Statesmen, Scoundrels, and Eccentrics: A Gallery of Amazing Arkansans

Scipio A. Jones

Scipio A. Jones Before his death in , Scipio A. Jones was the foremost African American lawyer in Arkansas.He was also among the most prominent black leaders in the state and region. Scipio’s date and place of birth are not known.He was almost certainly the biological son of his mother’s owner, not an uncommon occurrence during the slave regime. His mother, along with other slaves, was taken to Texas to escape liberation when Union troops marched into southwest Arkansas in the spring of . He was probably born while the family was returning to Arkansas after the Union army was driven out of south Arkansas. An infant when the war ended in , Scipio was raised by his mother and her husband, Jemima and Horace Jones. The first written record we have on him is the  census, which noted that young Scipio was the only literate member of the family. At about the age of twenty, Scipio moved to what is today North Little Rock, where he eventually took a degree from Shorter College. He then taught school for a time while reading law during his free time in the offices of several prominent white attorneys. Jones was authorized to practice law on June , , after passing the required examination. In  he was admitted to practice before the Arkansas Supreme Court, and in  the U.S. Supreme Court recognized his credentials. Jones practiced law until the end of his days, sometimes with a partner but often in a solo practice. Like many lawyers of his time, he also dabbled in various business investments. He owned considerable rental property, invested in a local ice company, and in  he launched the Arkansas Realty and Investment Co., which Jones thought would “afford the race a better opportunity to develop ...and grow prosperous.” Much of Jones’s practice revolved around a variety of black fraternal organizations, including the Mosaic Templars of America. Founded in  Little Rock in ,the Mosaic Templars grew steadily through the years, and by  the group had , members in more than , lodges in twenty-three states,South and Central America,and theWest Indies. Jones served the group as its attorney general. Jones reached the pinnacle of his legal practice in the aftermath of vicious race violence around Elaine in Phillips County in .While the white leadership portrayed the violence as a black conspiracy to kill local white landowners, blacks claimed it resulted from white opposition to black sharecroppers organizing a union. The violence resulted in the deaths of an unknown number of people,mostly blacks.Estimates range from twenty to more than eight hundred, but no accounting was taken at the time as far as is known. Among the more egregious murders was the killing of four middleclass black citizens, Dr. D. A. E. Johnston, a Helena dentist; Dr. Louis H. Johnston, an Oklahoma City physician, and two brothers in the automobile business, one of whom had been wounded in France during World War I. They were murdered while tied up inside an automobile after being taken off a train. As soon as the guns grew silent a massive roundup of black men began,  being charged with a variety of offenses. No whites were prosecuted, though the bulk of the dead were black. Twelve black men were sentenced to death after they confessed. The problem was that the confessions were beaten out of them. While the violence at Elaine has been a blot on Arkansas history, the legal effort to free the twelve condemned men is actually an uplifting though harrowing story. With assistance from the recently established National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, several prominent white attorneys were hired to appeal the death sentences . Former state attorney general George Murphy, a veteran of the Confederate army, took on the case for the NAACP. When Murphy died suddenly, his partner Edgar McHaney took charge of the defense. Black Arkansans also raised enough money to hire Scipio Jones to work on the case. By , Jones had appeared seventeen times before the Arkansas Supreme Court, an amazing record for a black attorney. Neither Governors Charles H. Brough nor Thomas C. McRae would budge from their hands-off attitude. But, McHaney and Jones made a formidable team, and with a little help from Judge John E.  THE LAW Martineau and others, they were able to delay the executions and take their appeals all the way to the U.S. Supreme...