Scipio Africanus Jones

Attorney & Judge, Civil Rights Activist & Businessman

Named after a Roman general, Scipio Africanus Jones was born into slavery, probably late 1863. His master Dr. Sanford Reamey of Tulip in Dallas County (about fifty miles south of Little Rock) was a prominent white man and also the father of the child slave. Dr. Reamey, however, seemed to have played an important role in Scipio's development and education. Scipio Africanus Jones after a distinguished legal career as lawyer and judge died in 1943.. 

As a child, Jones attended black schools near Tulip. He moved to Little Rock in the early 1880s to continue his education. After graduating from the "preparatory course" at Philander Smith College, Jones received a bachelor's degree from North Little Rock's Shorter College in 1887. He then taught school while reading law in the office of three white attorneys. When he passed the Arkansas bar examination in 1889, Jones became one of Little Rock's first "home grown" black lawyers.

Just after the Civil War, most black lawyers in Arkansas came from somewhere else--trained in prestigious schools such as the Boston College School of Law or the University of Chicago. Others took correspondence courses or like Scipio Africanus Jones apprenticed to practicing attorneys.

For the most part, black attorneys were relegated to non-trial work. They prepared contracts, arranged adoptions and wills, filed lawsuits between black clients and did other office work. In a kind of intraracial racism  blacks with money hired white lawyers. And black lawyers had usually only white clients when they were appointed by the court to represent the indigent.

Scipio Jones received his training through a firm of white lawyers--his  white father had a lot to do with that. Twenty-seven black lawyers were admitted to the state bar between 1891 and 1923, a period defined by increasingly difficult race relations and strengthening segregation.

Scipio Africanus Jones became a prominent black Republican and held many party leadership positions. Too young to reap the benefits of Reconstruction, he did not receive the federal appointments that had been available to an earlier generation of black Republican loyalists.  

Much of Jones's period of involvement in the Republican party was spent battling the "lily white" faction that steadily gained power during the early 20th century. Including his involvement in Republican politics, Jones was locally prominent  also for his work as attorney for the Mosaic Templars. 

However, Judge Jones, appointed to the bench in 1915, was primarily noted for his defense of twelve black men who in 1919 were convicted of murder after race related violence in Philips County, Arkansas. He successfully appealed on behalf of these twelve black men who had been convicted of murder following the Elaine Race Riot. This case brought Jones national recognition.

Black tenant farmers were holding a union meeting in a church in Elaine, Arkansas, when shots were fired just before dawn on October 1. After two days of violence, federal troops were sent in from Little Rock to quell the riots. Five white men were killed and estimates of the dead among blacks range from 20 to more than 800.

Although no whites were arrested, 143 blacks were taken into custody and 12 were convicted of first-degree murder  in twenty minutes.

Jones worked with a firm of white lawyers to free the twelve men. The defense took place over a period of six years, with one case going as far as the Supreme Court of the United States. Jones, however, did not go to the nation's highest court.

Though he did not put forth most of the argument, he did much of the research. In many Arkansas counties, as an understood rule, a black lawyer could only appear before the bench when accompanied by a white attorney.

Jones was not hired until late November, after all twelve had been convicted. He was retained by black Little Rock citizens to work with a white attorney George W. Murphy, employed by the NAACP, and later as co counsel with Edgar L. McHaney, another white attorney. 

Although he was prohibited from arguing the case, it was through Jones' efforts, that Moore v. Dempsey, for the first time, permitted collateral attack, through habeus corpus, on a state appellate court decision. All twelve defendants were finally freed five years after their conviction, through a maze of motions, appeals, retrials, and executive clemency that only a skilled lawyer could manage.

The episode began on Sept. 30, 1919, when white lawmen broke up a meeting of black sharecroppers who had convened in a church in Phillips County, near Elaine, to discuss forming an agricultural union. One lawman was killed and another wounded, provoking a mob of white vigilantes to roam the county for several days. 

When order finally was restored, five white people had been killed, and, officially, twenty-five African Americans -- but most likely substantially more -- were murdered randomly. Despite the many black deaths, no whites were charged after the riot. However, within a month, an all-white jury convicted twelve black men of murder and sentenced them to death. The NAACP soon hired a white Little Rock attorney, George W. Murphy, to appeal the convictions.

 Murphy, in turn, asked Scipio Jones to assist him. When Murphy died unexpectedly less than a year later, Jones took the lead in the appeal, and charges against six of the men were dismissed in 1923. 

Jones subsequently made an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court for the remaining six defendants, whose cases were returned to federal district court for trial. These six men were sentenced to 12 years in prison, but in 1925 the governor pardoned them, bringing to a close the most important legal battle in Scipio Jones's long career as a lawyer.

During the time he worked on the appeal, Jones lived in a modest Colonial Revival cottage that still stands at 1911 Pulaski St. This was his third home in the Dunbar neighborhood, following residences at 1808 and 1822 Ringo, where he had lived with his first wife, Carrie, and their daughter, Hazel. 

When Jones remarried after Carrie's death, he and his second wife, Lillie, lived on Pulaski for about ten years before building a more substantial and stylish house at 1872 Cross in 1928. The house on Cross, a richly-detailed Craftsman-style residence, was Jones's home until his death in 1943. The Scipio A. Jones House on Cross Street is one of the eight historically-black properties in the neighborhood surrounding Dunbar Junior High being nominated to the National Register of Historic Places. 

There are two versions of the "Elaine race riot of 1919" that left as many as 200 blacks dead: the white version and the black version.  Out of fear of revenge and retaliation, the stark differences rarely have been aired in public in this Mississippi Delta community.

In Elaine, on September 30, 1919,  when a white sheriff's deputy was killed and white mobs from Arkansas and Mississippi took revenge on blacks. No one in Elaine at this point is leading an effort for reparations.

According to the white version, a black man, Robert L. Hill, organized a union among black sharecroppers, incited them, planned an insurrection in which the blacks would kill the whites and take their land. Unprovoked, a white deputy was shot by blacks meeting at a church near Elaine, and chaos ensued.

The blacks tried to get their fair share of the money from cotton sales by forming a sharecroppers union to assure an accurate account of how much they were owed by landowners.

Even the number of dead remains up for debate: anywhere from 20 to 200 blacks died in the clash. Though no one knows for sure who fired the first shot, there is much evidence that whites attacked and killed blacks indiscriminately. Rather than the term "riot," the words "massacre"  and "lynchings" are most appropriate to describe what happened in Philips County.

Four blacks were killed in the custody of white law officers. Historical research supports racial abuse, though the U.S. Supreme Court secured the freedom of the twelve blacks condemned to be electrocuted

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updated 20 October 2007