Biography
Arnold Johnson was the Communist Party USAs longtime legislative director and its principal liaison with sympathetic members of Congress and with the broader peace and civil-rights movements. Indicted in the Foley Square Second String in June 1951 and convicted with the rest of the second string in January 1953, he was sentenced to three years in federal prison.
Allen’s memoir recounts Jessie Wakefield’s Harlan criminal-syndicalism arrests, the bombing of her relief-delivery car and a later arrest with ACLU representative Arnold Johnson. The narrative corroborates the existing Harlan prosecution and relief work, without establishing another exact admission, release or completed service total. Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/allen/organizing-south.pdf#page=72
The September 12, 1931 Daily Worker names Johnson among fourteen defendants indicted under Kentucky’s criminal-syndicalism law. It describes a possible maximum of twenty-one years and a $10,000 fine, rather than an individual sentence actually imposed or served. This supports his existing Harlan prosecution, without a new custody period or endpoint. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1931/v08-n220-NY-sep-12-1931-DW-LOC.pdf#page=2
Photo: Arnold Johnson, 1957, Political Affairs via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
A separate Harlan County imprisonment in 1931
The Southern Worker of August 15, 1931, page 1, names Civil Liberties Union representative Arnold Johnson among those arrested in Harlan County and held on criminal-syndicalism charges alongside Jessie Wakefield and local strike leaders. NYU’s Tamiment Library finding aid for the Arnold Johnson Papers independently connects this Harlan representative to the later Communist Party legislative director. The finding aid describes six weeks in jail during the 1931 miners’ struggle and says he was arrested, but never tried, after distributing a free-speech pamphlet. This is distinct from the later federal Smith Act case. The six-week archival summary is kept as narrative, not converted to an exact 42-day total. No physical admission or release day is established here.
The same finding aid gives January 1955 to May 1957 for the later federal imprisonment, which differs from the existing 1951–1958 date span. That later span and its stored total are not independently validated by this newspaper and are not replaced here; original prison or parole evidence is needed to resolve the discrepancy.
Sources: Southern Worker, August 15, 1931, original page 1; NYU Tamiment Library, Arnold Johnson Papers TAM.137, historical/biographical note and chronology.
The September 14, 1931 Daily Worker, reporting from Corbin on September 13, states that both Jessie Wakefield and Arnold Johnson had been released on condition that they leave Harlan County. The account establishes an actual September release from his Harlan custody, separate from the later Smith Act term; it does not establish the exact release day.
In his November 12 first-person letter Johnson states he shared a Harlan County jail cell with Asa Cusick for 37 days while imprisoned for ACLU activity. This measured shared-cell interval is preserved without treating it as a complete personal term or deriving unknown admission dates.
Hevener dates the joint criminal-syndicalism arrest of ACLU representative and Union Theological Seminary student Arnold Johnson and Jessie Wakefield to August 6, 1931. Unable to post $10,000 bond each, they spent about five weeks in Harlan County jail and on September 12 agreed to leave Kentucky rather than be moved to an isolated Jackson County jail. This supplies a dated conditional release account; the five-week summary is not substituted for the archival six-week account or the separately documented 37 shared-cell days.
John Watts Hevener, A New Deal for Harlan: The Roosevelt Labor Policies in a Kentucky Coal Field, 1931–1939 (Ohio State University PhD dissertation, 1971), printed pages 115 (PDF pages 124). Source 805 SHA256 03766c260a4cf06629fb296358baf9e49448a191f9d290929ecd947963b0e125.
