A mob intent on death

Description

"In a landmark Fourteenth Amendment case, and one of the NAACP's first campaigns of national litigation, sixty-seven blacks were sentenced to prison and twelve others to the electric chair. It took five years of bitter failure, rescheduled execution deadlines, numerous trials and hearings, and three appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, but in the end all went free. It was a great victory for the right to fair trial, the right not to be deprived of life and liberty without due process. The October 1, 1919, 'Race War' (Arkansas Gazette) began in a small black church in the village of Hoop Spur in Phillips County, near the Mississippi River in eastern Arkansas. Five white men and probably more than 200 black men, women, and children were killed. Whites called it a planned insurrection to murder white planters, instigated by union agitators. Blacks said they had gathered in their church to seek legal help to get a fairer price for their cotton. There was later evidence that testimony and confessions had been bought by torture. Three attorneys - Colonel George W. Murphy, a white ex-Confederate officer; Scipio Africanus Jones, a black ex-slave; and Moorfield Storey, a Boston aristocrat and NAACP president - led the defense. There are many other vivid characters in this story, among them Walter White, young, blue-eyed, blond NAACP officer, who passed as white to investigate the Arkansas riots; U.S. Bratton, fighting Arkansas lawyer; Governor Charles H. Brough, who thought Arkansas had 'dealt patiently with the negroes'; Ed Ware, black sharecropper and defendant, who said, 'the Lord will never let us die for we are innocent.' A Mob Intent on Death is a lesson in American constitutional law as it was lived by real people in a time of bigotry, a time in which justice was almost defeated but eventually triumphed"--Unedited summary from book cover.

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