Cotton Pickers Strike of 1891 (CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas)

The editorially maintained state encyclopedia entry behind the essay’s 1891 paragraph: the September 1891 Lee County strike organized by Ben Patterson of Memphis, loosely affiliated with the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, demanding one dollar per hundred pounds of picked cotton, and its suppression.

Scope of this record, stated plainly. The entry’s definitive closing tally is fifteen African Americans killed, Patterson among them, with six imprisoned; its opening paragraph separately says “more than a dozen,” and this record uses the article’s own final figure. The essay’s phrasing rule comes from the source’s specifics: hanging is documented for captured strikers later seized by masked men, not for every death, so “lynched” is not used as a blanket descriptor for all fifteen. This is a modern synthesis of period newspaper and court records, not those primary documents themselves, hence tier B; Gaither’s Blacks and the Populist Movement independently corroborates the fifteen and is the upgrade path if a later draft needs tier A.