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Encyclopedia Of Arkansas Minute: The Cotton Pickers' Strike Of 1891

An 1891 attempt by Black sharecroppers to increase the amount of money they were paid for picking cotton led to more than a dozen of them dying.

Ben Patterson of Memphis came to Lee County in late September to establish a strike, but things quickly took a violent turn as organizers traveled the county. Two cotton pickers were killed on the 25th and a white plantation manager was murdered and a cotton gin burned three days later.

As the county sheriff organized a posse to track down the strikers, many of them fled to Cat Island on the Mississippi River to hide out. The posse stormed the island and killed two strikers while nine others were captured; a lynch mob killed all nine of them. Patterson, too, was murdered when the crew of a steamboat he boarded learned his identity.

By the time the strike was completely suppressed fifteen Black men were killed and six others imprisoned. This mob violence almost certainly quashed Black labor organization in the Delta until the Elaine Massacre of 1919.

To learn more, visit encyclopediafarkansas.net.

Mark Christ produces and hosts Encyclopedia of Arkansas Minute on KUAR. He is head of adult programming for the Central Arkansas Library System. He previously served as community outreach director for the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, which he joined in 1990 after eight years as a journalist.