Elaine, Arkansas massacre, Tulsa Massacre

  Tulsa race massacre

"More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals, and as many as 6,000 black residents of Tulsa were interned in large facilities, many of them for several days.  

The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 36 dead. 

The 2001 Tulsa Reparations Coalition examination of events identified 39 dead, 26 black and 13 white, based on contemporary autopsy reports, death certificates, and other records. 

 The commission gave several estimates ranging from 75 to 300 dead." 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre 

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The Elaine massacre 

 occurred on September 30–October 2, 1919 at Hoop Spur in the vicinity of Elaine in rural Phillips County, Arkansas where 

 African Americans were organizing against peonage and abuses in tenant farming. 

 As many as several hundred African Americans and five white men were killed. 

 Estimates of deaths made in the immediate aftermath of the Elaine Massacre by eyewitnesses range from 50 to "more than a hundred" 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaine_massacre 

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Foreman and country peon 

 by Prilidiano Pueyrredón (1823 - 1870)

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Foreman and country peon by Prilidiano Pueyrredón (1823 - 1870)

Peon 

 (English /ˈpiːɒn/ PEE-on, from the Spanish peón Spanish pronunciation: [peˈon]) usually refers to a person subject to peonage: 

 any form of wage labor, 

 financial exploitation, 

 coercive economic practice, 

or policy in which the victim or a laborer (peon)  

has little control over employment 

 or economic conditions.  

Peon and peonage can refer to both the colonial period and post-colonial period of Latin America, 

as well as the period after the end of slavery in the United States, 

 when "Black Codes" were passed to retain African-American freedmen as labor through other means." 

"After the U.S. Civil War, the South passed "Black Codes", laws to control freed black slaves. 

 Vagrancy laws were included in these Black Codes. Homeless or unemployed African Americans who were between jobs, most of whom were former slaves, were arrested and fined as vagrants. 

 Usually lacking the resources to pay the fine, the "vagrant" was sent to county labor or hired out under the convict lease program to a private employer. 

 The authorities also tried to restrict the movement of freedmen between rural areas and cities, to between towns.

Under such laws, local officials arbitrarily arrested tens of thousands of people 

and charged them with fines and court costs of their cases. 

 Black freedmen were those most aggressively targeted. Poor whites were also arrested, but usually in much smaller numbers. 

 White merchants, farmers, and business owners were allowed to pay these debts, and the prisoner had to work off the debt.  

Prisoners were leased as laborers to owners and operators of coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries, and farm plantations, with the lease revenues for their labor going to the states.  

The lessors were responsible for room and board of the laborers, and frequently abused them 

 with little oversight by the state." 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peon