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

Author:Robert Whitaker [Whitaker, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B001AX9QS8
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2008-06-10T07:00:00+00:00

SCIPIO JONES ENTERED THIS world of black leadership at the very moment that whites in Arkansas—and the rest of the South—began setting up their Jim Crow society. Arkansas passed literacy and poll tax laws in 1891 and 1892 to disenfranchise blacks, and it segregated its railroad cars and waiting rooms at the same time. In 1900, gubernatorial candidate Jeff Davis made white supremacy the center of his campaign, calling a black who voted an “ever-present eating, cantankerous sore.” He publicly embraced lynching, boasting that in his state, “when we have no doubt about a Negro’s guilt, we do not give him a trial, we mob him and that ends it.” Arkansas, which during the 1870s and 1880s had been heralded as a “promised land” for blacks, turned into a lyncher’s paradise. It was here in 1892 that Edward Coy was roasted alive, and from 1889 to 1918, 182 blacks were strung up by white Arkansans, with none of the perpetrators ever sent to jail.

At a national level, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois offered conflicting visions for how blacks should respond to Jim Crow and this flowering of white-supremacist law. Washington advised blacks to be patient, to accept segregation and loss of voting rights for the moment, and instead prove themselves worthy of citizenship by becoming better educated and by prospering economically. His National Negro Business League encouraged blacks to raise themselves up by owning stores and shops. Black leaders, he advised, should cultivate good relations with white leaders. However, Du Bois denounced Washington’s accommodationist policies, thundering that “manly self- respect is worth more than lands and houses, and that a people who surrender voluntarily such respect, or cease striving for it, are not worth civilizing.” Those two responses seemed diametrically opposed, and yet Scipio Jones—and this was the curious part of the man—personally adopted both.

Bush, Keatts, and Jones all saw their Mosaic Templars fraternal order as the embodiment of Washington’s ideals. Their organization came to publish a weekly paper, operate a hospital and a school for nurses, and provide clerical jobs to hundreds of black women. By 1917, it had eighty thousand members and more than two thousand lodges operating in twenty-six states, Central America, and the West Indies. Bush, Keatts, and Jones all became personal friends of Booker T. Washington, Jones serving on the executive committee of his National Negro Business League. In 1909, Jones helped organize the National Negro Bar Association as an auxiliary to the business league.

Jones prospered on a personal level as well. By 1907, he lived in a comfortable house in the Dunbar neighborhood and owned ten or so other houses and lots, his net worth estimated to be between $15,000 and $20,000. At some point, he became wealthy enough to have a live-in housekeeper and travel around town in a chauffeured Cadillac. He also was tireless in his efforts to build up Little Rock’s black community: he served as the attorney for at least six fraternal organizations, raised funds for

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