Richard Wright’s Legacy of Exposing Racial Violence Honored on Anniversary of Elaine Massacre in Arkansas

In Part 2 of our our interview about the 103rd anniversary of the 1919 Elaine massacre, which was commemorated this weekend, we continue our conversation with Julia Wright, daughter of the acclaimed Black author Richard Wright, who called Elaine home and wrote about his great-uncle Silas Hoskins’s lynching in Elaine three years prior in 1916. We also speak with Paul Ortiz, historian at the University of Florida, about one of the worst racial massacres in U.S. history, when white mobs in Arkansas killed over 200 African Americans. After the massacre, no white attackers were prosecuted, but 12 Black union members convicted of riot-related charges were sentenced to death. The NAACP challenged their conviction, and in a landmark case, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 2 that their 14th Amendment right to due process had been violated, leading to their release.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! Audio and was authored by Democracy Now!.