On the laps of gods : the Red Summer of 1919 and the struggle for justice that remade a nation /

The "Elaine Riot" killed 4 whites and well over 100 blacks. The defendants above were sentenced to die in trials lasting as little as an hour. MY grandfather lived in West Helena, Ark., in 1919, in Phillips County, the place of the race massacre chronicled in "On the Laps of Gods." A box of his papers that I recently uncovered shows evidence of that Jim Crow era in action - a receipt for his poll taxes from 1917, identifying him as white and stamped with the name of the sheriff, Frank Kitchens. Robert Whitaker's book quotes a letter in which Kitchens is described as wanting a "free hand to hunt Mr. Nigger in his lair." Despite my family connections to Phillips County, I hadn't heard about the "Elaine Riot" (named for a nearby town), until I happened upon a description of it a decade ago in a reissue of the W.P.A. Guide to 1930s Arkansas. Most other Americans have never heard of it either. Whitaker explains why: "As with many racial histories of this kind," he says, it was "one of those shameful events best not talked about." Many in Little Rock, where I grew up, also felt that way for decades about the 1957 integration crisis at Central High. Richard Wright also lived in West Helena in 1919 (he was 11), but he doesn't mention the massacre -in his autobiography, "Black Boy" - even though, as Whitaker notes, "a very conservative estimate today would put the number of blacks killed at well over 100, and perhaps the real toll was two or three times that many." For Wright, the threat of death from the "invisible whites" was merely part of the Delta landscape, as omnipresent as the cotton fields and canebrakes, the tension so palpable that when Wright questioned his mother about why their people didn't fight back, "the fear that was in her made her slap me into silence." The silence of these hidden stories is beginning to be broken, and though academic specialists have known about them for years, skillful popular historians like Robert Whitaker are now bringing them to a wider public. The first half of Whitaker's book documents the moment-by-moment progress of the Elaine conflict, which capped a season of racial and labor upheaval known as the Red Summer of 1919. It began at a church where black sharecroppers were meeting to discuss unionizing. A shootout left one white man dead; three others were killed later. Unfounded rumors of insurrection had already been coursing through the county seat of Helena (the anxiety heightened by the fact that blacks outnumbered whites in the county nearly three to one), and the area soon found itself overrun with vigilante groups and outside posses roaming the woods and gunning down blacks. Federal troops came from Little Rock to quell the violence (but actually may have contributed to it), and eventually more than 300 black suspects were jailed, 12 of whom would be convicted of murder - in trials lasting as little as an hour - and sentenced to die in the electric chair. Throughout this part of the story, Whitaker interposes clear, succinct background material on sharecropping, the history of Helena and the gradual undermining of the 14th Amendment by the courts. Though it's been amply documented in books like the collaboration "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America" and Philip Dray's "At the Hands of Persons Unknown," the sheer scale, brazenness and inhumanity of lynchings recounted here is horrifying, especially descriptions of victims being "roasted" alive. Threats of this kind sustained a peonage system in the fields and factories that mimicked slavery more than 50 years after Emancipation. Douglas A. Blackmon, in his recently published "Slavery by Another Name," another attempt to bring the shameful practices of the era to light, argues that the term "Jim Crow segregation" trivializes that time: "Imagine if the first years of the Holocaust were known by the name of Germany's most famous anti-Semitic comedian of the 1930s." But if the first half of "On. the Laps of Gods" (an awful title, by the way) provokes open-mouthed horror at the injustices, the second half, in which Whitaker follows the court cases, provides salutary redemption, mainly in the person of Scipio Africanus Jones, one of the great forgotten heroes of American history. Born a slave, whose father was very likely his mother's owner, Jones became the most prominent black lawyer in Little Rock. He was so successful representing black businesses that he could afford a chauffeur-driven Cadillac, and so popular among the city's white power structure that the all-white school board named the black high school in North Little Rock for him while he was still living. (One irony is that integration closed the school and Jones's name drifted into obscurity.) Representing the 12 condemned men on appeal, Jones demonstrated both legal shrewdness and uncompromising moral courage. He was battling not only a system rigged against black defendants but also the doubts of the fledgling N.A.A.C.P., which supported the appeals financially even if it sometimes treated Jones, the backwater Arkansas lawyer, with New York City high-handedness. In the end, he fought all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where his formidable skills helped win a groundbreaking decision, Moore v. Dempsey, that set the stage for his clients' eventual release. But perhaps this is where Whitaker's background as a science writer (he is the author of "Mad in America," a highly praised history of the treatment of mental illness) works against him. Judicious almost to a fault, Whitaker seems determined to underplay the drama of the tortuous progress of the cases through the courts. All the elements of a legal thriller are here - coerced confessions, recanting witnesses, 11th-hour reprieves, death threats - but Whitaker seems hesitant to step out of his role as arbiter of facts and embrace a more imaginative approach. He spends a mere paragraph on what is probably the book's most cinematic moment, when on the third day of the trials in Phillips County, George Murphy, a white, 79-year-old ex-Confederate soldier hired by the N.A.A.C.P. to act as the lead attorney while Jones labored on the details, "clutched his chest and collapsed to the floor." That left Jones on his own to try the cases in a hostile courtroom. He performed unflappably in the face of real danger. ELSEWHERE, Whitaker declares that Jones's habeas corpus petition to the Supreme Court (which the N.A.A.C.P. esteemed so highly that it reprinted the document as a pamphlet) is "the most eloquent and convincing argument that could possibly be made, and it consisted, ultimately, of a powerful narrative that left no question about what the nation's highest court, if it was concerned about justice, should do." Unfortunately, he doesn't provide any extended examples of Jones's soaring rhetoric. Still, the turns the cases take are riveting, and the portraits of the condemned, together with their words, are as raw and heartbreaking as the blues. Whitaker's facts don't differ fundamentally from those in Grif Stockley's 2001 account, "Blood in Their Eyes," a work of dogged and indispensable research, but that book became bogged down by the weight of its details. Whitaker has pared extraneous material and placed the massacre and the Supreme Court decision in their full legal and historical context. At the same time, he has revived the story of a great African-American lawyer, Scipio Africanus Jones. Jay Jennings, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, is writing a book about Little Rock, Ark., and the 2007 Central High football team.

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. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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 York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.