ELAINE, Ark. — In Phillips County, tiny Elaine, population 636, doesn't have a whole lot going on in town, but it does have history and people who remember that history.
Many people living there want to make sure that one of the darkest chapters in state history is never forgotten.
In 1919, a gathering of sharecroppers angry over their treatment turned violent. They spent three days lynching African-Americans before federal troops arrived to regain control.
More than 100 people died, mostly black, but only a dozen black men were charged with crimes and sentenced to death. Subsequent court rulings spared their lives.
This week, apparent vandalism to a tree in Elaine honoring the victims raised concerns that some people might not have learned from that history.
"People can be jerks sometimes and they do a lot of hateful stuff," said James White, the director of the Elaine Legacy Center, a small museum and community center set up in an old elementary school.
"We put a memorial tree up in there in April and it stayed up there for about four months, but somebody just went up there, to be a jerk and chopped it down," he explained.
Also this week, two hours away in Little Rock, one of the state's most outspoken African-American political leaders took notice of efforts to build a memorial to Elaine about 25 miles away in the Phillips County seat of Helena West Helena.
"I don't know why you would call it anything but a hate crime," said Pulaski County Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen, who traveled to Elaine to see the damage to the tree first-hand and criticize the building of the memorial in Helena.
"You don't go to Austin, Texas and put up a monument to the Alamo if you know where the Alamo happened," he said. "After questions get raised, and I gladly admit that the questions should have been raised, about the Helena hypocrisy, the tree gets hacked down."
Police are investigating. They surrounded the fallen tree with crime tape this week but someone subsequently dragged the stump out of the ground, leaving a hole filled by a traffic cone.
Up the highway, the Elaine Massacre Memorial is nearly complete. It will sit in the corner of a town square between a county courthouse and a federal building. The square includes an historical marker noting seven Confederate generals from Phillips County.
"This is one piece of a bigger puzzle," said Memorial Designer Amoz Eckerson. "This event happened all over the county. The place where it started doesn't even exist anymore. Yes, it's named for Elaine, but I think that's actually because the people in Helena didn't want the massacre associated with them."
Eckerson said he hopes the people of Elaine come to the dedication scheduled for September 29.
White, the legacy center director, said he plans to attend, while also delivering a message to whomever damaged the tree.
"We are most definitely going to put up another tree," he said. "I want to say to the people that chopped it down, you're going to have to chop it down again, because we gonna keep putting it up there."