Scipio Africanus Jones was born in 1863 near Tulip in Dallas County to Jemmima Jones, an enslaved woman. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says his father is generally considered to be Dr. Sanford Reamey, the man who held her. In Little Rock he finished Walden Seminary's four-year course in three, took a bachelor's degree at Bethel Institute in 1885, taught for four years while reading law, and passed the bar on June 15, 1889. He practiced in the city for the rest of his life, often for clients who could not pay, and he was an officer of the Mosaic Templars of America.
The longest case
Jones was a Republican when the state party's leaders were trying to make it white. In 1900 and 1902 he brought a Pulaski County slate that included Black delegates to the state convention, and both times it was rejected. In 1902 he ran for the school board and lost, 2,202 votes to 181, after the Arkansas Gazette warned of the danger of seating a Black man.
On November 24, 1919, Black citizens of Little Rock hired him to work with George W. Murphy, the NAACP's lawyer, defending twelve men sentenced to death after the Elaine massacre. Six became known as the Moore defendants: Frank Moore, Frank and Ed Hicks, Joe Knox, Paul Hall and Ed Coleman. Frank Hicks's jury took eight minutes. After Murphy died in 1920, Jones and Murphy's partner Edgar McHaney filed petitions on June 8, 1921, two days before the execution date, in a Pulaski County court that lacked jurisdiction, because the federal judge was unavailable. The chancellor stayed the executions. On February 19, 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6 to 2 that mob-dominated trials had denied the men due process. The six were freed on furlough on January 13, 1925. Jones called it "the greatest case against peonage and mob law ever fought in the land."
May 4, 1927
Two years later the mob came to Little Rock. After the body of a white girl, Floella McDonald, was found in a church belfry, police held the janitor's sixteen-year-old son, Lonnie Dixon, and questioned him for nearly a day without food, rest or a lawyer. On May 4 a posse hanged a Black man named John Carter from a telephone pole and shot him. A caravan dragged his body to Ninth Street and Broadway, the heart of the Black business district. About 5,000 white people rioted there for hours and burned his body. Jones and other Black leaders had warned residents to stay indoors, and one man who did not was seized and beaten. The Guard arrived three hours in. A grand jury deadlocked without indictments. Dixon was convicted in a trial some reports say took seven minutes of deliberation, and was electrocuted on June 24, his seventeenth birthday.
Remembered
Some criticized Jones for his non-confrontational approach. He died at home on March 28, 1943, and was buried at Haven of Rest Cemetery, where a marker for Carter was unveiled in 2021.
The Mosaic Templars Cultural Center stands on West Ninth Street, where his order built its temple, and the Elaine cases are told at the Elaine Massacre Memorial in Helena.