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On the Laps of Gods
The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation
1 of 1 copy available
September 30, 1919. The United States teetered on the edge of a racial civil war. During the previous three months, racial fighting had erupted in twenty-five cities. And deep in the Arkansas Delta, black sharecroppers were meeting in a humble wooden church, forming a union and making plans to sue their white landowners, who for years had cheated them out of their fair share of the cotton crop. A car pulled up outside the church . . .
What happened next has long been shrouded in controversy.
In this heartbreaking but ultimately triumphant story of courage and will, journalist Robert Whitaker carefully documents—and exposes—one of the worst racial massacres in American history. Over the course of several days, posses and federal troops gunned down more than one hundred men, women, and children.
But that is just the beginning of this astonishing story. White authorities also arrested more than three hundred black farmers, and in trials that lasted only a few hours, all-white juries sentenced twelve of the union leaders to die in the electric chair. One of the juries returned a death verdict after two minutes of deliberation.
All hope seemed lost, and then an extraordinary lawyer from Little Rock stepped forward: Scipio Africanus Jones. Jones, who’d been born a slave, joined forces with the NAACP to mount an appeal in which he argued that his clients’ constitutional rights to a fair trial had been violated. Never before had the U.S. Supreme Court set aside a criminal verdict in a state court because the proceedings had been unfair, so the state of Arkansas, confident of victory, had a carpenter build coffins for the men.
We all know the names of the many legendary heroes that emerged from the civil rights movement: Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King Jr. among them. Whitaker’s important book commemorates a legal struggle, Moore v. Dempsey, that paved the way for that later remaking of our country, and tells too of a man, Scipio Africanus Jones, whose name surely deserves to be known by all Americans.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 10, 2008 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780307409164
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780307409164
- File size: 30174 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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March 10, 2008
On September 30, 1919, a group of white planters tried to shut down a black sharecroppers’ meeting in Arkansas; a sheriff was killed in the melee, and the next day hordes of whites traveled to the county. Thus began the Elaine Massacre, the “indiscriminate hunting down, shooting and killing of Negroes,” as one white witness described it. Whitaker (The Mapmaker’s Wife
) reconstructs the “killing fields” where by October 3, five white men and over 100 black men, women and children were killed. Hundreds of black sharecroppers were arrested; after torture-obtained confessions, 74 men were convicted and 12 received the death penalty. Whitaker examines the trial, the ensuing appeals and the heroic—ultimately successful—efforts of the lawyer and former slave, Scipio Africanus Jones and the 12 defendants who were finally set free in 1925. His research is thorough, particularly in his use of Arkansas resources; the arrangement of his documentation, however, makes tracking his sources a put-the-jigsaw-together exercise for the reader. Whitaker’s balanced report of what are, at times, diametrically opposed versions of events illuminates a dismal corner of American history. -
July 15, 2008
Whitaker ("The Mapmaker's Wife"), a journalist who usually writes on topics in popular science and medicine, plunges full force into the legal and historical significance of a U.S. Supreme Court decision overlooked by many historians. "Moore v. Dempsey" (1923) concerned an appeal from five blacks convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to death by the Court of the State of Arkansas. The convictions stemmed from a 1919 Arkansas race riot in which a white man was killed and several people of both races were injured. Whitaker shows how NAACP attorneys struggled to defend the accused in the face of an all-white jury, prosecution witnesses who were whipped if they didn't lie, a mob outside the courthouse threatening violence if there were no convictions, court-appointed defense attorneys who refused to call any witnesses, and a trial and deliberation that took less than an hour. Whitaker carefully traces the progress of the defendants' federal appeal all the way up to a Supreme Court dominated by a group of crusty old men, a few of whom had the heart and mind to see through the sham of Arkansas justice, overturn the state court ruling, and set the men free. He praises Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, noting in particular the influence of that Boston Brahmin on the other justices, who finally agreed with Holmes that "counsel, jury and judge were swept to the fatal end by an irresistible wave of public passion." Whitaker also notes the exemplary work of Scipio Africanus Jones, the NAACP attorney, born a slave, whose effective constitutional arguments turned the tide in favor of the defendants. Highly recommended for academic and law libraries.Philip Y. Blue, New York State Supreme Court Criminal Branch Law Lib., New YorkCopyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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