Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor

by Kim Kelly

By 1919, the union felt strong enough to take action on behalf of a group of Black cotton farmers in Elaine who wished to sue their employers for their fair share of that year’s bumper crop. White lawyer Ulysses S. Bratton, known to be sympathetic to the Black workers’ plight and credited with years of work suing Delta landowners for violations of the Peonage Act, took the case. On September 30, 1919, Bratton sent his son, Ocier, an accountant and World War I veteran, down to the Ratio lodge to meet with union organizers and collect his lawyer’s fee. Less than an hour into the younger Bratton’s roadside meeting with the two dozen Black men and women sharecroppers behind the lawsuit, a group of armed white men rode up and kidnapped him. An angry mob chained him to a storefront and rifled through his pockets, further enraged when it found he had an IWW newspaper tucked away. Ocier was labeled a labor agitator, thrown onto a train, and transported twenty-five miles to Helena, where he remained in jail for thirty days.