Prologue
One day in January of 1931, a white tenant farmer named H.C. Coney who lived near the little town of England, Arkansas, reached the limit of his patience. He and his wife and children struggled in the best of times, in a cabin with newspaper on the walls and a wood stove for heat. But the drought of 1930, coinciding with the greatest depression in the nation’s history, had devastated the farms of the South. Without a harvest of corn or cotton, the situation had grown desperate. Coney couldn’t even find anyone to buy his truck for the deflated price of $25, and there weren’t enough clothes among all the family members, as he later told a reporter, “to wad a shotgun proper.” The stingy ration of lard, flour and beans, given out to drought victims by the Red Cross, kept the family constantly on the edge of starvation. Then, on January 3, 1931, a neighbor lady told Coney that her children hadn’t eaten in two days. That sent him into action.
Coney and his wife jumped into his truck and drove to the nearby home of a landowner named L.L. Bell, the local chairman of the Red Cross. There Coney found a crowd of hungry neighbors, all demanding food. The chairman refused aid because the office had run out of forms and couldn’t proceed without them. (Red Cross officials worried about “imposters“ hoarding supplies). Coney yelled to some of the crowd to jump on his truck and drive to the nearby town of England, where the stores were, to demand food and, if necessary, to take it. By the time they reached England, a crowd of some 500 white and black farmers had gathered, shouting “we’re not going to let our children starve,” and “we want food and we want it now.”
The Lonoke County drought chairman, a prominent lawyer and plantation owner named G.E. Morris, stood up before the crowd and promised that he would get them food if they would just be patient. Morris made frantic phone calls to Red Cross authorities in Little Rock, which finally resulted in the distribution of $2.75 worth of rations, meant to last for two weeks, for each of 500 families in need. It wouldn’t have taken much to provoke a violent showdown, Coney said afterward, but “they doled out the feed and we all idled back here without nobody gettin’ hurt.” Thus ended the “England riot.”
Reactions to the January 3 incident in England, Arkansas, varied wildly. The New York Times called it an “invasion of armed and hungry farmers and their wives.” The Red Cross spokesman minimized the incident, insisting that the trouble was caused by “about 40 men from one section of the county, causing only temporary excitement but no damage to property or persons.” Some in Congress denounced the farmers as Communist instigators, a charge which even Red Cross county chairman Morris denied. “I knew the crowd to whom I spoke,“ Morris said. “All of them were poor, illiterate Americans, having made share crops around England for years. They never heard that Russia had a revolution.” Will Rogers, humorist and lecturer, put it more succinctly during a tour of the drought region:
