<b>They Shot Them Down Like Rabbits . . . <br></b><br>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. A car pulled up outside the church . . . <br><br>What happened next has long been shrouded in controversy.<br><br>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. <i>On the Laps of Gods</i> is the story of the 1919 Elaine massacre in Hoop Spur, Arkansas, during which white mobs and federal troops killed more than one hundred black men, women, and children; of the twelve black men subsequently condemned to die; of Scipio Africanus Jones, a former slave and tenacious black attorney; and of <i>Moore v. Dempsey,</i> the case Jones brought to the Supreme Court, which set the legal stage for the civil rights movement half a century later.