PDF The National Parks: America's Best Idea by Dayton Duncan; Ken Burns in History

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They shot them down like rabbits . . . September 30; 1919. The United States teetered on the edge of a racial civil war. During the previous three months; racial fighting had erupted in twenty-five cities. And deep in the Arkansas Delta; black sharecroppers were meeting in a humble wooden church; forming a union and making plans to sue their white landowners; who for years had cheated them out of their fair share of the cotton crop. A car pulled up outside the church . . . What happened next has long been shrouded in controversy.In this heartbreaking but ultimately triumphant story of courage and will; journalist Robert Whitaker carefully documents—and exposes—one of the worst racial massacres in American history. Over the course of several days; posses and federal troops gunned down more than one hundred men; women; and children.But that is just the beginning of this astonishing story. White authorities also arrested more than three hundred black farmers; and in trials that lasted only a few hours; all-white juries sentenced twelve of the union leaders to die in the electric chair. One of the juries returned a death verdict after two minutes of deliberation. All hope seemed lost; and then an extraordinary lawyer from Little Rock stepped forward: Scipio Africanus Jones. Jones; who’d been born a slave; joined forces with the NAACP to mount an appeal in which he argued that his clients’ constitutional rights to a fair trial had been violated. Never before had the U.S. Supreme Court set aside a criminal verdict in a state court because the proceedings had been unfair; so the state of Arkansas; confident of victory; had a carpenter build coffins for the men.We all know the names of the many legendary heroes that emerged from the civil rights movement: Thurgood Marshall; Rosa Parks; and Martin Luther King Jr. among them. Whitaker’s important book commemorates a legal struggle; Moore v. Dempsey; that paved the way for that later remaking of our country; and tells too of a man; Scipio Africanus Jones; whose name surely deserves to be known by all Americans.