Sons of Mississippi, Paul Hendrickson

"This photograph was taken in late September 1962, seven years after the killing of Emmett Till. The photograph, which isn't an icon image of the sixties—but should be—was recorded a few days before an all-night riot in Mississippi in which two died and hundreds were injured. It was made by an uncommonly brave and gifted white freelance photographer from Alabama named Charles Moore, on a Thursday afternoon, in a grove of elms and oaks and fine old catalpa trees, at Oxford, Mississippi, on the campus of a place known lovingly as Ole Miss. A week later this document was published in a double-truck spread in Life magazine with this small headline down in the left-hand corner: 'Local lawmen, getting ready to block the law.' There were a lot of other pictures in the story, but this was the one that stole your eyes...

Paul Hendrickson

"...Even now, after years of looking at it, examining it, carrying it, I can't precisely say what it was about the image that so took hold of me. It had an overwhelming storytelling clarity—and simultaneous confusion. It was only much later, with the research and reporting and interviews unfolding before me, that I found a certain corroboration for all I must have been imagining the first time I came across it."

—from Sons of Mississippi by Paul Hendrickson

From the April 2003 Washington Monthly, "Rising Sons: A review of Paul Hendrickson's Sons of Mississippi," by Wen Stephenson: On Sept. 27, 1962, in Oxford, Miss., among the elms and oaks and catalpa trees on the campus of Ole Miss, a gifted young freelancer snapped a photograph for Life magazine of seven Mississippi sheriffs having too good a time. It's not an icon of the 1960s, but it should be, says Paul Hendrickson. They're standing, "these seven faces of Deep South apartheid," around the hood of a squad car, and the handsome one in the middle--head of the state sheriffs' association, cigarette between his grinning teeth--is taking a practice swing with a billy club to the amusement and grim appreciation of his colleagues. It was three days before James Meredith would become the first African American to enroll at the University of Mississippi (accompanied by more than 500 federal marshals and several thousand U.S. troops), and these sheriffs, in their white shirts and dark ties, had come from all over the state to help keep their fellow Mississippian from setting foot on the sacred campus.

Paul Hendrickson

For Hendrickson, a former Washington Post reporter who was born in California but raised partly in the Deep South, that photograph contains an essential underlying story of the Battle of Oxford and the larger civil rights struggle, a story of race and its legacy that holds the key to much of the past 40 years. In Sons of Mississippi, Hendrickson takes a rare approach to this subject, focusing on the white supremacists themselves, rather than the familiar, and safer, heroic narrative of the people who rose up to defeat them. His driving impulse is to get beneath the surface and beyond the frame of that photograph in order to see these seven Southerners, and their children and grandchildren after them, as complex individuals rather than two-dimensional caricatures. He knows that racism--even in a time and place as benighted as Mississippi in 1962--is never monolithic, and is careful to highlight the nuances of racial feeling along a spectrum that runs from virulent bigotry to complacent (and complicit) passivity. He knows that the only way to understand the inhumanity in that photograph is to make the men who populate it human.

1962 Ole Miss University campus riot.

Two of those men were still alive when Hendrickson started the project; all of them are well remembered by family, friends, and colleagues. One of the deceased, the former sheriff of Pascagoula--alcoholic, viciously bigoted, and beloved of his men--has an FBI file on him big enough, yet maddeningly inconclusive enough (full of "redactions" pointing all the way to J. Edgar Hoover) to be the stuff of legend. For more than one of them, Hendrickson unearths evidence of Klan and Klan-related activities, though he's unable to prove anything, and none can be linked directly to any civil-rights crime.

The University of Mississippi, Oxford 1962.

But as Hendrickson states at the outset, his book isn't really about the men in the photograph. "Instead," he writes, "it's about what's deeply connected but is off the page, out of sight, past the borders. It's about what has come down from this photograph." And so the portraits of those men are followed by longer, more intimate profiles of some of the descendants, those he calls "the inheritors," in whose stories he finds "some modest surprises and small redemptions and blades of latter-day racial hope."

U.S. Border Control

There's Sheriff Tommy Ferrell, who succeeded his father as sheriff of Natchez (Adams County), keeps a portrait of Nathan Bedford Forrest--co-founder of the KKK--on his office wall, and has nonetheless risen to national prominence in his determination to modernize the image of Mississippi law enforcement. (And whose proud political demeanor conceals an edge of defensiveness about his father's role in the 1960s.) There's Tommy's son Ty Ferrell, a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Santa Teresa, N.M.--compassionate, painfully self-conscious, prone to tears--who seems to carry around with him the entire burden of the family's racial past. And there's John Cothran--grandson and namesake of Sheriff John Ed Cothran of infamous Greenwood (Leflore County) in the Delta--a "working stiff" whose good heart and bad temper have left him with four broken marriages, who works as a floor manager at Home Depot and a second job stocking shelves at the Kroger supermarket to pay child support for the kids he loves, and whose ambition is a double-wide trailer in an all-white development outside Senatobia. (And yet whose humanity toward, and willingness to stand up for, his black co-workers and friends give him a shot at redemption that is neither simple nor sentimental.)

Ole Miss was the scene of rioting that spilled over into the streets of Oxford, Mississippi (1962)

Hendrickson succeeds, movingly and compellingly, in these portraits of contemporary Southerners. But his feel for the deeper Southern past, and for the broader context of Southern politics, is less sophisticated and less satisfying. That is to say, Hendrickson gives us vivid pictures of who the men in that photograph were in 1962, and of what they passed on to their descendants, but he makes almost no effort to explain how they got that way--almost forgetting, it seems, that these men themselves were descendants, inheritors of the forces that shaped their South. Despite a central chapter in which he weaves a kind of historical essay on the events surrounding the Battle of Oxford and its aftermath, I found myself searching for some analysis of the social and political dynamics of race and class that run as an inescapable current through Southern history.

Ole Miss 1962

How, for example, did the poor and working-class backgrounds of these men, their lack of education, and their place within the stratified society of white Mississippi, affect their racial fear? How did white supremacism, and the populist politics of racial solidarity, offer them a kind of perverse security within that world? How did the tangled history of race and class in the Jim Crow South set the social boundaries and norms of behavior in their time and place? Hendrickson hints elusively at such questions, but fails to confront them. (source: Wen Stephenson, Washington Monthly)

click here to watch Paul Hendrickson on C-Span's Book TV

Birmingham, Alabama 1963

Birmingham, Alabama 1963

From the New York Times Book Review, by David K. Shipler: There are few white people in America more passionately perceptive about our vexing national problem of race than liberal-minded whites from the South, especially those who lived through the turbulent years of the civil rights movement. Lacking the detachment that allowed most Northerners to make judgments without making commitments, Southern whites who valued justice were forced to confront themselves, their families, their place of privilege. This happened either in real time or later, in a kind of retrospective anguish that has produced fine scholarship, fiction and journalism and even enlightened politics.

Bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama 1963

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Now comes Diane McWhorter. On Sept. 15, 1963, she was about the same age as the four black girls who were killed by the bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. ''But I was growing up on the wrong side of the revolution,'' she writes. In her childhood world of white Birmingham, the bombing's immediate consequence was trivial: a spasm of anxiety and the cancellation of a rehearsal for ''The Music Man,'' in which she had a part. In her adulthood outside her native city, however, she suffered a delayed reaction: a longer, gnawing anxiety about her family's possible connections with the violent resistance to integration. To unravel that personal story, she had to unravel the entire story.

Birmingham, Alabama 1963

''Carry Me Home'' is an exhaustive journey through both the segregationist and integrationist sides of Birmingham's struggle. There are few innocents in her depiction, especially on the white side, where the roots of bigotry and murder insinuate themselves into the foundation of the city's ''rule of law'' and the bedrock of its corporate power.

Scouring law-enforcement reports, archives, memoirs, personal papers and adding her own interviews, McWhorter, in her first book, expertly follows the tangled threads of culpability until they reveal what she calls ''the long tradition of enmeshment between law enforcers and Klansmen,'' which included the Federal Bureau of Investigation as well as the state and city police. Her precision in filling in the particulars of that collaboration contributes significantly to the historical record.

Freedom Riders, Alabama 1963

Birmingham has stood at the confluence of some of this country's momentous antagonisms -- between black and white, Jew and gentile, Roman Catholic and Protestant, labor and industry, Communist and anti-Communist. Surfacing and submerging and resurfacing, these currents of enmity shaped unsavory alliances, and they never quite dissipated before surging through the racial clashes of the 1960's. Back in the 1920's, the Ku Klux Klan's anti-Catholicism proved useful to coal and steel industrialists, who figured that if their work force of American-born Protestants and immigrant Catholics fought each other, ''there was no danger of union solidarity even among whites, let alone across color lines,'' McWhorter writes. (As a Klan lawyer in 1921, Hugo Black ''won an easy acquittal'' for a Methodist preacher who shot a Catholic priest to death.) When labor strife escalated in the 1930's, the Communist Party tried to shoulder aside the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People by melding the causes of Negro liberation and workers' rights. Unlike the Communists in Moscow, those in Birmingham were on the right side of history, but their involvement sowed the seeds of the Red-baiting that afflicted the civil rights movement until its end.

Birmingham, Alabama.—Police dogs are brought out to control demonstrators, 1963.

Anti-union vigilantism committed by Klansmen on the payroll of U.S. Steel and other corporations set a pattern that lasted for decades. When the barons of business, known as the Big Mules, were no longer willing to dirty their own hands, they used ''the racism they had fomented whenever the have-nots threatened to organize across racial lines,'' McWhorter writes. ''Rather than give specific orders to the vigilantes, they would delegate political intermediaries to oversee strategic racial violence.'' Chief among those intermediaries was a frog-voiced radio baseball announcer named Eugene Connor, known by his nickname, Bull; from his post as Birmingham's commissioner for public safety, he ran Klan-based vigilantes on behalf of the Big Mules. Among those vigilantes, McWhorter names Troy Ingram, who learned about dynamite while working for Charles DeBardeleben's coal mining company, and another miner, Robert Chambliss, who organized the 16th Street church bombing with a device rigged by Ingram.

Eugene "Bull" Connor

The intricate alliance among the Big Mules, the judges, the police, the politicians, local newspaper editors and the Klan created an insular universe in which segregationists almost never failed to exercise bad judgment. Again and again, Connor rescued the civil rights demonstrators from oblivion. When Freedom Riders arrived in an integrated bus in 1961, he kept his policemen away for a prearranged 15 minutes so Klansmen could beat the defenseless protesters. When children marched peacefully, Connor had them met by snarling police dogs and the high-pressure hoses of a reluctant fire department. Connor's bigoted wisecracks made great quotes. Cattle prods, clubs and smirks made perfect pictures -- just what the nonviolent civil rights movement needed to mobilize the conscience of the country. ''I prayed that he'd keep trying to stop us,'' Wyatt Tee Walker, the executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, is quoted as saying a decade later. ''Birmingham would have been lost if Bull had let us go down to the city hall and pray.''

Alabama Map

Skillful black activists understood that bad national press alone would not bring ultimate change; integration would depend on Birmingham's influential whites, a few of whom were eventually drawn into biracial discussions -- and were threatened as a result. McWhorter has pieced together their quiet deliberations, their ambivalence as they looked for concessions that would stop the demonstrations, relieve the mounting pressure from Washington and end Martin Luther King Jr.'s sojourns in Birmingham to support the marchers. Department store owners -- most of them Jewish and subjected to anti-Semitism from the Klan and its sympathizers -- were the first to be coaxed into integration: lunch counters, water fountains, fitting rooms, rest rooms. Finally, whites got rid of Connor by eliminating his job through a risky petition campaign and ballot initiative that changed the form of city government.

Bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama 1963

McWhorter has a keen eye for hypocrisy, even among the good guys. Her comprehensive reporting allows for no sacred cows, not The New York Times (which declined to publish King's ''Letter From Birmingham Jail''); not CBS (which edged out Edward R. Murrow before he could do a documentary on Birmingham); not John F. Kennedy (who wanted King to desist); not Robert F. Kennedy (who authorized the wiretaps on King); not King himself, not even McWhorter's own father. If ''Carry Me Home'' has a hero, it is not King, who seems to appear and vanish irrelevantly like an apparition; it may be Fred Shuttlesworth, the showy Birmingham preacher and favorite target of Chambliss's bombings, who steadfastly ran the movement on the ground.

Alabama bombing

McWhorter subjects King to a dose of mixed reviews. He is described as courageously embracing a white man who mounts a stage to punch him, and he is skewered for a series of frailties: his false claim to have been at a certain demonstration, the womanizing that gave J. Edgar Hoover ammunition against him and his slights of Shuttlesworth, who was excluded from the entourage that accompanied King to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

At the end of her book, McWhorter finally exorcises the demon that has haunted her. ''Papa, this is it,'' she tells her father, catching him at a sober moment in the grimy office of his machine shop. ''I have to know what you were doing.'' She tests him by reading from a list of names, asking if he knows this one, that one.

The most he will say is, ''Sounds familiar,'' but usually it's ''Naw, I don't believe so.'' She thinks he is finally telling the truth, which indicates that he did not, in fact, belong to a violent klavern of the Ku Klux Klan whose members' names are on her list. After years of gruff bragging about his Klan affiliation and mysterious nights devoted to what he called ''civil rights,'' he admits almost sheepishly that he was not involved that deeply, because it would have meant murdering people.

''I couldn't quite grasp the grandiosity that would make someone falsely claim intimate knowledge of the most horrible crime of his time,'' McWhorter writes of her father. What he actually did she concedes she may never know, but ''at least one of my childhood fears had been laid to rest: My father had not killed anyone.''

McWhorter pursued her search as both daughter and citizen, making her family a metaphor for her country. Each encounters its own wrongdoing and lives with suspicions about itself, but her family's revelations inspire more relief than what she learns about her country.

The most chilling element in this book is not the Klan, the fire hoses, the bombings or the racist epithets. It is the portrait of the law, and of law enforcers, sustaining injustice. We have traveled a great distance from Birmingham, but deep character flaws in nations, as in individuals, do not always disappear. They can lie dormant, mutate and emerge in crisis. The invocation of ''the rule of law'' is so central to the system of American freedom that its perversion can shake the foundations. Law is not the same as morality. As King wrote from his Birmingham jail cell after defying a court injunction against demonstrations: ''Everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was 'legal' and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was 'illegal.' '' (source: The New York Times, by David K. Shipler)

Birmingham 1963: Tensions rising in Alabama

Children's Crusade, Birmingham, Alabama 1963

The 1963 campaign to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama, generated national publicity and federal action because of the violent response by local authorities and the decision by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to recruit children for demonstrations. The “Children’s Crusade” added a new dynamic to the struggle in Birmingham and was a major factor in the success of the campaign.

Aware that support for protests in Birmingham was waning during April 1963, King and the SCLC looked for ways to jumpstart the campaign. When the arrest and jailing of King did little to attract more protestors, SCLC staff member James Bevel proposed recruiting local students, arguing that while many adults may be reluctant to participate in demonstrations for fear of losing their jobs, their children had less to lose. King initially had reservations, but after deliberation he agreed, hoping for the action to “subpoena the conscience of the nation to the judgment seat of morality.” SCLC and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) members immediately canvassed colleges and high schools for volunteers and began training them on the tactics of nonviolent direct action.

On 2 May, more than a thousand African American students skipped their classes and gathered at Sixth Street Baptist Church to march to downtown Birmingham. As they approached police lines, hundreds were arrested and carried off to jail in paddy wagons and school buses. When hundreds more young people gathered the following day for another march, commissioner Bull Connor directed the local police and fire departments to use force to halt the demonstration. Images of children being blasted by high-pressure fire hoses, clubbed by police officers, and attacked by police dogs appeared on television and in newspapers and triggered outrage throughout the world.

On the evening of 3 May, King offered encouragement to parents of the young protesters in a speech delivered at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. He said, “Don’t worry about your children; they are going to be alright. Don’t hold them back if they want to go to jail, for they are not only doing a job for themselves, but for all of America and for all of mankind.”

After intervention from the U. S. Department of Justice, the Birmingham campaign ended on 10 May when the SCLC and local officials reached an agreement in which the city promised to desegregate downtown stores and release all protestors from jail if the SCLC would end the boycotts and demonstrations. A week and a half later, the Birmingham board of education announced that all students who participated in the demonstrations would be either suspended or expelled. The SCLC and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) immediately took the issue to the local federal district court, where the judge upheld the ruling. On 22 May, the same day as the initial ruling, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision and condemned the board of education for its actions.

While he faced criticism for exposing children to violence—most notably from Malcolm X, who said that “real men don’t put their children on the firing line”— King maintained that the demonstrations allowed children to develop “a sense of their own stake in freedom.” He later wrote, “Looking back, it is clear that the introduction of Birmingham’s children into the campaign was one of the wisest moves we made. It brought a new impact to the crusade, and the impetus that we needed to win the struggle.” The success in Birmingham provided momentum for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and helped pave the way for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (source: Stanford University)

Susan Smith White Woman Murders Her Children and Blames a Black Man

Susan Smith's mugshot

Dr. David Pilgrim writes: In 1994 Susan Smith, a young mother in Union, South Carolina, claimed that a man had commandeered her car with her two boys -- Alex, 14-month-old, and Michael, 3-year-old. She described the carjacker as a "Black male in his late 20s to early 30s, wearing a plaid shirt, jeans, and a toboggan-type hat." A composite of her description was published in newspapers, nationally and locally. Smith appeared on national television, tearfully begging for her sons to be returned safely. An entire nation wept with her, and the image of the Black brute resurfaced. The Reverend Mark Long, the pastor of the church where Smith's family attended services, said in reference to the Black suspect, "There are some people that would like to see this man's brains bashed in."

Susan Smith's fictitious black brute

After nine days of a gut-wrenching search and strained relations between local Blacks and Whites, there was finally a break in the case: Susan Smith confessed to drowning her own sons. In a two-page handwritten confession she apologized to her sons, but she did not apologize to Blacks, nationally or locally. "It was hard to be Black this week in Union," said Hester Booker, a local Black man. "The Whites acted so different. They wouldn't speak (to Blacks); they'd look at you and then reach over and lock their doors. And all because that lady lied."

Susan Smith

The false allegations of Charles Stuart and Susan Smith could have led to racial violence. In 1908, in Springfield, Illinois, Mabel Hallam, a White woman, falsely accused "a Black fiend," George Richardson, of raping her. Her accusations angered local Whites. They formed a mob, killed two Blacks chosen randomly, then burned and pillaged the local Black community. Blacks fled to avoid a mass lynching. Hallam later admitted that she lied about the rape to cover up an extramarital affair.

How many lynchings and race riots have resulted from false accusations of rape and murder leveled against so-called Black brutes? (source: Dr. David Pilgrim, Professor of Sociology, Ferris State University; Nov., 2000)

Omaha Vice: The Lynching of Willie Brown

OMAHA

Omaha, Nebraska riot aftermath 1919

For forty years Omaha was ruled by a political, criminal gang that was perhaps the most lawless of any city of its size in the civilized world. There had grown up during that period, a powerful group who lived on the proceeds of organized vice and crime. These included about three hundred and eighty-four (384) houses of prostitution, together with saloons, pool halls, organized bank robbers, organized highway robbers, and professional "con" men and burglars.

Thomas Dennison and his second wife, 16-year-old Nevajo Truman, October, 1930.

Source — NSHS

Whenever a plan was made to have a election of officials, certain men in the community would assemble and hold a conference and they would decide what men it would be "safe" to elect, and they would give The Boss for his service a certain sum of money and control of the vice interests, the Police Department, the Police Court, the juries, and then proceed to elect public officials. This condition obtained, without interruption, from the early history of the city until 1908.

Reforms began in 1908 by an early closing law for saloons, followed by laws which took the control of juries and elections from the vice-ring. In 1916 statewide prohibition was carried.

We thus eliminated the whiskey interests which furnished the most of the money for election purposes, the control of the jury and election machinery, from the gang, and the actual disposition of public officers, but we had not eliminated all of the gang. There was still left the Omaha Bee which had been the mouth-piece of the vice-ring, the thugs and murderers who had ruled for years, and these combined to destroy the present city administration and regain control of the Police Department, which was absolutely necessary for the continuation of the reign and control of vice.

A mob of white men marched from South Omaha (rallied and led by a henchman of Dennison's) and converged on the Douglas County Courthouse, where the jail was. In the evening the crowd grew larger and set the courthouse on fire, forcing police to turn Brown over to them. They lynched him, hanging him from a lamppost on the south side of the courthouse, then dragging his body through the streets and burning it.

In order to accomplish this, the Omaha Bee, assisted at times by the other daily papers, began a campaign of slander and vituperation against the Police Department of the City of Omaha, and in order to make it effective they chose a line of propaganda to the effect that Negro men were attacking white women, assaulting them with intent to commit rape, and actually committing rape, with the connivance of the Police Department. They made a majority of the people in Omaha believe that all Negro men were disposed to commit the crime of rape on white women.

Rioters on the south side of Douglas County Courthouse, Omaha, Nebraska, September 28, 1919

For years there has been much illegal cohabitation of whites and blacks in Omaha, with about fifteen assignation houses where colored men met white prostitutes. Leading colored citizens asked the police to suppress these dens, but when this was begun, it only increased the slander and vituperation of the Omaha Bee, the organ of the vice-ring. This was kept up successfully until the people believed that the police were invading private property without warrant of law and arresting law-abiding citizens.

Tom Dennison. The reign of Omaha political boss Tom Dennison ended in 1933. For more than thirty-five years, he controlled gambling, drinking, prostitution and other criminal interests throughout Omaha, particularly in his seedy Sporting District. He controlled bootlegging operations in Little Italy through the Prohibition Era. He was closely allied with James Dahlman, Omaha's only eight-term mayor. Dennison was implicated in agitation of groups related to the Omaha Race Riot of 1919.

There was still left in the Police Department from the old regime a large percentage of the police officers protected by Civil Service, who were loyal to the old vice-ring, and they were doing everything within their power to hamper and discredit the honest efforts of the present city administration to enforce the law. The result of this was that together with the campaign of the newspapers, the morale of the Police Department was broken down and the city administration was unable, in the brief space of time that it had been in office, to get rid of these discordant elements.

The lynch mob white European-born immigrants and ethnic European Americans. The mayor attempted to intervene and was also hanged; he was saved only by a last-minute rescue by federal agents.

There was, furthermore, in connection with these men, fathered by these same influences, an organized gang determined to wreck the administration at any cost, and they deliberately organized a mob; they furnished it with money and liquor, and the leaders of the old vice-ring stood around in the mob, urging the men to go in and assist in wrecking the Court House, lynch the Negro, and kill the Mayor of the City and other officials.

The burning of Will Brown's body, Omaha, Nebraska, Sept. 28, 1919.

Both Brown, who was lynched, and the woman who accused him belonged to the under-world which met at the houses of assignation. They had quarreled and the woman "got back" at Brown by alleging attempted assault. It is said that at the time she was wearing a diamond ring given her by Brown.

United States Citizen, Willie Brown the lynching victim in Omaha, Nebraska, 1919.

(source: The Crisis)

Chris Herbert Buys Gravemarker for Victim of the 1919 Omaha Race Riot

LETTER FROM CHRIS HEBERT

To the People of Omaha, Nebraska

Regarding William Brown and the riot of 1919

Chris Hebert. "I wanted to show there's still some decency left," said Chris Hebert, of Riverside, who gave $450 to buy a grave marker.

I was watching a TV show that was talking about the actor Henry Fonda. It mentioned that his life was greatly affected by a lynching that took place in Omaha, Nebraska, when he was a boy.

I guess I am just a curious person. I searched the words Henry Fonda and Lynching and found a story in Wikipedia, about William “Will” Brown.

You will never believe the impact that this had on my reading this story 90 years later.

I am a proud American. I am a person of color. An average guy who loves his wife, his family, and his country.

When I read Will Brown's story, I had tears in my eyes. We have come a long way since the riot of 1919. We witnessed this during the Presidential Election of 2008. I never thought in my lifetime that a black man would ever be president of this great country. Yet it has happened.

We all have rights guaranteed by our Constitution and legal system. We all can vote, worship at a church of our choice, work in a profession of our choosing. Sadly, this would not have come about without the Will Browns and Emmett Tills of the world.

Omaha, Nebraska lynch mob 1919

It is a shame that it took these deaths and others to raise public consciousness and effect the changes that we enjoy today. When I discovered that William Brown was buried in a pauper's grave, I did not want William Brown to be forgotten. I wanted him to have a headstone to let people know that it was because of people like him that we enjoy our freedoms today. The lesson learned from his death should be taught to all. That is, we cannot have the protections guaranteed by the Constitution without law. There is no place for vigilantism in our society.

William Brown, Omaha

The words of the Omaha World Herald after Will Brown's death said it best:

“There is the rule of the jungle in this world, and there is the rule of law. Under jungle rule no man's life is safe, no man's wife, no man's mother, sisters, children, home, liberty, rights or property. Under rule of law, protection is provided for all of these, and provided in proportion as law is efficiently and honestly administered and its power and authority respected and obeyed.

“Omaha has had an experience in lawlessness. We have seen, as in a nightmare, its awful possibilities. We have learned how frail is the barrier which divides civilization from the primal jungle — and we have been given to see clearly what that barrier is. It is the law! It is the might of the law, wisely administered. It is respect for the obedience to the law on the part of the members of society! May the lesson sink deep!” — Morning Omaha World-Herald September 30, 1919.

"Will" William Brown. Lynched in Omaha riot. September 28, 1919. Age 40. "Lest We Forget

"

I hope that people will stop by his headstone, read it, maybe say a prayer for Mr. Brown and reflect on what happened on the 28th of September 1919. We must never let ourselves sink again to this level of inhumanity.

Respectfully,
Chris Hebert

Elaine, Arkansas 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation

White mob, Elaine Arkansas

Katherine Marino of the San Francisco Gate, reviews, 'On the Laps of Gods,' by Robert Whitaker, on 27 July 2008: In the summer of 1919, a wave of labor strikes, lynchings and anti-communist violence swept the nation's cities, from Omaha and Chicago to Washington, D.C. The nadir of this "red summer" occurred in Phillips County, Ark., in the small town of Elaine on the Mississippi Delta, where more than 100 black sharecroppers were brutally murdered over three days. Award-winning journalist Robert Whitaker unearths this tragedy and its legal aftermath in vivid detail in his compelling new book, "On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice that Remade a Nation."

African American sharecroppers being escorted by soldiers, Elaine Arkansas

The "Elaine Massacre" erupted when the town's black sharecroppers organized to secure a more equitable price for their cotton. To counteract the unjust debt peonage system that long victimized them, they formed the Progressive Farmers and Household Union and gathered to discuss legal counsel. Hearing that sharecropper union members were meeting for "communist" purposes in a church close to Elaine, the town sheriff and his agents arrived at the site, and opened fire on the men who stood guard. When a white man was shot, Elaine's residents retaliated fiercely, not only with gruesome mob violence, but also with machine-gun-wielding U.S. federal troops instructed to kill any black people who showed signs of resistance. In the end, five white men and almost 200 black men, women and children were dead.

Black Little Rock attorney Scipio Africanus Jones

The town indicted more than 100 black people for the murder of the white men, and the Arkansas state court sentenced 12 sharecroppers to death by electrocution. A five-year legal battle ensued, involving trials, hearings and disclosures of prisoner confessions induced by torture. The action was led by the NAACP, which sent reporter Walter White to investigate, and brilliant black Little Rock attorney Scipio Africanus Jones, who emerges as the real hero of Whitaker's story.

African America, Little Rock attorney Scipio Africanus Jones

Born a slave, Jones had "pulled himself up by his own bootstraps," becoming one of the country's most successful black lawyers. Using his professional clout to champion the equal rights of his race, he was driven by a life philosophy that fused the conflicting ideas of W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. Jones recognized that the Elaine prisoners had not received their constitutionally guaranteed due process and protested the Arkansas state court's violation of the defendants' Fourteenth Amendment rights.

Despite the fact that the generally conservative U.S. Supreme Court had long distanced itself from state proceedings, and never before dismissed a verdict in a state criminal trial for "unfair" proceedings, Jones' last-ditch effort to file a writ of habeas corpus was, astoundingly, successful. Guided by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Moore v. Dempsey established the principle that a mob-dominated trial in a state court was invalid, and the 12 men were ultimately freed.

Elaine, Arkansas 1919

Whitaker reveals the great triumph and significance of this case by richly contextualizing its place in American legal history. He roots the massacre and its national trial into the larger story of the Supreme Court's shaping of national politics. Focusing especially on Reconstruction-era Supreme Court decisions, Whitaker demonstrates how a series of 1870s cases reduced the Fourteenth Amendment to a symbolic but largely meaningless gesture for social and civic equality, and paved the way for the state-sponsored terrorism in Arkansas. He also argues, somewhat simplistically, that the most substantial factors contributing to Reconstruction's demise were these Supreme Court cases, "after [which] the other causes of America's long decline ... lined up like dominoes," obscuring a more complex alchemy of political, economic, social and cultural forces that also importantly contributed to Reconstruction's end.

Elaine, Arkansas 1919

Nevertheless, Whitaker's book is a deeply researched and evocatively written history that deserves to be widely read. He has uncovered a long-overlooked story that challenges triumphalist narratives of U.S. democracy. "On the Laps of Gods" begs reconsideration, as well, of America's 1960s civil rights movement. Its roots, Whitaker suggests, can be found in the political activism of Elaine's organizing sharecroppers and in Jones, a visionary figure who successfully altered the course of American justice. (source: San Francisco Gate, by Katherine Marino)

On the Laps of Gods

The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice

That Remade a Nation

By Robert Whitaker