUR OPPONENTS OF WHAT YOU YOURSELF ARE PLANNING.

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