| Abstrakt: |
The year was 1919. The United States was in the lingering grip of a global pandemic, and cities across the country were aflame with long-suppressed racial animosities. Historians came to know it as the Red Summer for the violence that played out from April to October. On September 30, outside the small delta town of Elaine, Arkansas, efforts by Black sharecroppers to obtain a fair return on their cotton harvests were met with gunfire and violence. It would be arguably the largest race "riot" in U.S. history, and army troops, many fresh from the battlefields of France, were required to restore order. Twelve Black farmers—who would become a national cause celebre as the Elaine Twelve—were arrested, tortured, railroaded through trial, and sentenced to death. Their fate ultimately would be decided by the Supreme Court in an appeal known as Moore v. Dempsey. The Court's 1923 ruling expanded the use of federal habeas corpus for state prisoners, overturning a posture of judicial deference to state courts that had evolved in the fifty years since the end of the Civil War. It was a milestone of due process law, and it opened the door for the civil rights cases that came to define the 1950s and 1960s. In the process, it would catapult a fledgling NAACP into the force for racial justice it is today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
