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On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation | 
| Manufacturer: Crown
Category: EBooks
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $9.99
You Save: $14.96 (60%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 17457
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Dewey Decimal Number: 976.788052
ASIN: B001AX9QS8
Publication Date: June 10, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
They shot them down like rabbits . . .
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.
From the Hardcover edition.
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| Customer Reviews:
A MUST READ book August 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
On the Laps of Gods by Robert Whitaker: This is a MUST READ book by a jornalist formerly with the Wall Street Journal. It focuses on an attempt by tenant farmers in Southeastern Arkansas to organize and collectively confront the land owners with theft of profits due the tem. Land owners learned of the cooperative meeting and ambushed them in their local church, beginning a trail of killing that eventually took the lives of 100 black tenant farmers and their families. They were assisted by Federal Troops from a local barracks who used machine guns on the tenant farmers. Whitaker pictures this confrontation in the larger picture of consistent and planned disenfrantisement of the black in all of the the states of the Confederate south by agreement with the local law officers and the local court systems as they passed law after law diminishing the rights of blacks. The Supreme Court USA of the time looked the other way arguing states rights dispite abuse of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
Whitaker paints a lesson for us all. In a day when the US government easily condemns lack of freedom for citizens of other countries, we must look back on our own recent past. It is an agonizing moral dilemma and should tax our own moral code. The hero here is Scipio Africanus Jones, born a slave who rose to practice law and free the 87 Arkansas prisoners falsely accused of murder by collusion of the courts and the law and who faced either long prison sentences or execution. WHAT A STORY.
Riveting--and timely July 17, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book is heartrending but also uplifting. It brings into focus a national hero, Scipio Jones, who was born a slave but rose to prominence. Now forgotten, he brought about--through his deft legal work--changes in our national law that we would do well to remember now in these days when habeous corpus seems to have gone by the wayside. Truly this book can be seen as examining the changes in our law that made it possible for the civil rights movement to emerge. It really is a great book and a great read. It can be hard to get through some of the gripping--but painful--accounts of the killings in the beginning of the book--but the end is worth it.
A Script Worthy of a Movie? June 17, 2008
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
The very title of the book suggests that a great deal of help was needed in overcoming one of the most shameful events in the annals of America's very dark racial history. The events in question have to do with Robert Whitaker's award winning story about what happened to a group of black sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta, in Elaine, Arkansas, just up the street from Helena, about a 4 hours drive from my own hometown of Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
What happened on the night of September 30, 1919 has been seared into the collective memory of all blacks affiliated with the Helena area. On that night, a group of Black sharecroppers, who had gotten tired of years of being cheated out of their fair share of their cotton crops, decided to take matters into their own hands by forming a union with the intention of petitioning and eventually suing their landowners to redress this long-running economic inequity and injustice.
This injustice, incidentally was common practice used against black farmers, whether sharecroppers or not, and existed all over not just Arkansas, but all over the South. As a small boy, I can distinctly remember my grandfather, Silas Brown, who was not a sharecropper, but happened to own his own proverbial "forty acres and two mules (Blue and Cake)," bitterly complaining about how he too was being cheated out of his cotton crop by the unscrupulous "buyers and ginners of cotton."
In any case, the group didn't get very far along in their plans to form a union, as a car pulled up to the wooden church where the meeting was taking place and with a posse of "federalized concerned white citizens" began a four day massacre that ended up killing more than 100 black men, women and children, and was also coincidentally responsible for the death of a solitary white man.
This "white instigated vigilante action," as is customary in the U.S., was of course referred to as a "race riot." Meaning of course that the blacks inside the church, and not the white terrorists outside, were responsible for the occurrence of the incident. In the "mop up operation," following this clear white vigilante action, massacring more than 100 blacks, more than 300 black farmers were also arrested and charged with a variety of crimes ranging from illegal assembly, rioting, resisting arrest, carrying concealed weapons, to the murder of the lone white man.
In the "kangaroo court" that followed, the court-appointed defense attorneys refused to call any witnesses; prosecution witnesses were whipped if they didn't lie; and a mob held sway outside the courthouse, threatening to burn it down if there were no convictions. Some of the defendants were sentenced to die in the electric chair in less than two minutes; the rest in no more than a few hours. The all-white jury consisting of the normal cast of characters, of local leaders and "distinguished concerned white citizens" sentenced the "so-called union ring leaders" to death in the electric chair.
In 1919, this was American justice in its fullest racial glory.
The book however, is not about the "so-called race riot" per se, but is about the heroic legal efforts of a black Little Rock attorney named Scipio Africanus Jones, an about how he succeeded in taking the case (Moore vv. Dempsey) all the way to the Supreme Court and getting six of the death sentences overturned. And while the author readily admits that many of those involved in the legal victory were white, for obvious reasons his focus was on the bravery, courage and skill of this lone black lawyer, who risked his life in taking up the cause of the defense.
Since the context and circumstances of the story constituted a virtual leitmotif of small town southern racial injustice, it is puzzling how some Arkansas white historians (especially the author of Blood in Their Eyes, which is "a decidedly white account" of the same set of events) can call the incident controversial? It is also difficult to see why they chafe over the fact that Scipio Jones was made into a black legal hero. It is a black hero story, told about black people. Do whites have to always steal all black narratives, when American history is written? Why not just leave it alone?
As a footnote, there was once a black High School in North Little Rock, Arkansas, in the same AA Conference as my own Merrill High, name Scipio Jones High School. Until reading this book, I had never known who Scipio Jone was.
Worthy of a movie for sure! Five stars
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