Leroy Johnston

LeRoy Alfred Johnston was a decorated Black veteran of World War I. He had enlisted in 1917, served in the 369th Infantry Regiment — the "Harlem Hellfighters" — and was severely wounded in France before returning to Arkansas in August 1919. Two months later, on October 2, 1919, a white posse killed him and his three brothers during the Elaine massacre in Phillips County. The four Johnston brothers had been on a hunting trip and had nothing to do with the labor meeting of Black sharecroppers that white mobs and troops were then attacking. Warned that the roads were dangerous, they boarded a train toward Helena. A white posse stopped the train, arrested the brothers on a charge of supplying ammunition to the sharecroppers, chained them together, and put them in a car. All four were shot, and their bodies were left by the roadside. LeRoy Johnston had survived the war only to be killed at home. His Army discharge record had been altered to downgrade his wounds from "severely" to "slightly," which kept him from the Purple Heart for a century; a historian uncovered the change, and the medal was awarded posthumously in 2018. No one was ever convicted of killing the Johnston brothers. The massacre as a whole left an estimated 100 to 240 Black people dead, and instead of prosecuting the white attackers, authorities charged scores of Black residents.