Robert Whitaker: On the Laps of Gods
Wednesday, February 18
Start Time: 7:00 PM
Author Robert Whitaker will discuss and sign copies of his book On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation. Both an epic tale of oppression and gripping legal drama, this is the story of the Elaine Massacre and the case that set the stage for the Civil Rights movement.
Click here for an excerpt.
About the book:
In this heartbreaking but ultimately triumphant story of courage and will, journalist Robert Whitaker carefully documents—and exposes—one of the worst racial massacres in American history. Over the course of several days in 1919, posses and federal troops gunned down more than one hundred men, women, and children (union leaders and their families) in the Arkansas Delta.
But that is just the beginning of this astonishing story. White authorities also arrested more than three hundred black farmers, and in trials that lasted only a few hours, all-white juries sentenced twelve of the union leaders to die in the electric chair. One of the juries returned a death verdict after two minutes of deliberation.
All hope seemed lost, and then an extraordinary lawyer from Little Rock stepped forward: Scipio Africanus Jones. Jones, who’d been born a slave, joined forces with the NAACP to mount an appeal in which he argued that his clients’ constitutional rights to a fair trial had been violated. Never before had the U.S. Supreme Court set aside a criminal verdict in a state court because the proceedings had been unfair. Whitaker’s book commemorates a legal struggle, Moore v. Dempsey, that paved the way for that later remaking of our country, and tells too of a man, Scipio Africanus Jones, whose name surely deserves to be known by all Americans.
About the author:
Robert Whitaker is the author of three books. His first, Mad in America was named by Discover magazine as one of the best science books of 2002, while the American Library Association named it one of the best history books of that year. In 2004, Basic Books published his second book, The Mapmaker’s Wife which was named by the American Library Association as one of the best biographies of that year.
In 2007, he received the Anthony J. Lukas work-in-progress award for his manuscript of On the Laps of Gods. The San Francisco Chronicle named it one of the best 50 non-fiction books of 2008.
Prior to writing books, Robert Whitaker worked as the science and medical reporter at the Albany Times Union newspaper in New York for a number of years. His journalism articles won several national awards, including a George Polk award for medical writing, and a National Association of Science Writers’ award for best magazine article. A series he co-wrote for The Boston Globe was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998.
