Today’s Communiqué – 1.5.24 – Today's Communiqué

1. Arkansas Cinema Society To Screen Documentary, ‘We Have Just Begun’

Film focuses on the 1919 massacre of Black farmers in the Arkansas Delta

LITTLE ROCK, Jan. 3, 2023 — The Arkansas Cinema Society and the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts will host the Arkansas premiere of We Have Just Begun, the story of the 1919 Elaine Massacre and Dispossession. The event is part of ACS’ Dreamland Film Series and takes place on Jan. 19, 2024, in the Performing Arts Theater at AMFA. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. and the show starts at 6 p.m. Filmmaker Michael Warren Wilson will be on-hand for a Q+A after the film. Admission is $15 and tickets can be purchased online or at the door.

Deep in the Arkansas Delta lies the legacy of the worst race or labor battle in American history—hidden and obscured for over 100 years. This is the story of We Have Just Begun.

“The story of the Elaine Massacre is crucial to consciousness raising to teach people that resistance to oppressive systems has always been the science of collectivity,” said Tongo Eisen-Martin, Co-Writer/Co-Narrator/Producer. “And just as much as the film is excavation, it is also a warning in that the material conditions that gave rise to these waves of massacres of Black people then, if not twin to, are definitely sibling to what we have now.”

Michael Warren Wilson, director, co-producer and co-writer of the film, feels this screening at AMFA is important to raising awareness of the event and its correlation with current circumstances.

“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,” said Wilson. “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 has reverberated into the present. Today, the people of the Arkansas Delta have even fewer options, yet remain dominated by many of the same historical forces they fought in 1919. Elaine is Arkansas. Understanding Elaine is to understand the ways in which capitalist domination and exploitation of the Delta has defined Arkansas economic and social life—activating and intensifying the racial legacies of enslavement and maintaining inequality in the region.”

Many Arkansans worked on the film including Michelle Duster (great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells), noted musician Joshua Asante (formerly of Amasa Hines), Cherisse Jones-Branch (ASU Professor), Brian Mitchell (head of the Abraham Lincoln Archives in Illinois), Judge Wendell Griffin, and James White and Leonora Marshall (of the Elaine Legacy Center), along with various descendants of both massacre perpetrators and victims.

About We Have Just Begun

The result of over seven years of investigation into the buried history and legacy of the Elaine Massacre and Dispossession, We Have Just Begun explores the continuity of exploitation and domination in the Delta from before 1919 to the present. The film assembles striking new revelations by descendants, recordings of eyewitnesses, and original research to portray a region and people brutally stripped of resources and autonomy to this very day.

We Have Just Begun takes its name from the secret passcode used by a Black union of farmers and domestic workers organizing throughout the Arkansas Delta in 1919. Narrated by current San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin, and featuring Ida B. Wells’s great-granddaughter, Michelle Duster, reading from the great journalist’s pamphlet, “The Arkansas Riot,” the film immerses the viewer in a community wrestling with its own legacy. It reveals previously untold layers of the episode, including buried documents and the actual motivations for the massacre and subsequent mass dispossession. A lyrical composition of Delta voices, archival documents, and original compositions by musician Joshua Asante, it is a portrait of rural struggle toward emancipation, despite brutal attempts to suppress it.

About the Dreamland Film Series

The Dreamland Film Series celebrates Black voices in cinema. Whether they be Arkansas-based films and filmmakers or stories of the Black experience on a national level, Dreamland seeks to lift up their voices.

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