In 1918 the price of cotton was constantly rising and at length reached forty cents a pound.  Even with the cheating to which the Negroes were subjected, it became difficult to keep them in debt, and they became more and more insistent in their demands for itemized statements.  Nevertheless some of those whose cotton was sold in October, 1918, did not get any statement of any sort before July of the next year.

Seeing no other way out of their difficulty, sixty-eight of the Negroes got together and decided to hire a lawyer who would help them to get statements of their accounts and settlement at the right figures.  Feeling that the life of any Negro lawyer who took such a case would be endangered, they employed the firm of Bratton and Bratton, of Little Rock.  They made contracts with this firm to handle the sixty-eight cases at fifty dollars each in cash and a percentage of the moneys collected from the white planters.  Some of the Negroes also planned to go before the Federal Grand Jury and charge certain planters with peonage.  They had secret meetings from time to time in order to collect the money to be paid in advance and to collect the evidence which would enable them successfully to prosecute their cases.  Some Negro cotton-pickers about the same time organized a union; and at Elaine many Negroes who worked in the sawmills and who desired to protect their wives and daughters from insult, refused to allow them to pick cotton or to work for a white man at any price.

Such was the sentiment out of which developed the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America, which was an effort by legal means to secure protection from unscrupulous landlords, but which did use the form of a fraternal order with passwords and grips and insignia so as the more forcefully to appeal to some of its members.  About the first of October the report was spread abroad in Phillips County that the Negroes were plotting an insurrection and that they were rapidly preparing to massacre the white people on a great scale.  When the situation had become tense, one Sunday John Clem, a white man from Helena, drunk, came to Elaine and proceeded to terrorize the Negro population by gun play.  The colored people kept off the streets in order to avoid trouble and telephoned the sheriff at Helena.  This man failed to act.  The next day Clem was abroad again, but the Negroes still avoided trouble, thinking that his acts were simply designed to start a race riot.  On Tuesday evening, October 1, however, W.D.  Adkins, a special agent of the Missouri Pacific Railroad, in company with Charles Pratt, a deputy sheriff, was riding past a Negro church near Hoop Spur, a small community just a few miles from Elaine.  According to Pratt, persons in the church fired without cause on the party, killing Adkins and wounding himself.  According to the Negroes, Adkins and Pratt fired into the church, evidently to frighten the people there assembled.  At any rate word spread through the