ON THE LAPS OF GODS
                                                        
                                                          By Robert Whitaker
"Robert Whitaker unearths a dark historical event in a creative and powerful way.  Don't miss this book!"
                                                                                          -Cornel West
About the Book
 
On the night of September 30, 1919, black sharecroppers in Hoop Spur, Arkansas, deep in the Mississippi Delta, gathered in a humble wooden church. They had recently joined a fledgling farmers’ union, and they were meeting that night to decide whether to hire an attorney to sue their plantation owners. This season, they wanted to get their fair share of the cotton crop.
 
The sharecroppers were thinking of taking this bold step at the very moment that the United States appeared to be on the verge of a racial civil war. There had been racial fighting in 25 cities and towns during the summer, and in September, the nation had been wracked by news of one horrific lynching after another.
 
What happened in Phillips County during the first few days of October has long been a subject of controversy. A narrative history, On the Laps of Gods provides a documented, detailed account of the killing that erupted there. And yet out of that shameful event there rose an epic legal struggle, known as Moore v. Dempsey, that ultimately remade our nation.
 
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        The
  First Chapter
  1. About the Documents
  2. You can use this site to review many of the source documents. This includes:
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  4. • Accounts of lynchings that led up to the Red Summer of 1919.
  5. • Papers of the sharecroppers’ union.
  6. • Newspaper and magazine accounts of the “Elaine Riot.”
  7. • Ida B. Wells’ account of the “Arkansas Riot.”
  8. • Court documents from the Moore v. Dempsey case.
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  1. The Twelve Condemned to Die
  1. The Murdered
  1. The Attorney: Scipio Jones