A church at Hoop Spur, tenant farmers meeting about what their cotton had earned them, and men posted at the door to watch the road. The shooting that began there in 1919 ran three days, and the number of Black residents of Phillips County killed was never counted; several hundred, by most estimates. Twelve Black men were sentenced to death afterward, and Scipio Africanus Jones carried their case as far as the Supreme Court, and won it. The Evening Star's front page the next morning led on a steel executive denying his corporation mistreated its men.
A memorial went up in Helena in 2019, a hundred years on, in front of the old courthouse. It doesn't carry a list of the dead, because nobody knows the names — instead it names the twelve men who were sentenced, and speaks for the uncounted.
The church at Hoop Spur would have been the only building in reach where that many people could lawfully sit down together: no lodge hall, no schoolhouse open to them, so the sanctuary did the work of both. Which is also why meetings held there were so easily read from outside as something other than a meeting.