In 1909, the Arkansas General Assembly passed Act 112, which outlawed night riding. Federal judge Jacob Trieber convicted several whitecappers in 1904 in Helena (Phillips County). Unlike people who perpetrated lynchings, night riders and whitecappers sometimes were arrested, had their identities made public, and were charged and convicted of their crimes. For example, in Black Rock (Lawrence County) in 1894, unemployed whites posted notices calling upon local mills and factories to discharge their black employees these whitecappers remained sporadically active through the following years, attacking several African Americans in 1898. Such acts of night riding and whitecapping occurred not only in agricultural areas but also in towns built upon industry. The aim of night riders was to drive off these black laborers and thus reduce the labor pool. Frequently, landless whites committed acts of violence against African Americans, who, due to the race-based wages of the era, were working on these plantations for much less than the average white person would earn. Whitecappers struck in Cross and Poinsett counties in 1902, in Crittenden County in 1904, and periodically plagued Mississippi County from 1908 to 1921. An expansion of the plantation system in the Arkansas Delta between 18 was challenged by a violent campaign on the part of landless whites. Other factors besides price control, such as class and race relations, pitted landowners against tenant farmers and squatters. As a way of restraining the night riders, on September 27, 1908, during an emergency meeting of the Farmers District Union of Marmaduke at the Greene County Courthouse in Paragould, merchants were asked to temporarily refrain from buying cotton. The riders staged spectacular nighttime raids, destroyed cotton in the fields, killed livestock, burned barns and warehouses filled with cotton, dynamited farm machinery, and assaulted buyers. Night rider violence escalated into 1909. Newspapers also reported attacks by night riders in Marmaduke (Greene County), Bethel (Greene County), Walcott (Greene County), Lake City (Craighead County), and Jonesboro (Craighead County), as well as other small farming communities in or near Greene County. On September 29, 1908, the violence against cotton growers escalated with an attack against a farmer near Mainwood, about fifteen miles from Paragould (Greene County). In Greene County, a group of masked, armed men rode horseback from town to town, burning wagons of cotton and intimidating farmers to force cotton growers to hold their cotton for a price of thirty-five to forty cents. However, many instances of night riding had racial overtones that hearkened back to the days of the post-Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan (KKK).Ĭotton men of the state had formed the Arkansas Farmers Union in the early 1900s in order to stabilize the price of cotton, but when cotton prices fell to ten cents per pound, poorer farmers responded with a kind of viciousness unparalleled since the lawlessness of the KKK during the late nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1900s, cotton farmers throughout Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Missouri were often the targets of night riders seeking to intimidate farmers into selling their crops at higher prices than offered by the big agricultural companies. The term “night riding” is frequently synonymous with “whitecapping” or “bald knobbing,” all terms denoting extralegal acts of violence targeting select groups and carried out by vigilantes under cover of night or disguise.
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