On the Laps of Gods - Digest - The Morning News

Reading • On the Laps of Gods

Some Americans may find the continuing revelations of the United States’s heinous injustice and craven exploitation shocking and distasteful. I find many of them, including the massacres at Rosewood and Tula, instructive and sobering. Historian Robert Whitaker carefully presents the story of race war in Elaine, Ark., and the fate of 12 black union leaders sentenced to death by all-white juries in 1919. Lawyer and former slave Scipio Africanus Jones joins with the NAACP to appeal the sentences to the U.S. Supreme Court. The result was a landmark decision, Moore v. Dempsey. It reads better than Grisham. —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 21, 2008