The Elaine massacre occurred on September 30–October 2, 1919, at Hoop Spur in the vicinity of Elaine in rural Phillips County, Arkansas where African Americans were organizing against peonage and abuses in tenant farming. As many as several hundred African Americans and five white men were killed. Estimates of deaths made in the immediate aftermath of the Elaine Massacre by eyewitnesses range from 50 to "more than a hundred". Walter Francis White, an NAACP attorney who visited Elaine shortly after the incident, stated "... twenty-five Negroes killed, although some place the Negro fatalities as high as one hundred". More recent estimates in the 21st century of the number of black people killed during this violence are higher than estimates provided by the eyewitnesses, and have ranged into the hundreds. The white mobs were aided by federal troops and local terrorist organizations. Gov. Brough led a contingent of 583 US soldiers from Camp Pike, with a 12-gun machine gun battalion.
Peon usually refers to a person subject to peonage: any form of wage labor, financial exploitation, coercive economic practice, or policy in which the victim or a laborer (peon) has little control over employment or economic conditions. Peon and peonage can refer to both the colonial period and post-colonial period of Latin America, as well as the period after the end of slavery in the United States, when "Black Codes" were passed to retain African-American freedmen as labor through other means.
Sharecropping is a legal arrangement in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land.
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is a 1971 novel by Ernest J. Gaines. The story depicts the struggles of blacks as seen through the eyes of the narrator, a woman named Jane Pittman. She tells of the major events of her life from the time she was a young slave girl in the American South at the end of the Civil War.
Arkansas literature has an emerging consciousness, though it still lags behind other Southern states such as Mississippi and Georgia in the promotion of its literary culture. University of Arkansas Press is probably the state's largest publisher of books, though there do exist some notable small presses in the state: August House, Rose Publishing Group, and Chenault and Gray. The University of Arkansas's M.F.A. program has graduated a number of notable writers, including Lewis Nordan, John Dufresne, Steve Yarbrough, and more. In 2004, the state held the first annual Arkansas Literary Festival in Little Rock, attracting famous writers from around the nation. The Porter Prize is the state's most prestigious literary award.
Lake Chicot is a lake adjacent to the Mississippi River. The lake is located on the east side of Lake Village, Arkansas in Chicot County. It is the largest oxbow lake in North America, as well as the largest natural lake in Arkansas.
LeRoy Percy was an American attorney, planter, and Democratic politician who served as a United States Senator from the state of Mississippi from 1910 to 1913.
Let The Circle Be Unbroken is the 1981 historical children's novel by Mildred D. Taylor. A sequel to Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976), the book is set in Mississippi in 1935, and continues the saga of the African-American Logan family as they struggle to make a living sharecropping during the Great Depression. Several trials and tribulations are faced by the family told from the perspective of the African-American experience, including issues of racism in the criminal justice system, interracial marriage, "passing", and poverty. Ultimately, the novel emphasizes themes of self-respect, hard work, and pride. It won the Coretta Scott King Author Award in 1982. A recording by Lynne Thigpen was named to the 1996 ALA Notable Children's Recordings list.
Julia Peterkin was an American author from South Carolina. In 1929 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Novel/Literature for her novel Scarlet Sister Mary. She wrote several novels about the plantation South, especially the Gullah people of the Lowcountry. She was one of the few white authors who wrote about the African-American experience.
Austin Corbin was a 19th-century American banking and railroad entrepreneur. He consolidated the rail lines on Long Island, bringing them under the profitable umbrella of the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR).
Nathalie Handal is a French-American poet, writer and professor, described as a “contemporary Orpheus.” A New Yorker and a quintessential global citizen, she has published 10 prize-winning books, including Life in a Country Album. She is praised for her “diverse, and innovative body of work.”
Lakeport Plantation is a historic antebellum plantation house located near Lake Village, Arkansas. It was built around 1859 by Lycurgus Johnson with the profits of slave labor. The house was restored between 2003 and 2008 and is now a part of Arkansas State University as a Heritage site museum.
Mary Grace Quackenbos Humiston (1869–1948) was the first female Special Assistant United States Attorney. She was a graduate of the New York University School of Law and was a leader in exposing peonage in the American South. She was also known for a short time as "Mrs. Sherlock Holmes", starting with her work solving the cold case of Ruth Cruger who disappeared in New York in 1917.
Lycurgus Johnson (1818–1876) was an American cotton planter and large slaveholder in the Arkansas Delta during the antebellum years. Born to the powerful political and planter Johnson family in Scott County, Kentucky, he became the owner and developer of the Lakeport Plantation in Chicot County, Arkansas. It bordered the west bank of the Mississippi River.
The Sunnyside Plantation was a former cotton plantation and is a historic site, located near Lake Village in Chicot County, Arkansas, in the Arkansas Delta region.
Tina DeRosa was an American writer best known for her 1980 novel, Paper Fish. She also published poetry, short stories, and creative nonfiction.
Umbertina (1979) is a feminist novel by Helen Barolini. It tells the story of four generations of women in one Italian-American family. It is the first novel by an Italian-American woman which explores, in depth, the connected themes of gender and ethnicity.
Mary Bucci Bush is an American author and a professor of English and creative writing at California State University, Los Angeles.
Mae Louise Miller was an American woman who was kept in modern-day slavery, known as peonage, near Gillsburg, Mississippi and Kentwood, Louisiana until her family achieved freedom in early 1961.
