The Unitarian Universalist Church of Little Rock, 1818 Reservoir Road, is glad to offer the opportunity to view the Documentary film “We Have Just Begun” about the 1919 Elaine Massacre. Please join us on Saturday, May 11, at 6:00 pm for the showing and a panel discussion and Q&A with the Producer/Director, Michael Warren Wilson, following the film presentation. The following information provides details about the film and its story.
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.
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 new revelations by descendants, recordings of eyewitnesses, and original research to portray a region and people brutally stripped of resources and autonomy to this 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 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 portrays the rural struggle toward emancipation despite brutal attempts to suppress it.