Jennifer Hadlock

Jennifer Hadlock is a community organizer, genealogist, movement lawyer, and member of TIAA Exposed.

She learned about the Elaine Massacre of 1919 as a Board member of the Fund for Reparations Now!! and was subsequently invited by the Elaine Legacy Center to research land ownership and theft in Phillips County, Arkansas, to document and corroborate oral history passed down by Black descendants of the Elaine Massacre.

She has since scoured deeds, wills, and property maps in the Phillips and Desha County courthouses, examined tax records at the Helena Public Library, and searched through files and archival materials at public libraries in Memphis, Marianna, Marvell, Elaine, Little Rock, New York, Chicago, and Clarksdale, Mississippi, and at the Arkansas State Archives in Little Rock.

The research took her to the Cotton Museum in Memphis, the Delta Cultural Center in Helena, the Mississippi Levee Districts office in Clarksdale, the Lower White River Museum in Des Arcs, the Museum of Grand Prairie in Stuttgart, the Marianna Lee County Museum in Marianna, the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center in Little Rock, the Lower Mississippi Museum in Vicksburg, and the University Museum and Cultural Center at University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.

She listened to oral history recordings and conducted interviews with many descendants and residents of the area, and pored over the notes of Nan Woodruff, author of “American Congo,” along with the archived papers of Arthur Waskow, the early Ida B. Wells book, “A Riot in Arkansas,” Grif Stockley’s “Blood in Their Eyes,” and other books about the Elaine Massacre.