32. But The Massacre Was To Be Severe
The sheriff, Frank Kitchens, and his deputies did not set out themselves to find the people who were responsible for the white man’s death at the church. Instead, they called for white people throughout Phillips County to form mobs to subdue an impending insurrection.
What unfolded was less a race riot and more a massacre. One of the witnesses, a white man by the name of H.F. Smiddy, remarked in 1921, “several hundred of them… began to hunt negroes and shotting [sic] them as they came to them.”
