Harlan
Bozeman

Out the E is a photographic project on the rural Arkansas Delta town of Elaine. There are some there who don’t want to remember the events that began that day in 1919. And there are others who’ve failed to even start to talk about it. There is a racial divide in this small community, creating a culture of silence and negligence that has yet to begin to heal.

Law and way of life operate differently in this region. After the end of Civil War, most of the formerly enslaved blacks became tenant farmers. In 1919, as cotton prices skyrocketed, black sharecroppers, trapped in a vortex of credit and debt and underpaid for their crops, began to organize to receive fair payment. On September 30, a meeting of farmers was disrupted by several white men, killing one. Hours later, spurred on by a “black insurrection”, a white mob—including federal troops—descended on the area. Two days later more than 500 blacks were killed in what is considered to be the deadliest racial conflict in the U.S.

A century later, most of the town’s black residents live in a familiar cycle. The only employment is a few local businesses and working on soybean farms, and most of the farming jobs are typically offered exclusively to whites. Basically, to make a living in Elaine you need to leave. In a time when more Americans are grappling with the country’s history of extracting wealth and resources from its black communities, Out the E places attention on a town and community that has long been forgotten.