Biography
Arvid Owens was among seven workers arrested after a demonstration demanding work at Oakland City Hall on December 27, 1929. The defendants received sentences of a $100 fine or forty days in jail. A photograph of the group appeared in the Daily Worker in April 1930.
Page 3's individually labeled group photograph places this person among seven arrested at the Oakland City Hall unemployment demonstration on December 27, 1929. The enlarged original caption gives $150 fine or forty days in jail, differing from the $100 stated in some existing accounts. This nominal alternative is not a completed forty-day interval. Separate later USL Battery Company protest sentences remain distinct. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1930/v06-n334-NY-apr-02-1930-DW-LOC.pdf
An earlier Oakland defense-meeting jail and bail release
The October 12, 1929 Daily Worker names Arvid Owens among nine people arrested after police broke up an Oakland meeting defending the Gastonia textile defendants. It reports that demonstrators gathered at the city jail and remained until the nine were released on bail furnished by Anita Whitney. Owens is individually described as taking over the speech after James McCrary was arrested, then being arrested himself. This is a separate earlier Oakland incident from the December 27 unemployment demonstration already recorded. The by-mail report supplies no exact event day or measured length of detention, and the short interval must not be represented as a completed forty-day sentence or continuous imprisonment into December.
Daily Worker, October 12, 1929, original pages 1, 3. Accounts and allegations are attributed to the newspaper and reported witnesses.
Daily Worker, April 2, 1930; relevant page stated in the accompanying profile note.
