Never Forget: America’s Forgotten Mass Lynching: When 237 Black Sharecroppers Were Murdered In Arkansas
In 1919, after the end of World War I, Black sharecroppers in Arkansas began to unionize. This attempt to form unions triggered white vigilantism and mass killings that left 237 Blacks dead. Towards the end of 1918 , attorney Ulysses S. Bratton of Little Rock, Arkansas listened to Black sharecroppers tell stories of theft, exploitation, and never ending debt . One man, by the name of Carter, explained how he cultivated 90 acres of cotton and then had his landlord confiscate the crop and all of his possessions. Another Black farmer, from Ratio, Arkansas said a plantation manager would not give sharecroppers an itemized record of their crop. No one realized that within a year of meeting with Mr. Bratton, one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. would take place. In a report released by the Equal Justice Initiative, white people in the Delta region of the South started a massacre that left 237 Black people dead . Even though the one-time death toll was unusually hig