LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — The Arkansas Cinema Society (ACS) and the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts (AMFA) are set to host the premiere of a new film titled "We Have Just Begun." The story of the 1919 Elaine Massacre and Dispossession.
The event will be held in the Performing Arts Theater at the AMFA on Friday, January 19, 2024, and is a part of the Arkansas Cinema Society's Dreamland Film Series.
Admission costs $15 per person and tickets can be bought at the door or online. Doors to the screening will open promptly at 5:30 p.m. and the show will begin at 6:00 p.m.
After the film concludes, filmmaker Michael Warren Willsion will present for a Q+A session.
The story of We Have Just Begun, takes place deep in the Arkansas Delta and showcases the legacy of the worst race or labor battle in American history that was hidden and obscured for over a century.
“The story of the Elaine Massacre is crucial to consciousness-raising to teach people that resistance to oppressive systems has always been the science of collectivity,” said Tongo Eisen-Martin, Co-Writer/Co-Narrator/Producer. “And just as much as the film is excavation, it is also a warning in that the material conditions that gave rise to these waves of massacres of Black people then, if not twin to, are definitely sibling to what we have now.”
Director, co-producer, and co-writer Michael Warren Wilson expressed that this screening is a very important key to raising awareness of the event and how it correlates to modern-day circumstances.
"After interviewing dozens of descendants, historians, and current residents of the Delta, it’s clear to me that the Elaine Massacre was the deadliest race or labor battle in American history,” said Wilson. “Yet, despite growing up in Arkansas, I knew nothing about it prior to my research. The centennial in 2019 brought the event more publicity, but the full truth of it was obscured even then. The Elaine Massacre and subsequent dispossession of Black people has reverberated into the present. Today, the people of the Arkansas Delta have even fewer options, yet remain dominated by many of the same historical forces they fought in 1919. Elaine is Arkansas. Understanding Elaine is to understand the ways in which capitalist domination and exploitation of the Delta has defined Arkansas economic and social life—activating and intensifying the racial legacies of enslavement and maintaining inequality in the region.”
The film was worked on by many Arkansans including Michelle Duster (great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells), noted musician Joshua Asante (formerly of Amasa Hines), Cherisse Jones-Branch (ASU Professor), Brian Mitchell (head of the Abraham Lincoln Archives in Illinois), Judge Wendell Griffin, and James White and Leonora Marshall (of the Elaine Legacy Center), along with various descendants of both massacre victims and perpetrators.
The creation of We Have Just Begun is the result of more than seven years of research and investigation into the history and legacy of the Elaine Massacre and Dispossession. The film got its name from the secret passcode that was used by a Black union of farmers and some domestic workers organizing across the Arkansas Delta back in 1919.
For more information about the film, please click here.
