Biography
Blaine Owen was arrested during Birmingham police raids against the Southern Worker newspaper. The Daily Worker of April 17, 1935, page 3, reports that police confiscated much of the newspaper’s material and arrested James Stevens and Blaine Owen under the Downs literature law, which prohibited possession of more than one copy of revolutionary literature. The Southern Worker nevertheless reappeared as an eight-page newspaper in the preceding week. The report supplies no exact arrest date, conviction, sentence, detention period or actual release. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n092-NAT-apr-17-1935-DW-Q.pdf
Page 7 prints his first-person account of arrest at a sharecroppers’ meeting near Selma, confinement in separate cells from a Young Communist League comrade called Red, interrogation after about twenty-four hours, denial of attorney access, and forced removal from jail at Sheriff Reynolds’s gunpoint into landlords’ hands. Both were driven fourteen miles into the countryside and whipped. Owen describes later efforts to contact comrades. Page 3 names Owen and Henry Johnson in its retrospective account of the two white workers seized at a Dallas County meeting. The identification of Red with Johnson is not independently explicit here, so no alias is invented. No exact arrest day or completed custody total is supplied. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n125-NAT-may-25-1935-DW-Q.pdf
Daily Worker, May 25, 1935; relevant page stated in the accompanying profile note.
The June 4 Birmingham dispatch in the June 5, 1935 Daily Worker dates the Downs-law arrests of Bob Wood and Blaine Owen to March 10. The newspaper describes the law as prohibiting possession of more than one copy of a radical publication. It reports bail after their arrest and a later kidnapping and beating by the Ku Klux White Legion. Their trial at Birmingham Recorder’s Court was scheduled for June 5 at 9 a.m. before Judge Martin; the report does not establish that the hearing occurred or its outcome. March 10, 1935 is recorded as Owen’s arrest in this Birmingham prosecution. No exact physical jail-admission or bail-release day, judicial sentence or completed custody total is inferred. The separately recorded Selma sharecroppers’ meeting seizure and whipping remains a different episode.
The March 15 dispatch dates Owen’s home arrest to Sunday night, March 10, 1935, under Birmingham’s Downs seditious-literature ordinance. The March 20 trial was still prospective; no complete custody interval is supplied.
