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.