Scipio Africanus Jones (August 3, 1863 – March 2, 1943) was an American educator, lawyer, judge, philanthropist, and Republican politician from the state of Arkansas.

Born into slavery in Smith Township near Tulip in Dallas County in south Arkansas, Jones became a successful and powerful businessman.

These three initiated Jones into the Prince Hall Freemasonry, a secret fraternal society of prominent African Americans who pooled resources for the ideals of liberty, equality and peace.

The Republican Party offered Jones the positions of Recorder of Deeds in the District of Columbia and Ambassador to the Republic of Haiti, but he declined both appointments to concentrate on local affairs.

In 1902, Jones helped organize a slate of black Republicans to challenge the Lily Whites and Democrats in the city of Little Rock general election.

Four years later, Jones, J. H. Blount, N. R. Parker and J. Hibbler helped organize a Black and Tan protest meeting in Little Rock in which a list of demands for equal political treatment was presented to the Lily Whites.

The organization provided burial and life insurance to members; operated a building and loan association, a newspaper, a nursing school, and a hospital; and offered other social programs to the community.

Jones also served as the attorney, counselor, and legal adviser for several other African-American fraternal organizations, including the International Order of Twelve and Knights and Daughters of Tabor, which also had its headquarters in Arkansas, a few blocks from the Mosaic Templars.

He successfully defended the Grand Lodge of the Knights of Pythias when the Arkansas Insurance Commission attempted to put them out of business.

[2] The election of a Negro justice so angered W. N. Lee, a white lawyer from Little Rock who was originally from Mississippi, that he engaged in fisticuffs with Hale for nominating Jones.

The meeting, packed with anti-Klan delegates who listened attentively to many verbal lashings of the secret fraternity, was the first at which a direct attack was ever made by the Democratic party in the county against the Ku Klux Klan, which had been active in the state since 1921.

Scathing denunciations of the order were made by the chairman of the convention, Fred A. Isgrig, and the secretary of the County Central Committee, Frank H. Dodge.

Isgrig traced the history of the Little Rock Klan in politics, describing the fight it had made to obtain control of the school board, the county offices, and the membership of the state legislature allotted to the district.

Jones was the first lawyer in Arkansas to raise the question that African Americans had not been permitted to serve on the grand and petit juries, although many were qualified.

The plight of the Elaine 12, and 87 other black men who were convicted to prison terms for participation in the riot, quickly made international headlines.

After much internal debate, the NAACP temporarily retained Jones as their replacement for Murphy, making him briefly the sole attorney for all of the 99 defendants.

It was a landmark precedent that marked the Court's review of state criminal cases from the point of view of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Jones successfully lobbied Arkansas Governor Thomas McRae, who had earlier refused to release the defendants, to let men out on indefinite furloughs in 1925.

During a speech before one of the largest KKK rallies in Arkansas history the night before his inauguration, Terral vowed to execute the six remaining Elaine defendants as his first official duty in office.

Jones remained active in Republican politics and continued to press legal challenges to racial discrimination in Arkansas until his death.

During World War I, Jones led the Liberty Bond recruitment drive among the African-American community in Arkansas and raised $243,000 in the effort.

Jones also served as the head of the Negro State Suffrage League and fought for voting rights for black citizens throughout his life.