Reimagining Equality

by Anita Hill

  Ida Elliott lived Roosevelt’s message, whether she meant to or not and whether he wanted her to or not. In 1915 Ida gave birth for the last time. She bore thirteen children in all, although the number of children born to African Americans in general was on the decline.

  Local customs, culture, and a lack of available birth control probably had the greatest influence on Ida’s decisions about marriage and children—more so than the president of the United States or intellectuals like Grimké. In southeast Arkansas’s black and rural communities, big families were respected and children were valued for their labor. Women were expected to produce and care for large numbers of them. Ida’s marriage to Henry and her many children may have enhanced her respectability, but each child made her more conscious of the racial violence around her. To establish the kind of home she wanted, she needed each member of the household to feel secure. Security was not the province of men alone; black women shared in that responsibility. And at the start of the twentieth century, the past and present brutality wrought by racial distinctions left Ida with grave feelings of uncertainty about how much control she would ever have over her own life or her children’s lives.

  Promised Lands

  For many black families in the area, the only response to the harshness of Arkansas was to leave it. According to historian Kenneth Barnes, in the 1880s and 1890s about 650 black Arkansans sought to find a home in Liberia, which was thought to be, as one settler wrote to relatives, “the colored man’s home, the only place on earth where they have equal rights.”5 More blacks left for Liberia from Arkansas than from any other state. To reach their destination, they had to trek halfway across the country to New York before boarding a steamer headed for the “African Promised Land.” Hundreds of cotton farmers and field hands were promised twenty-five acres of land and a chance to grow coffee. Full citizenship in the United States had proved so elusive that they sold their few possessions to scrape together the money they needed to reverse the Atlantic transit of their forebears.

  So strong was the allure of an idealized nation to call “home” that black Arkansans were willing to abandon their houses, extended families, neighbors, and friends to “return” to a place they had never been, where they would be a majority race. But in that place—where “there are no white men to give orders, and when you go in your house, there is no one to stand out, and call you to the door and shoot you when you come out”6—these pilgrims also found dense jungle and wetlands that had to be cleared before any planting could be done. Virulent strains of malaria wiped out many. Others went bankrupt when coffee prices plummeted in the 1890s, after Brazil flooded the world market with its own product. Some returned to the States, but some, having risked everything to get to Liberia, stayed.

  Black Arkansans who chose not to make the long journey to Africa, but still longed for a home that promised a more certain freedom, opted to settle nearby in Oklahoma Territory. It was accessible and, in the minds of many, largely devoid of the overt racism common in the South. That notion about Oklahoma was accurate, in part. Slaves who had been held by Indian tribes suffered less abuse and had more independence than slaves on Southern plantations. The more humane nature of black-Indian relationships endured after slavery ended, just as the harsher tenor of black-white in the South endured.

  Available transportation and the proximity of the region to Arkansas made Oklahoma Territory an attractive destination. The structure of farm ownership there was also appealing, because it differed so vastly from the plantation system that existed in Arkansas and other southern states. In Oklahoma, small individual plots were the norm. Southern plantation owners with huge acreages required many field hands to sustain their enterprises, but in Oklahoma blacks, whites, and Indians could own and sustain their own relatively small allotments.

  In the late nineteenth century, the cultural and racial climates of Oklahoma also contrasted with those in the Deep South. In 1889 the federal government opened land to the general public that had been set aside for Indian tribes, and settlers from throughout the South found their way to Oklahoma Territory. The subsequent building boom that swept through Oklahoma in the 1890s drew even more speculators and settlers to the territory, a substantial number of them black. In one incident in 1891, hundreds of blacks fled racial violence in Arkansas, spending the night under wharves with whatever belongings they could carry before heading down the Arkansas River on steamers to Oklahoma Territory.7 The home that had once been promised to the area tribes was now a mecca for blacks and whites seeking their own version of the American Dream, a dream granted to them at the expense of the Indian population.

  For many blacks, Arkansas had become a place to leave. Ida and Henry not only stayed, but made a commitment to the state that eventually became a critical part of the family legacy. In 1895, after years of working the land of white farmers, William Henry Elliott applied to the federal government for eighty acres of uncultivated land close to his birthplace, near where his mother, Mollie, had been a slave. Ida and Henry began the process of finalizing their ownership of the allotment. In January 1896 they built their first home on the land, a two-room log cabin. It was just the beginning of their claim to the homestead.

  Each year they cleared more of the pine and oak trees that were native to the property. The first year, they planted four acres of cotton and corn in the soil, which had been enriched by centuries of forest foliage. They added a smokehouse and planted an orchard. By 1902, when Henry applied for the final patent, or deed, they were farming twenty acres. By virtue of the Elliotts’ hard work, the log cabin had become home to thirty-seven-year-old Henry, twenty-eight-year-old Ida, and their seven children. They were the first in the Elliott and Crooks families to own property. “Repatriating” to Africa or resettling in Oklahoma was not for them.

  Ida and Henry were at home in Arkansas, but as they went about securing their place in Little River County, violence was escalating. Racial terrorism in Arkansas included both mass killings and individual lynchings, and Little River County escaped neither. The Supreme Court’s infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 legalized separation along color lines and succeeded in legitimizing racial intimidation as an extracurricular tool in the furtherance of segregation.

  Fear and Terrorism in Black and White

  In March 1899, a group of fifty white citizens of Little River County set out to kill a number of its black citizens who were rumored to be planning a race war. By one newspaper account, as many as twenty-three black men were hunted down and either shot or hanged, most for being “smart and troublesome niggers,” as one observer put it.8 Fear gripped blacks throughout the county. Some attempted to escape to New Boston, Texas, just across the Arkansas border. Ironically, Ida’s family had left New Boston years earlier and settled in Little River County after her brother, Danny, was killed by a white man in a dispute over land. No one was ever tried in the incident. Similarly, law enforcement turned a blind eye to the 1899 murders of those “troublesome niggers.”

  Many modern-day analyses of the horrors of lynching attempt to expose the dubious reasoning that was often used to explain why so many African Americans died at the hands of lawless mobs. These explanations debunk the myth that black men were lynched as punishment for sexual assault, pointing out that the victims were often seen as a threat to the economic order in the agrarian South. Unlike Angelina Grimké, most writers tend to look at the public impact of lynching. Even today, few focus on how such a lawless act reaches into the private sphere, with profound consequences as far-reaching as they are unpredictable. Such brutality is not simply directed at individuals; it alters the sense of security of the family members and neighbors left behind.

  The story of one of my grandparents’ neighbors, who was murdered at the hands of a mob, helps illustrate that. In 1910 Dock McClain, a black farmhand whose census record indicates that he could neither read nor write nor identify his parents’ places of birth, was ar
rested by the Little River County sheriff for stabbing Ernest Hale, a prominent local white farmer. The gash McClain carved was so deep that those who found the wounded man claimed to have seen his heart beating inside his chest. For days after the stabbing, as Hale struggled for his life, McClain sat in the Ashdown County Jail awaiting a trial. On the night of May 14, as officials transported their prisoner to a nearby facility, seventy-five whites surrounded the sheriff and his deputies. At eleven o’clock the mob hanged the accused, Dock McClain.

  Word of Dock McClain’s death spread quickly among the blacks in the small community outside Ashdown, where he and his wife, Mary, shared a home. The next morning, on Sunday, May 15, 1910, Mary McClain awoke in her rural home to her new status of widow. According to a report in the Arkansas Gazette, the state’s largest newspaper, her husband’s demise was quiet and swift. The sheriff who was transporting Dock McClain from the Ashdown jail to a “safer” location across the Texas border was overcome by the mob without a single shot being fired. The mob took custody of McClain, and within minutes he was dead.

  Depending on the account, lynching was the fate that befell as many as twenty-six black men in Little River County from 1893 to 1910. Some lynchings were conducted away from public scrutiny, like the killings in March 1899 in which virtual hunting parties scoured the woods and river bottomland to find their victims. Others were carried out quite publicly.

  In some instances, Jim Crow trials and executions resembled lynchings. Newspaper accounts detailed gruesome hangings in front of large crowds of both black and white onlookers, as in the 1883 case of Joseph Young. Even before seventeen-year-old Young was tried and convicted for sexual assault, he had been savaged thoroughly by law enforcement officials as well as dehumanized by the press. In reporting the trial, the Arkansas Gazette described Young as inhuman. In implementing his execution, the county sheriff and a posse of seventy-five men armed with Winchester rifles escorted Young to his hanging as his father, a local mill worker, and scores of black citizens held a prayer vigil on Joseph’s behalf. Yet even with the horde of deputized whites ready to shoot Joseph and onlookers, the sheriff found it necessary to shackle the prisoner’s arms and legs and place an iron collar around his neck.

  Trials were often dispensed with. When Dock McClain was hanged, “so quietly did the lynchers work,” the Gazette reported, “that the sleeping town knew nothing of the crime,”9 as if that somehow diminished the violence carried out against Dock, as well as Mary and her children, seventeen-year-old Lizzie and thirteen-year-old Ezekiel. At the time of the lynching, the family had been without Dock for weeks, but now the isolation took on a permanence. Mary’s worst fears had been realized and her twenty-year marriage brought to a brutal end.

  In the following years, a banner waved outside the NAACP headquarters in New York City, some fifteen hundred miles away, reading “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday.” As part of a national campaign against the lynchings that were occurring throughout the South, the organization marked each newly reported incident with the banner. In Little River County in 1893, 1899, and 1910, that banner could have read, “A Neighbor Was Lynched Yesterday.” In 1910, Mary McClain’s banner would have been even more personal: “My Husband, My Children’s Father, Was Lynched Yesterday.” After the worst outcome imaginable of her husband’s arrest, Mary had to confront what life would be like for her and her children after Dock’s horrible, unjust death.

  The lynching changed Mary’s life forever. The death of a spouse, violent or otherwise, can be devastating, even with today’s counseling and the availability of antidepressant drugs. In the aftermath of Dock’s lynching, Mary might have experienced what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder. In 1910, although the American Psychiatric Association did exist, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders did not, and post-traumatic stress had yet to be identified. In the early twentieth century, an intense psychological reaction to a traumatic event likely meant admittance to an insane asylum. Even that treatment would have depended on whether such places existed for “colored” women in Arkansas. Today, survivors or victims of violence can find support groups and organizations that raise awareness. In 1910, the loved ones of lynching victims would not have joined together to draw attention to their plight. Out of fear, few dared speak of such matters in the light of day.

  The biggest question facing Mary McClain was whether she should take her children and move from where her husband met his tragic end. She chose to remain in Little River County, where she might regularly encounter members of the Hale family and where living reminders of Dock’s death would be unavoidable. She might have thought it unwise to move her children from a life that was familiar to a place where they would confront new and unknown demons. She and Dock had been farm laborers, born and raised in Arkansas. Even if she had wanted to, would she have had the means to make such a move? She could continue to pick cotton and work the fields she had known since childhood.

  The lynching would have also affected how neighbors interacted with Mary and her children. Was there a stigma attached to being the family of a man whose death was a manifestation of the racism that cloaked the entire community? Would Mary and her children be shunned or ridiculed by their neighbors, black or white? Would neighbors feel sympathy for Mary? She must have heard the jokes that blacks made about racial violence as a way of calming their fears. But this form of gallows humor was no longer an abstraction, and Mary’s experience was one that most of her neighbors undoubtedly dreaded.

  Black people had learned to trust one another for survival, assured that at the very least they shared a collective interest in avoiding racial violence. In rural black Arkansas, trusting other blacks was second only to trusting God. But Dock McClain’s lynching hit so close to home that it may have threatened that collective interest. Would Mary be able to trust anyone?

  Mary’s neighbors and friends would have expected her to be angry. The unfairness of her situation magnified the unfairness of the everyday racism they all experienced. Their collective history included generations of slaves who had learned, out of necessity, to hide their feelings. Did Mary take out the anger she masked from others on her children “for their own good”? Did the lessons she learned from her forebears serve her as she taught her children that their very survival might require them to swallow the hurt and the bitterness? At age thirteen, Ezekiel would have had a difficult time, and his anger at life’s unfairness might have easily defied a mother’s teaching. No evidence of Ezekiel remains in public records.

  Historical records cannot tell us how the McClains and their community coped in the aftermath of Dock’s lynching. What is known is that seven years after her father’s murder, Lizzie McClain, at the ripe age of twenty-four, married Willie Brown in Little River County. Lizzie’s wedding in 1917 made her part of the third generation of African Americans to marry in hopes of being established as “a people.” But as the subsequent history of racial violence would show, marriage was not the panacea that the black Civil War corporal had hoped for in his speech to his troops.

  Lizzie was four years older than the average marrying age for women at the turn of the century. She may have delayed marriage, but to forgo marriage and children, the way Grimké’s title character did in Rachel, would not have been an easy choice. She may not have understood or even cared about the political implications of such a choice, but Lizzie was no doubt aware of the cultural implications. In the early 1900s, black women were striving for respectability, and one way to achieve it was through motherhood within marriage. Whether Lizzie had children is not clear from the public records, but her choice to marry in the same community where her father was so violently killed shows a commitment to home.

  Mary McClain died in 1925 and was buried in Newsome Cemetery in Little River County, among the neighbors and friends she and Dock McClain had shared. The cemetery is seven miles east of Ashdown, Arkansas, just off State Highway 317 and not far
from Yarborough Landing, a new lakeside housing development named after the slave-owning family who once owned the land. Turn right off the highway at a white house and follow the dirt road into a wooded area, and you will soon reach the cemetery entrance. Amid the rough stones that mark the graves of African American men and women, most of whom were born in the nineteenth century, is the grave of Mary McClain. The headstone gives her date of death and the fraternal organization that likely paid for the marker: 1/9/1925, Nelson Chamber 2134, Red Bluff, Arkansas. It does not tell us that she was a wife, a mother, and a woman who struggled to deal with the cruel circumstances life had dealt her fifteen years earlier, when a violent mob lynched her husband.

  Mary lived long enough to see her children reach adulthood, which may have been her greatest triumph. That a local organization paid for her headstone suggests that she was a valued member of the community. No headstone exists for Dock McClain in Newsome Cemetery, or in any other cemetery in Little River County.

  There are, however, numerous public records of the Hale family. Ernest Hale, whose encounter with Dock ultimately led to the lynching, had ventured out on his own at age fourteen. Rather than live in comfort with his physician father and be attended by black servants, he chose to live in a neighbor’s smokehouse, doing farm work for room and board and token pay. Exactly what prompted him to leave home is not clear, but he could not have known that his future would be as bright as it was. He soon accumulated enough money to buy ten acres of land. In 1910, when Dock McClain stabbed him, Hale was on his way to becoming one of the county’s most prominent farmers. He survived the attack and continued to live on a nearby farm; by 1914 he had accumulated thousands of acres of the rich land that surrounded his father’s home.