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  • Race against Time: The Untold Story of Scipio Jones and the Battle to Save Twelve Innocent Men by Sandra Neil Wallace
  • Elizabeth Bush

Wallace, Sandra Neil Race against Time: The Untold Story of Scipio Jones and the Battle to Save Twelve Innocent Men; by Sandra Neil Wallace and Rich Wallace. Calkins Creek, 2021 [144p] illus. with photographs Trade ed. ISBN 9781629798165 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781635923735 $11.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 7-12

In September 1919, white townsmen of Hoop Spur, Arkansas raided a meeting of Black sharecroppers gathered to discuss unionizing. After riddling the church where they met with bullets and then burning it down to hide the evidence, the townsmen proclaimed the event a Black-initiated race riot. Five white citizens were dead (three by their own misfire), as were a conservative estimate of two hundred Black citizens, but twelve Black men who managed to flee the massacre were rounded up for a trial, convicted, and sentenced to death. Their last slim hope lay with Scipio Jones, a successful Black attorney who donated his service to keeping them alive. While the prosecution relied on lies, torture, and corruption to deliver the swift conviction, Scipio played a legal long game, and the best shot for that was stalling in the lower courts as the case wound its way to the United States Supreme Court, which would consider Jones' then untested argument that Arkansas had lost jurisdiction over the case. The Wallaces do a laudable job of elucidating Jones' tactics, and readers who revel in legal dramas (think, for example, Sheinkin's The Port Chicago [End Page 192] 50 BCCB 2/14) will punch the air as he wins skirmish after skirmish by a hair's breadth. The authors also carefully follow Jones' contentious negotiations with the NAACP, which preferred to sideline Black attorneys in favor of white lawyers, considered more convincing to white juries. Thus, as they explain in a thoughtful concluding note, Jones' work was sometimes so obscured that, "with every proceeding we asked ourselves, "Where was Scipio Jones?" Booktalk this with Hartfield's A Few Red Drops (BCCB 1/18) for a snapshot of racial turmoil, 1919. Bibliography, source notes, index, and period photos are included.

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