New Book Provides Contextual Insight into Elaine Massacre

One of the largest racial confrontations in U.S. history occurred in 1919 in the Phillips County farming town of Elaine, Arkansas where a massive violent white mob took aim at a small black sharecroppers labor union struggling to organize for higher cotton crop prices. A new book of essays, Elaine Massacre and Arkansas: A Century of Atrocity and Resistance, edited by Arkansas racial cleansing historian Guy Lancaster and published by Butler Center Books, examines key complex events which inexorably led to the bloody conflagration. Guy Lancaster was recorded courtesy Anna Lancaster, Archival Assistant and AV/AR Specialist at the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the Central Arkansas Library System.