Slaughter in the Delta: Confronting Racism, Need for Change on the UA Campus

Confronting the legacy of racial violence in Arkansas in a search for inner peace.

by Abbi Ross

Tyrah Jackson stands on the steps of Gearhart Hall, wearing a microphone like a Britney Spears-era pop star while she calls out instructions to over 100 people, almost all of which are dressed in black and hanging on to her every word. 

Jackson and the crowd have just made their way across a rain-soaked University of Arkansas campus, from the Fulbright Dining Hall past the now infamous J. William Fulbright statue and finally to Gearhart. The early morning rally on March 13, 2021, is a call to action on the removal of racist figures like Fulbright and Gov. Charles Brough from campus. And for Jackson, it hits a little closer to home than others. 

While much of the discussion on campus about these figures centers on the legacy of Fulbright, it is the repercussions of Brough’s actions that have recently become a driving force in Jackson’s life. 

Over a hundred years before in Elaine, Arkansas, the deadliest racial confrontation in the state took place. Members of Jackson’s family lived in the city at the time and survived the confrontation. 

It was a result of growing tension and fear over labor unions, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. Jackson’s family members were a part of over 100 Black Arkansans, mostly sharecroppers, who met at a local church for a Progressive Farmers and Household Union meeting to talk about securing better payments for their cotton crops from white plantation owners on Sept. 30, 1919. It is unclear who fired first, but gunfire between the Black guards outside the church and three people in a vehicle parked in front of it resulted in the death of a white security officer and the wounding of the Phillips County deputy sheriff, Charles Pratt. 

It marked the start of one of the bloodiest racial confrontations in United States history. 

The sheriff sent out a posse to find those involved, and although they were met with little resistance, the group of 500-1,000 white people were determined to put down the “insurrection” going down in Elaine. On Oct. 1, 1919 a telegram was sent to Gov. Charles Brough requesting the presence of U.S. troops in the city. Brough responded with 500 “battle-tested” troops from Camp Pike, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. 

The troops were “under order to shoot to kill any negro who refused to surrender immediately,” the Arkansas Democrat reported on Oct. 2. Exact numbers are not known, but hundreds of Black men, women and children were killed. 

After visiting Elaine to get “correct information” concerning the “insurrection”, he returned to Little Rock and said in a press conference, “The situation at Elaine has been well handled and is absolutely under control. There is no danger of any lynching…. The white citizens of the county deserve unstinting praise for their actions in preventing mob violence,” according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. 

In a matter of days, Gov. Brough had secured his legacy as a man with the death of hundreds of innocent Black Arkansans on his hands. And it is one that Arkansans are still feeling the ramifications of today. 

It was in front of Gearhart Hall that Jackson revealed her grandfather and great aunt survived the Elaine Massacre. Jackson, alongside other campus leaders, shared their experiences and thoughts about racism on campus. 

Just over 100 years ago, members of Jackson’s family survived a heinous hate crime. Now Jackson stands in front of hundreds while she and so many others fight for their rights and the removal of presences on campus that never should have been in the first place. 

“I believe the way to [be anti-racist] is to rid the university of its racist effigies, but also of its structural discrepancies that continuously promote institutional racism,” Jackson said. 

Jackson is now a spokesperson for the UARK Black Student Caucus, a group that came together over the summer in response to racism on campus and organized the march. The Caucus is a response to the trauma that was brought forth over the summer when Black students and community members shared their experiences on campus with #BlackatUARK.  

The #BlackatUARK tag exploded on Twitter in June as people shared their experiences being Black on campus and in the community. 

“Being #BlackatUark is having PIKE throw a fried chicken, watermelon, and 40 oz themed party to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. day.” 

“Being #BlackatUark is having my mom scared for my safety because my name is on a letter addressing the racist actions of UARK students and demanding change on my campus. It hurts telling my mom that I’m okay at a school that I honestly don’t even feel safe at anymore” 

“#BlackatUark is creating a hashtag because the administration refuses to listen to the demands of black students”  

The posts shed a bright light on a side of the University of Arkansas that many did not want to see. The awakening of Black voices on campus converged as the UARK Black Student Caucus, a nascent student group that issued 15 demands for creating a more inclusive and respectful campus, including the removal of the Fulbright statue and renaming the Brough dining hall — the statue of a staunch segregationist and a cafeteria named for a man who aided the bloodiest race massacre in Arkansas. 

Months after the group’s creation, the Black Student Caucus announced the protest on March 13, the one that Jackson is helping lead like a conductor. 

“For too long we’ve been given half hearted affirmations, Performative initiatives, and mission statements…On Saturday March 13 at 9:30 am we use our voices for those that have been silenced. We need solidarity in this time and we hope you can join us. Where there are people, there is power ✊🏾  #blackatuark” 

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Jackson doesn’t fancy herself a leader. Nevertheless at six feet tall, with piercing dark eyes and a presence that can fill a room, she is the type of woman whom people listen to. 

That force is an amalgamation of growing up Black in the Arkansas Delta and then moving to Little Rock as a child, where she attended predominantly white schools.  

Jackson spent her early childhood in what the people who lived there called the projects, and what the government called “section-8 apartments.” It was there that Jackson found her own little piece of heaven. 

“When I was a child everyone knew each other and everyone looked out for each other,” Jackson said. “I never experienced danger and I never felt like I was in a dangerous situation. I always tell folks — I used to write poems back in the day — that I felt like I was in heaven, I was in paradise.”  

It was a chance for Jackson and her family, blood and not, to be “carefree Black kids in every sense of the word,” she said. 

There was no trauma looming over them. No need to be more than simply who they were. Jackson and her brother got to be kids. They got the chance to play outside, see friends and help around the house with nothing else hanging over their heads. If someone needed something, they knew they were going to get it one way or another.  

That paradise came from a community that helped shape Jackson into who she is. Her grandmother used to say, “I choose to live here, I don’t have to live here.” That mentality came from a place where people came first. 

Jackson’s family moved from Pine Bluff to Little Rock when she was five years old. The move was the start of an internal and external battle with the complexities of racism that Jackson didn’t fully realize until she was older. 

She attended a variety of schools growing up, some in the wealthiest parts of Little Rock where she flourished, others where the discrimination against her was enough to make her move schools. She attended schools like Mount St. Mary’s Academy, where she was one of three Black students in her year and stood out because she was from public school and a tall, Black woman with a knack for basketball. She also attended the famous Little Rock Central High School, the school she originally avoided because she did not think she would survive it. 

“I [went] through so many epiphanies during those years of kind of having this internal hate for my race, trying to be white…trying to move my race away,” Jackson said. 

When Jackson made her way to the UofA in 2018 she had gotten over it — people staring, asking questions. She knew what she was walking into when she made it to campus, which is made up of only 5.3% of Black students. 

“Through all that, I kind of learned how to survive and thrive in those predominantly white situations,” Jackson said. “ [I learned] how to be true to myself and my race.” 

By the time Jackson found out about her family’s surviving the Elaine Massacre, she was already well aware of the realities Black people still face in Arkansas and across the U.S.  

Those realities are something that many on the UA campus are still realizing and confronting. While Jackson had accepted them and learned to fight back, many still haven’t, which is what pushed her to get involved.  

While Jackson has not faced some of those issues on campus, she understands the emotional toll of it all. Many of those students at the UofA were also from the Delta region of Arkansas Jackson grew up. 

“The underlying segregation that happens in the Delta, even today, no one talks about it because it’s not a state-sanctioned segregation, but it is segregation,” Jackson said. “They got on to this campus and felt like fishes out of water and I felt like I needed to do something about that.”  

Jackson’s fire to help Black students was only fueled farther when she learned about her family’s connection to Brough. Jackson learned her family survived the Elaine Massacre in February after seeing a snippet of a documentary about the event that her uncle shared on Facebook. 

Moses Jackson, the grandfather of Tyrah, and a direct descendant of survivors of the massacre, was a part of a documentary shedding light on the Elaine Massacre. 

“The man would take your cotton and then the man at the store [where] you had credit would run your books up on ya so you didn’t have nothing,” said Moses Jackson, a former sharecropper and the grandfather of Tyrah in a 2002 documentary. “You work a whole year and handpick 40 bales of cotton and you  come out with nothing.” 

In the 20 minute documentary narrated by esteemed Black actor, Ossie Davis, Moses, alongside his sister Ruth Jackson, are among the first to speak. The documentary narrates the events of the Elaine Massacre and gives a voice to the people who experienced living in Elaine at the time. 

“Colored people had more fear than they got now,” Ruth said in the film. “A lot of things they were scared of, they were afraid to talk about.” 

Many of the challenges that those Black Arkansans faced in 1919 are still there. While fighting for better pay as sharecroppers is not something Black Arkansans have to worry about in the 2020’s, there are still a number of aggressions, large and small, that they face on a daily basis. Black people are still being attacked for gathering to fight for basic human rights, as seen in the hundreds of protests across the U.S. last summer after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. They are still being murdered by the people who are paid to serve and protect. They are still fighting microaggressions implemented in workplaces and universities, like the ones brought up during the #BlackatUARK movement last summer as well.  The list could go on. 

While some things have improved since 1919, there is still exploitation and an underlying belief in white supremacy, said Brian Mitchell, a history professor at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock. 

“Although we thought it was dead, it has very much been resurrected the last four or five years,” Mitchell said. 

The “history” surrounding monuments like the Fulbright statue is often lumped in with the idea of “heritage.” 

“The word heritage is loaded with emotion and nostalgia that go back and not necessarily history,” Mitchell said.  “These monuments are counterfactual, they’re not telling a whole story.” 

Jackson is a member of the committee that worked on decisions regarding the Fulbright statue and renaming the dining hall, among other issues. University officials formed The Committee to Evaluate J. William Fulbright and Charles Brough’s U of A Presence in the summer of 2020 as a part of the demands issued by the Black Student Caucus. 

The committee is made up of 19 members that were chosen to help represent campus in the most diverse and broadest way possible, said Stephen Caldwell, an associate professor and chair of the Faculty Senate. 

The committee was tasked with providing a recommendation on Fulbright’s name being removed from the college of arts and sciences, the relocation of his statue and Brough’s name being removed from the dining hall, Caldwell said. The committee met every Friday of the 2020-21 school year, spending time listening to a number of people and groups including campus members, alumni, historians and a committee from Elaine. The second part of the year was spent getting into the “nitty-gritty” of the possible changes, Caldwell said. 

Discussions surrounding the issue have included “what if” situations surrounding the governor’s intentions, Jackson said. 

“But it’s like what does he matter what he was doing when the intent —when the results —had the ramifications that they did?” Jackson said. “It’s not about intent. It’s about results.” 

False narratives have been taught to people in the United States that reinforces the narrative that people want to believe, Mitchell said. 

People have grown so attached to a patriotic narrative, that when they are confronted with facts, dates, documents that counter that patriotic narrative they reject it because it doesn’t glorify them, Mitchell said. 

“It pissed me off to see people debating it,” Jackson said. “I have the first-hand account right here.” 

Jackson’s family were sharecroppers. She grew up listening to stories from people like her great aunt Ruthie about how racist people were or from her father on how hard the work was. Jackson has five uncles and one aunt who all grew up working the land they lived on in Hughes. They all went to college and her family now owns one of the biggest construction companies in the state, she said. 

“I was astounded and I was dumbfounded and I was proud,” Jackson said about learning that her family survived the Elaine Massacre. “I think I shed a couple of tears just because of the things my family had to survive and people are still debating it and talking about it.” 

While the narrative surrounding figures like Fulbright, Brough and so many more across the country are changing and people are confronting their pasts, there is still a lot of work to do. 

Jackson has realized through all of this that she doesn’t need higher ups to get things done. There are people and groups on campus that are willing to take the time and the money to make the changes that Black students want to see happen, she said. 

Jackson thinks it is politics and oftentimes snobbery that bogs down within university systems, and academia itself, in their efforts to change. 

“It’s debilitating,”Jackson said. “I think this obnoxiousness and this clubby type mindset that comes with academia, and really all systems, is the reason we haven’t gotten anywhere. You’ve got to work from the inside out.”  

The University of Arkansas Board of Trustees voted on System President Donald Bobbitt’s recommendations July 28, exactly three months after the Committee to Evaluate J. William Fulbright and Charles Brough’s U of A Presence released their recommendation to then Chancellor Joe Steinmetz on Wednesday, April 28. 

The committee recommended renaming the College of Arts and Sciences, relocating Fulbright’s statue and renaming Brough Commons. 

One of those recommendations was met — the renaming of Brough Commons. It was voted that Fulbright’s name would remain on the College of Arts and Sciences and that the statue will remain behind Old Main. 

In an email to students following the meeting, then acting Chancellor Bill Kincaid reasoned leaving Fulbright’s name because of, “his association with promoting international understanding and world peace through education.” 

The email also discusses the decision to leave the statue where it is, instead of relocating it as recommended by the committee and Steinmetz. 

“However, since Act 1003 of 2021 prevents removing or relocating monuments on public property absent receipt of a waiver from the Arkansas History Commission, I believe the statue should be contextualized in its current location,” Bobbitt wrote in a letter to the board. “If a path presents itself at a later time to consider the relocation of the statue that is consistent with state law, the Board can revisit this issue.” 

Kincaid’s email goes on to talk about efforts to diversify campus and university plans. 

Jackson’s focus remains on Black students who are ready to make these changes. Before the final votes were made this summer, she said she no longer cares about the decisions the administration makes because of the backlash or dichotomy that would eventually follow. 

“It’s in the roots of the university that you’ll make the most change, not necessarily in high administration,” Jackson said. 

Jackson knows that there are students on campus waiting to share their voices and their ideas. 

“There are Black students out there who have some type of confidence in me to do something, and so my big thing now is going to each individual Black student that I can find and asking them what changes they want to see at the university,” she said. “‘What is it in your heart of hearts, in your complete soul, in your soul – not in regards to anybody else – what are the changes you want to see in the university?’”