Here, as in every company for which I’ve performed, trading sexual favours for better roles and positions is the norm. I currently work for a national ballet company in Europe. What Luke Jennings writes about abuse at the Royal Ballet is true of every ballet company I know ( LRB, 27 September). Using its precedent, the NAACP attacked Jim Crow laws in federal court, eventually securing the landmark school desegregation ruling Brown v. Moore led to the expansion of federal oversight in state criminal cases. It was the first time since Reconstruction that the federal courts had intervened in a state criminal case using habeas corpus. Their case was argued by Scipio Africanus Jones, a black lawyer from Little Rock. The court overturned the convictions of six sharecroppers who had been sentenced to death for conspiracy to murder whites, the alleged cause of the ‘uprising’. Dempsey (1923), the foundational ruling of the Civil Rights era. One major consequence of the Elaine Massacre was the US Supreme Court ruling Moore v. The bodies were left where they were murdered nature disposed of the remains. The Elaine Massacre took place in a frontier region, an area barely settled, a place of massive forests, sloughs and canebrakes, and teeming with wildlife: bears, wolves, wild boars, alligators. In neither case have the bodies been located. Wells’s The Arkansas Race Riot, published in 1920, was little noticed.Įlaine and Tulsa were nearly identical: a hundred years of silence in both black and white communities. There are many reasons the Elaine Massacre has been neglected: it is the only major pogrom to have taken place in a rural location no settlement was destroyed the victims were poor sharecroppers rather than middle-class blacks and the black community in Elaine did not have a John Hope Franklin to fight for public awareness of the tragedy. At a conservative estimate, more than a hundred blacks were killed, in nearly two dozen ‘killing fields’. There were a few isolated killings over the next four days. The next morning, US troops, armed with machine guns, arrived to ‘put down the black insurrection’, and for the next two days killed sharecroppers hiding in the canebrakes and the woods. The posses killed as many as twenty sharecroppers that afternoon, mobs from outside the county descended on the area, killing more indiscriminately. The massacre in Phillips County, which arose in response to an effort by black sharecroppers to organise a union (in the hope of receiving their fair share of the cotton crop revenue), began on the morning of 1 October 1919, when posses from the county seat of Helena made their way to Hoop Spur, a few miles north of Elaine. As a co-founder of the Elaine Massacre Memorial in Helena, Arkansas, I hope the events there will also be remembered when atrocities against African Americans in the years after the First World War are listed. In his excellent piece about the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, Eric Foner points out that there were also ‘violent racial confrontations’ in East St Louis, Chicago, Washington and Seattle ( LRB, 9 September).