Scipio Africanus Jones was a leader in the civil rights community in Arkansas in the late 1800s and early 1900s. His work as an attorney not only saved innocent men from being executed but won important legal gains for minorities in the state.
Jones was born in Dallas County in the southern reaches of the state during the Civil War. However, his birth year is uncertain; it's generally believed by biographers to be either 1863 or 1864. His mother had been a slave while his father, a prominent physician in the area, owned his mother.
Jones was an energetic student and attended the segregated schools in the area as a child. In his teen years, the family moved to Little Rock, where Jones took the college preparatory courses at Philander Smith College and then earned a bachelors degree at Bethel Institute in North Little Rock in 1885.
He had developed a passion for the law and wanted to become a lawyer. However, no law schools existed in Arkansas at that time, much less for African-Americans.
As was the custom for many aspiring lawyers at the time, Jones apprenticed himself to several Little Rock attorneys – all white in an era of racial hostility -- who let him read their law books and learn about law practices. While Jones studied to become a lawyer, he made ends meet by serving as a school teacher.
By 1889, he was admitted to the bar and began practicing law on his own.
Jones was outspoken on civil rights issues. He and other Black lawyers in Arkansas organized to stop the state legislature from passing segregation laws. Jones also trained several other African-American lawyers in the state during his career. In 1909, he became a founding member and treasurer of the National Negro Bar Association.
His civil rights work in the courts was extensive. On at least five occasions, he had criminal convictions of African-Americans overturned on the grounds that the juries were all-white. In 1905, he won a case on behalf of convicts who were leased to a planter who later abused them. The results of the case led to changes in the convict-lease system before it was later abolished altogether.
In addition to his civil rights work, Jones often served poor clients for free. He was the first African-American to appear as an attorney before the Arkansas Supreme Court. He appeared before the state's highest court dozens of times and presented dozens of cases in federal courts.
In 1919, he represented dozens of African-Americans accused of murder during the bloody Elaine Race Riots. The exact death toll in the Elaine Riots is unknown. Some scholars estimate that as many as 200 Black people died at the hands of white mobs. No whites were convicted or even indicted. Five whites died, and twelve Black people were convicted in their deaths with almost no evidence presented against them.
They were sentenced to death, but Jones argued that the trial was unfair. Through Jones's efforts, all convictions were overturned by 1925.
Jones won great respect for his work. In 1915 and 1924, he served as a special judge for a number of cases in Little Rock. He is believed to be among the first African-Americans in Arkansas to serve as a judge after Mifflin W. Gibbs served as a Little Rock municipal judge in the 1870s. In 1928, North Little Rock named its segregated high school after Jones in honor of his activities.
Jones continued fighting for civil rights to the end. In 1941, he fought for the admission of a Black student into the University of Arkansas graduate school. While the student was unable to gain admission, Jones was able to get the state to finance the student's education elsewhere.
In early 1943, joining with fellow civil rights attorneys Joseph and William Booker, he spearheaded a lawsuit by African-American teachers in Little Rock demanding equal pay with white teachers.
Scipio Jones died in Little Rock in March 1943, just before the courts ruled in favor of the teachers.
Dr. Ken Bridges is a professor of history and geography at South Arkansas Community College in El Dorado and a resident historian for the South Arkansas Historical Preservation Society. Bridges can be reached by email at kbridges@ southark.edu.