On the Laps of Gods

On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice that Remade a Nation is a 2008 book on the Elaine Massacre of 1919 written by Robert Whitaker and published by Crown Publishers of New York. It constituted the first book on the Elaine Massacre released by a commercial publisher, and the manuscript received the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, an award of $25,000 presented each year by the Neiman Foundation at Harvard University and the Columbia School of Journalism “to aid in the completion of significant works of nonfiction on topics of American political or social concern.”

Robert Whitaker is a journalist and author who had previously written for the Albany Times Union (New York), USA Today, Boston Globe, and other publications, in addition to serving as director of publications at Harvard Medical School. Prior to On the Laps of Gods, he had written Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (2002) and The Mapmaker’s Wife: A True Tale of Love, Murder, and Survival in the Amazon (2004). In 2005, he was conducting research for a book on the rate at which Black men were incarcerated when he came upon the Elaine Massacre and decided to pursue that project instead. He later wrote Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (2010) and Psychiatry under the Influence: Institutional Corruption, Social Injury, and Prescriptions for Reform (2015).

Whitaker begins his narrative with the September 30, 1919, meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America at a church in Hoop Spur outside of Elaine (Phillips County) that would serve as the spark for the violence. After this introduction, he backtracks to examine the means by which Black economic and legal rights were sidelined following the Civil War, the broader Red Summer of 1919, and the culture and politics of white elites in Helena (Phillips County) before detailing the known sequence of the massacre, including the participation of federal troops from Camp Pike in North Little Rock (Pulaski County) and subsequent efforts at cover-up, including the sham trials of African American defendants for supposedly leading a violent insurrection. The latter half of the book focuses upon notable Black Arkansas lawyer Scipio Jones and the efforts to free the Elaine Twelve, who had been sentenced to death, that would ultimately give rise to the U.S. Supreme Court case of Moore v. Dempsey. An appendix titled “The Killing Fields” offers a map and timeline of the massacre, as well as listing perpetrators in each case, as well as reports of African Americans killed.

In his review of the book in the New York Times, Little Rock (Pulaski County) writer Jay Jennings contrasted Whitaker’s book with Grif Stockley’s 2001 Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919 (published by the University of Arkansas Press), praising Whitaker for having “pared extraneous material and placed the massacre and the Supreme Court decision in their full legal and historical context.” Stockley himself reviewed Whitaker’s book for the June 4, 2008, edition of the Arkansas Times, and while he noted that Whitaker “clarifies and corrects a number of points and provides much more context and detail than any book written before on the massacre in Phillips County,” he also chided Whitaker for emphasizing the work of Scipio Jones at the expense of other lawyers who worked to defend the Elaine Twelve, such as Edgar McHaney and Ulysses Bratton.

In addition, Stockley expressed some suspicion at Whitaker’s failure to give the full title of Stockley’s book in his bibliography and his failure to cite it, choosing instead to cite research material Stockley had donated to the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the Central Arkansas Library System. Responding to Stockley in the June 19, 2008, issue of the Times, Whitaker defended his work as “the first book to provide a coherent, documented account of the killing that went on in Elaine.” In a 2009 review essay published in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Jeannie M. Whayne, a professor of history at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County), noted that both Stockley and Whitaker engaged somewhat in “the positioning of Black union men as merely the objects of white violence,” rather than as true agents in their own right, which served “to minimize the challenge they offered.”

For additional information:
Jennings, Jay. “12 Innocent Men.” New York Times, June 22, 2008. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/books/review/Jennings-t.html (accessed March 20, 2025).

Stockley, Grif. “On the Laps of Others.” Arkansas Times, June 5, 2008, p. 19. Online at https://arktimes.com/entertainment/books/2008/06/04/on-the-laps-of-others (accessed March 20, 2025).

Whayne, Jeannie M. “Black Farmers in the Red Autumn: A Review Essay.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 68 (Autumn 2009): 327–336.

Whitaker, Robert. On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice that Remade a Nation. New York: Crown, 2008.

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas