Grif Stockley
Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919
The tragedy of the race massacres in Elaine, Arkansas, is not only that they occurred, but that history has ignored them. In riveting prose, Stockley tells the full story of this incident, weighs the evidence and makes a clear and powerful case that white mobs and federal soldiers murdered black citizens of Elaine. And as he maps out the massacre, the resulting trials and the lives of the survivors, Stockley also tracks the twisting and silencing of the truth. (The University of Arkansas Press, 2001)
Excerpt from Blood in Their EyesIn the morning hours of October 1, 1919, urgent calls went up and down the Mississippi River from the heart of the Arkansas Delta: blacks in Phillips County are rioting. No one seemed to be clear about what had touched them off, but a shoot-out at a church in a hamlet called Hoop Spur in the southern part of the county had left one white man dead and others wounded.
Praise for Blood in Their EyesBlood in Their Eyes is a relentless examination of one of the bloodiest American racial repressions of the 20th century. In retelling the story of the Elaine massacres of 1919 with moral fervor and canny reinterpretation of sources, Grif Stockley has written a study of collective barbarism in real time that deepens our knowledge of the psychodynamics of white supremacy.
-— David Levering Lewis, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning author Meticulously researched and compellingly argued, Blood in Their Eyes is the definitive history of the Elaine, Arkansas, massacre . . . [which] was the bloodiest race war of the Red Summer of 1919. Compounding the violence by rampaging white mobs and army troops was the torture of black survivors. Grif Stockley, a lawyer, has told the whole story, and in doing so, he has deeply enriched our understanding not only of America's violently racist past, but also of the challenges which that history poses for the future. -— William M. Tuttle, Jr., author of Daddy's Gone to War: The Second World War in the Lives of America's Children (1993) and Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (2nd ed., 1996) Awards for Blood in Their EyesAmerican Association of State and Local History, 2003, Certificate of Commendation Booker-Worthen Literary Prize, 2001, for "Best Book" |
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