John Jefferson

One of the Black sharecroppers imprisoned after the Elaine massacre of September–October 1919 in Phillips County, Arkansas, in which white mobs and federal troops killed an estimated 100 to 800 Black residents who had been organizing the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America to demand fair settlement for their cotton. Arkansas prosecuted 122 Black survivors in trials lasting minutes before all-white juries; not a single white attacker was charged. He was among the men named by the anti-lynching journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett in her pamphlet "The Arkansas Race Riot" (1920) as then serving penitentiary terms of five to twenty-one years; the length of his individual sentence is not separately documented.