unable to pay such fees in a cash-poor economy. These two measures caused sharp declines in the number of African-American and white voters; by 1895 no African-American members were left in the General Assembly. The Republican Party was hollowed out, and the farmer-labor alliance collapsed. Most blacks were kept off the rolls and out of electoral politics for more than six decades, until after Congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, although a concerted effort in the 1940s increased voter registration. Social tensions rose in the area after World War I, as black veterans pushed for better conditions. Unlike other mass riots of Red Summer 1919, when whites attacked blacks in numerous northern and midwestern cities because of labor and social competition, the Elaine Race Riot, now known as the "Elaine Massacre", was the result of rural forces. It occurred near Elaine, Arkansas in the Delta, where local planters were trying to discourage the formation of an agricultural union among blacks. White mobs killed an estimated 237 blacks; five whites were killed in the unrest. The area suffered extensively during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which put tens of thousands of acres underwater, caused extensive property damage, and left many people homeless. In the mid-1930s, large cotton plantations, under stress because of the Great Depression, benefited from the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Act, which paid them to leave fields fallow, thereby raising the price of cotton by reducing the supply. The effect was devastating for sharecroppers and tenant farmers. In response, two young Socialists, advised by Norman Thomas, the leader of the Socialist Party, formed the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. They organized racially integrated meetings throughout the Arkansas Delta and signed up over 2,000 members. By 1935, the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union had over 10,000 members in 80 chapters. The union mounted a cotton pickers strike in the Delta in 1935, and after months marked by violence, the cotton pickers returned to the fields with considerably higher wages. But the union's power was greatly diminished by 1939. In the 1940s the mechanized cotton picker was introduced into regional agriculture. This led to a significant decline in demand for manual labor. During World War II, the defense industry in California and other western locations attracted many African-American workers from Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas in a second wave of the Great Migration, resulting in a marked population decrease in