[3][2][7] The white mobs were aided by federal troops (requested by Arkansas governor Charles Hillman Brough) and local terrorist organizations.

[11] Located in the Arkansas Delta, Phillips County had historically been developed for cotton plantations, and its land was worked by enslaved African-Americans before the Civil War.

In the early 20th century the county's population was still predominantly black, because most freedmen and their descendants had stayed on the land as illiterate farm workers and sharecroppers.

[9] White landowners controlled the economy, selling cotton on their own schedule, running high-priced plantation stores where farmers had to buy seed and supplies, and settling accounts with sharecroppers in lump sums, without listing items.

[12] The white-dominated legislature enacted Jim Crow laws that established racial segregation and institutionalized efforts to impose white supremacy.

[13] At the time of settlement, landowners generally never gave an itemized statement to the black sharecroppers of accounts owed, nor details of the money received for cotton and seed.

Black farmers began to organize in 1919 to try to negotiate better conditions, including fair accounting and timely payment of monies due them by white landowners.

[14] The PFHUA retained a white law firm based in Little Rock to represent the black farmers in getting fair settlements for their labors during the 1919 cotton harvest.

Competition for jobs and housing in crowded markets following World War I as veterans returned to the work force, stirring racial tensions.

Having served their country in the Great War, many African-American veterans were no longer willing to tolerate racial discrimination and were now prepared to use violence in self defense against white mobs and terrorism.

Approximately 100 African-American farmers, led by Robert L. Hill, the founder of the union, met at a church in Hoop Spur, near Elaine in Phillips County.

A posse was dispatched and within a few hours hundreds of white men, many of them the "low down" variety, began to comb the area for blacks they believed were launching an insurrection.

Sensational newspaper headlines published by the Arkansas Gazette and others reported that an "insurrection" was occurring, and that black people had planned to murder white leaders.

[3][1][10][9] A dispatch from Helena, Arkansas to The New York Times, datelined October 1, said: "Returning members of the posse brought numerous stories and rumors, through all of which ran the belief that the rioting was due to propaganda distributed among the negroes by white men.

"[22] The next day's report added: Additional evidence has been obtained of the activities of propagandists among the negroes, and it is thought that a plot existed for a general uprising against the whites."

[citation needed] The NAACP promptly released a statement from a contact in Arkansas providing another account of the origins of the violence noting efforts by Ulysses Simpson Bratton to assist African Americans in peonage: The whole trouble, as I understand it, started because a Mr. Bratton, a white lawyer from Little Rock, Ark., was employed by sixty or seventy colored families to go to Elaine to represent them in a dispute with the white planters relative to the sale price of cotton.It referred to a report in The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, Tennessee on October 3 that quoted Bratton's father:[26] It had been impossible for the negroes to obtain itemized statements of accounts, or in fact to obtain statements at all, and that the manager was preparing to ship their cotton, they being sharecroppers and having a half interest therein, off without settling with them or allowing them to sell their half of the crop and pay up their accounts....

If it's a crime to represent people in an effort to make honest settlements, then he has committed a crime.The NAACP sent its Field Secretary, Walter F. White, from New York City to Elaine in October 1919 to investigate events.

He gained an interview with Governor Charles Hillman Brough, who gave him a letter of recommendation for other meetings with whites, as well as an autographed photograph.

The conductor told the young man that he was leaving "just when the fun is going to start", because they had found out that there was a "damned yellow nigger passing for white and the boys are going to get him."

[9] The trials of these twelve lasted less than an hour in many cases; the juries took fewer than ten minutes to deliberate before pronouncing each man guilty and sentencing them to death.

[9] Moorfield Storey, descended from Boston abolitionists and founding president of the NAACP since 1909, became part of the team when the Moore cases went to the Supreme Court.

[9] The grounds were that the jury had failed to specify whether the defendants were guilty of murder in the first or second degree; those cases (known as Ware et al.) were sent back to the lower court for retrial.

It rejected the challenge to the all-white juries as untimely, and found that the mob atmosphere and use of coerced testimony did not deny the defendants the due process of law.

The State of Arkansas defended the convictions from a narrowly legalistic position, based on the US Supreme Court's earlier decision in Frank v. Mangum (1915).

It did not dispute the defendants' evidence of torture used to obtain confessions nor of mob intimidation at the trial, but the state argued that, even if true, these elements did not amount to a denial of due process.

[14] Prominent Little Rock attorney George Rose wrote a letter to outgoing Governor Thomas McRae requesting that he find a way to release the remaining defendants if they agreed to plead guilty to second-degree murder.

Rose's letter was an attempt to prevent Governor-Elect Thomas Jefferson Terral, a known member of the Ku Klux Klan, from getting involved in the matter.

[31][32] Just hours before Governor McRae left office in 1925, he contacted Scipio Jones to inform him that indefinite furloughs had been issued for the remaining defendants.

He later was selected as executive secretary of the NAACP, essentially the chief operating officer, and served in this position for decades, leading the organization in additional legal challenges and civil rights activism.

[29] A 1961 article, "Underlying Causes of the Elaine Riot", claimed that blacks were planning an insurrection, based on interviews with whites who had been alive at the time, and that they were fairly treated by planters of the area.