d 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 county that the massacre had started, and for
days there was murder and rioting, in the course of which not less
than five white men and twenty-five Negroes were killed, though some
estimates placed the number of fatalities a great deal higher. Negroes
were arrested and disarmed; some were shot on the highways; homes were
fired into; and at one time hundreds of men and women were in a stockade
under heavy guard and under the most unwholesome conditions, while
hundreds of white men, armed to the teeth, rushed to the vicinity from
neighboring cities and towns. Governor Charles H. Brough telegraphed to
Camp Pike for Federal troops, and five hundred were mobilized at once
"to repel the attack of the black army." Worse than any other feature
was the wanton slaying of the four Johnston brothers, whose father had
been a prominent Presbyterian minister and whose mother was formerly a
school-teacher. Dr. D.A.E. Johnston was a successful dentist and owned a
three-story building in Helena. Dr. Louis Johnston was a physician who
lived in Oklahoma and who had come home on a visit. A third brother had
served in France and been wounded and gassed at Chateau-Thierry.

Altogether one thousand Negroes were arrested and one hundred and
twenty-two indicted. A special committee of seven gathered evidence and
is charged with having used electric connections on the witness chair
in order to frighten the Negroes. Twelve men were sentenced to death
(though up to the end of 1920 execution had been stayed), and fifty-four
to penitentiary terms. The trials lasted from five to ten minutes each.
No witnesses for the defense were called; no Negroes were on the juries;
no change of venue was given. Meanwhile lawyers at Helena were preparing
to reap further harvest from Negroes who would be indicted and