On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation

by Robert Whitaker and Selwyn James

Book Overview

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. A car pulled up outside the church . . . What happened next has long been shrouded in controversy...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307339831
• ISBN13: 9780307339836
• Release Date: June 2009
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.69 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.1" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A Stunningly Scholarly Work -- The Bill of Rights Supreme

This is the story of a community of blacks ("Negroes" at the time) in the delta land of Arkansas during 1919, and the racial violence and injustice meted out. The hero/heroes not only include the wantonly killed and innocent blacks plus those tried and convicted for murder, but also, and in the main, the black lawyer, Scipio Jones, who essentially single-handedly won an interpretation from the U.S. Supreme Court that the Bill of Rights applied to everyone in the U.S., and that individual states could not deny the people those rights through their own laws or procedures. The work is an impressive scholarly work, meticulously researched and thorough. Its only negative is a certain novel-like style where the reader is treated to a sense of impending doom in the first chapter -- I guess in order to pique the reader's interest -- followed by digressions and background that seems out of place for so important a narrative and historical study. Even so, the style of presentation is small potatoes compared to the importance and depth of the story and its analysis. The story is sobering, but in the end something good results. The history of the U.S. contains many dark chapters, but the strength and ability of the U.S. to correct its mistakes, even though individuals must necessarily give their lives in so doing, is on display in no uncertain terms. Compared to this espisode, the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s seems like a walk in the park, and it may not have happened at all except for events and heroic actions by individuals like those contained in this book. One must wonder if the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day shouldn't be changed to Scipio Africanus Jones Day -- certainly the case could be made that Jones has the better claim. Unfortunately, the baby-boomer generation needed a hero from their own time to glorify themselves and heighten their own self-importance -- they should have looked further back to those who sacrificed so much more for civil rights. Other reviewers have already presented the book's story, so I need not repeat it here. But what is important to add is that this is true and factual history of an extremely important event in the march towards full civil rights for all American citizens, and as such should be required reading in history classes instead of the vapid sanitized writings glorifying 1960s politicians and civil rights leaders to the exclusion of all those who had gone before. Life was riskier before the 60s, and fighting injustice could be fatal. Even worse, merely standing up for oneself could be fatal as in this book. If the reader learns nothing else from this book, he should understand that any group fighting for its right to govern itself, adhere to its own chosen religion, speak its own language, or be respected and treated as equal citizens in a larger political entity must prove itself through individual sacrifices of life before their goals can be met. This is true e

American My Lai

It's great to see that this incident has finally merited its own book. I had heard it in a number of different books, but those only whetted my appetite for more. It's quite an interesting story. First, imagine some illiterate, dirt-poor, African-American sharecroppers in the heart of the Delta in the early part of the 20th century trying to organize a union. This then becomes a pretext for - there's no getting around - an out-and-out massacre. This massacre includes bands of Whites from over an extended area hunting African-Americans down like deer. Next, pull in the state militia and have them machine gun the hiding places where the African-Americans have fled. Finally, round up over 100 African-Americans and try them for murder. While you're at it, though, make sure you torture them with beatings, electric shocks, and drugs so they will be sure to perjure themselves. Yup, it all actually happened, right here in these United States. Depressing as this all sounds, the book is actually quite uplifting. The hero of the story is a local lawyer, born a slave, who takes on the case and never gives up - taking it all the way to the Supreme Court, where it's actually reversed and becomes a milestone in combating states rights and making the 14th Amendment actually work. Never heard of it? That's not too surprising. African-American history, especially what happened between the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s, is hidden history. I've actually read a ton of these books. This one seems particularly good to me. First, it's the only one I know that treats this particular (very important and very interesting) incident. Just as important, though, it is very well written. Unlike some of the other books, I had no problem following the who, what, where, and when. The author has a very lucid style that just flows and flows. At the same time, the author is also able to relay the emotional punch of the events. My only caveats are the emphasis on legal stuff (though he does a much better job than others). I also wasn't sure if there was enough context for the average reader. A lot of the other books go much more into the national picture - WEB DuBois and Booker T. Washington, Ida Wells, the NAACP, lynching legislation, etc. Nonetheless, he does keep it in the context of 1919, probably the worst year for race relations ever. Note, though, that the book is not about 1919 in general (as the sub-title implies), but very much about the Arkansas incident. I don't give out 5 stars very often. This book definitely deserved it.

A MUST READ book

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

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?

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 Am