Bob Reed

Bob Reed was a student at Commonwealth College. A February 6 dispatch in the Daily Worker of February 7, 1935, page 3, reports that four armed planters seized and beat Koch and Reed while they addressed an interracial sharecropper meeting at Gilmore, Crittenden County, the preceding Friday night. The meeting was organizing a Southern Tenant Farmers' Union local, and Koch discussed landlords' use of cotton-acreage reduction contracts. The assailants carried them away in a car with threats of lynching; a deputy sheriff joined them down the road and took the speakers into custody. The International Labor Defense secured their release, but they were then arrested again for disturbing the peace. A Marion hearing was announced for the dispatch date; no hearing outcome or exact custody endpoints are proved. The abduction and assault are contemporary allegations, attributed to this report. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n033-Nat-feb-07-1935-DW-LOC.pdf

Daily Worker, February 4, 1935: Page 3’s Memphis February 3 dispatch reports that Koch, director of Commonwealth College, and Reed, an ILD student delegate supporting the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, were pistol-whipped and jailed at a Gilmore, Arkansas union meeting yesterday, corresponding to February 2. The later February 6 account places the initial meeting on the previous Friday, February 1. These matching people and location are treated as the existing episode, with the one-day source discrepancy retained rather than inventing a second initial arrest or silently choosing a date. No release or verdict is reported in this brief item. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n030-Nat-sect-1-feb-04-1935-DW-LOC.pdf