Filmmaker Michael Warren Wilson calls the Elaine Massacre of 1919 the “deadliest race or labor battle in American history,” yet he grew up in Arkansas, graduated from Central High School in Little Rock and Hendrix College in Conway without ever learning about it.
He doesn’t want the same for today’s generation, and that’s one reason he directed, co-wrote and co-produced a new documentary, “We Have Just Begun.”
The film, which tells the story of a farmworkers’ struggle that became a race massacre shortly after the end of World War I, will have its Arkansas premiere on Jan. 19 at an event at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts’ Performing Arts Center in Little Rock. The Arkansas Cinema Society is co-hosting the screening.
The doors will open at 5:30 and the film will start at 6 p.m. Wilson will answer questions from the audience afterward. Tickets are $15 and will be available online and at the theater. The showing is part of the cinema society’s Dreamland Film Series.
Wilson hopes that the documentary will be a revelation to Arkansans who know little about the history of the massacre, which was a taboo subject for many of the 103 years that have passed since it unfolded.
Though exact numbers are lost to time, estimates of Black Arkansans killed by white mobs range into the hundreds. Five white people lost their lives, according to the Central Arkansas Library System’s Encyclopedia of Arkansas, which described the violence as “possibly the bloodiest racial conflict” in American history.
The events unfolded in Phillips County after about 100 Black sharecroppers attended a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union in Phillips County, about three miles from the town of Elaine.
Most of the sharecroppers labored on plantations owned by white people, and one cause of the violence was enmity and deep suspicion of labor unions in the rural delta. The sharecroppers were seeking better payments for their cotton crops and had hired lawyer Ulysses S. Bratton to press their claims. A shooting outside the church hosting the union meeting killed a white deputy sheriff and a railroad security officer, setting off waves of violence against Black Arkansans by bands of white vigilantes and soldiers sent in by Gov. Charles Hillman Brough from Camp Pike near Little Rock.
“The story of the Elaine Massacre is crucial to consciousness raising to teach people that resistance to oppressive systems has always been the science of collectivity,” said Tongo Eisen-Martin, the film’s co-writer, producer and co-narrator. “And just as much as the film is excavation, it is also a warning in that the material conditions that gave rise to these waves of massacres of Black people then, if not twin to, are definitely sibling to what we have now.”
Full Truth ‘Obscured’
Wilson also said history must be heeded. “After interviewing dozens of descendents, historians, and current residents of the Delta, it’s clear to me that the Elaine Massacre was the deadliest race or labor battle in American history,” he said. “Yet, despite growing up in Arkansas, I knew nothing about it prior to my research. The centennial in 2019 brought the event more publicity, but the full truth of it was obscured even then. The Elaine Massacre and subsequent dispossession of Black people has reverberated into the present. Today, the people of the Arkansas Delta have even fewer options, yet remain dominated by many of the same historical forces they fought in 1919.
“Elaine is Arkansas,” Wilson added in a statement. “Understanding Elaine is to understand the ways in which capitalist domination and exploitation of the Delta has defined Arkansas economic and social life — activating and intensifying the racial legacies of enslavement and maintaining inequality in the region.”
Several Arkansans worked on the film, including Michelle Duster, a great-granddaughter of pioneer Black journalist Ida B. Wells, and musician Joshua Asante, a former member of the Little Rock band Amasa Hines. Arkansas State University Professor Cherisse Jones-Branch contributed, as well as Judge Wendell Griffin and James White and Leonora Marshall of the Elaine Legacy Center. Brian Mitchell, director of research for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, was another contributor. Before taking the Illinois job, Mitchell was a history professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock who resigned his tenured position, citing “the widely held belief that the university’s social climate is one of pervasive and entrenched systemic racism and discrimination.”
7 Years in Making
According to a news release from the cinema society, “We Have Just Begun” was seven years in the making, and explores “the continuity of exploitation and domination in the Delta from before 1919 to the present.” It said the film includes “striking new revelations by descendants, recordings of eyewitnesses, and original research” portraying a populace that has been exploited for many generations.
The movie takes its name from a secret passcode used by a black union or farmers and domestic workers whose organizing in the delta preceded the massacre. San Francisco poet laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin narrates the documentary, and Duster reads from Ida B. Wells’ pamphlet of the time, “The Arkansas Riot.”
The movie, the release said, “is a portrait of rural struggle toward emancipation, despite brutal attempts to suppress it.”
The works of Wilson, the director, have been exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, Ars Electronica, Entermultimediale, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and the Rotterdam Film Festival.
He has taught film, multimedia and art practice at Pitzer College, the University of California-Riverside, the University of California-Irvine, the Otis College of Art, the San Francisco Film School and Cal-Poly-Pomona. Along with his bachelor’s from Hendrix, he holds a bachelor’s in fine arts from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a master’s in fine arts from the Yale School of Art.
Sign up for Daily E-news
