Narrated by Tongo Eisen-Martin, San Francisco Poet Laureate, & Michelle Duster, Ida B. Wells' great-granddaughter
In 1919, Black workers' decades-long efforts to challenge their exploitation and become landowners in the Arkansas Delta culminated in the nation's deadliest racial massacre and labor battle, an event which was then buried for 100 years. We Have Just Begun is the result of over seven years of investigation into the suppressed history and legacy of the Elaine Massacre and Dispossession and explores the continuity of exploitation and domination in the Delta from before 1919 to the present.
In the Reconstruction era, Philips County became the sharecropping capitol of Arkansas, with capitol flooding into the region as it became a global hub for hardwood and cotton. Amidst this massive influx of wealth, Black laborers still found themselves paid less than their white counterparts for the same work. Robert Lee Hill, a sharecropper's son, attempted to organize a union of Black farmers, landowners, and business owners in the region, which also included WWI soldiers who had returned home from fighting for freedom abroad to find discrimination still rampant at home. Whipped up into a frenzy by a growing Black business class and rising labor movements vilified as the product of foreign agents, white communities enacted the "Red Summer" which saw startling increases in KKK membership and lynchings, and would manifest in its deadliest form in the Elaine Race Riot.
Challenging the official narrative that Black workers instigated the riot by shooting a white police officer, and that only a few dozen workers were subsequently killed, We Have Just Begun assembles striking new revelations by descendants, recordings of eyewitnesses, and original research to portray a region and people brutally stripped of land and resources and forced to relocate to areas where their descendants remain to this day. Immersing the viewer in a community wrestling with its own legacy, the film reveals previously untold layers of the episode, including unearthed documents that illuminate the true motivations for and scope of the massacre and subsequent mass dispossession. A lyrical composition of oral histories, primary sources, and original compositions by musician Joshua Asante, We Have Just Begun is a portrait of rural struggle toward emancipation, despite brutal attempts to suppress it, and the ways in which the present continues to be shaped by the past.
FILMMAKER'S STATEMENT: "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. 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 have reverberated into the present – looming like specters that continue to define the terms. Today, the people of the Arkansas Delta have even fewer options and remain dominated by many of the same historical forces they fought in 1919. Understanding Elaine is to understand the ways in which capitalist domination and exploitation of the Delta has defined Southern economic and social life – activating and intensifying the colonial legacies of enslavement and maintaining inequality in the region. The film is a call to, at long last, decolonize the Delta and the American South more generally."
— Michael Warren Wilson
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