Biography
Claude Clossey Williams was a Presbyterian minister, labor organizer, and civil-rights activist. After relief wages were cut in Fort Smith, Arkansas, he helped lead striking relief workers and a hunger march. Police arrested Williams and other organizers on February 18, 1935 on a barratry charge. A jury convicted him, fined him $100, and imposed a ninety-day jail sentence. Williams spent twenty days in the Sebastian County jail before supporters obtained his release on bond. Prosecutors dropped the barratry charge on June 23, 1935. He worked with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and later served as national vice president of the American Federation of Teachers.
Daily Worker, June 17, 1936, page 1–2: Willie Sue Blagden’s account reports that a mob seized her and Williams near an Earle drugstore on June 15, forced them into the countryside, and flogged Williams with fourteen blows before beating her. They had gone to investigate violence against a Southern Tenant Farmers Union member. The paper identifies Williams as a Presbyterian minister, a labor-school teacher in Little Rock and national vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, and reports him recovering after the attack. The abduction is a separate extrajudicial detention from his 1935 Fort Smith prosecution; no formal charge, judicial sentence or exact duration is inferred. The same issue inconsistently calls the missing sharecropper Arthur and Frank Weems and reports his alleged death. A later contemporary report, TIME, May 31, 1937, “Farmers: Resurrection,” states that Frank Weems appeared alive in Chicago after surviving the beating. The 1936 death allegation is not adopted as fact. Correction source: https://time.com/archive/6891681/farmers-resurrection/ Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1936/v13-n145-NY-jun-17-1936-DW-Q.pdf
A February 21 Fort Smith report expressly placed Williams and college SLID organizer George C. Edwards in the Fort Smith jail following the relief-workers strike. It described Williams as a minister removed from his church after supporting sharecroppers. The account supplies actual confinement evidence without changing his separately established twenty days or inferring an arrest day from publication. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n046-Nat-feb-22-1935-DW-LOC.pdf#page=3
A February 25 Fort Smith dispatch described him as a Socialist minister removed from his church after supporting sharecroppers. It reported his recent barratry conviction after five minutes of jury deliberation, in connection with organizing a relief strike. This account adds trial context without changing his separately established twenty actual days in custody. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n049-Nat-feb-26-1935-DW-LOC.pdf#page=2
Page 3’s June 3 Fort Smith dispatch reports that their circuit-court appeals were to be heard that month, after March sentences arising from organizing FERA workers against a thirty-to-twenty-cent hourly pay cut on a two-day week. It gives Bryan six months and $500 for anarchy, and Williams three months and $100 for barratry or inciting dissension. City Judge James A. Gallaher and prosecutor Harrell Harper are named. Bryan was held incommunicado, denied friends and counsel, and defended himself. The announced appeal hearing is not a decision or a new arrest; imposed terms do not replace independently documented actual service. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n133-NAT-jun-04-DW-Q.pdf
Page 13 reports that Frank Weems was alive in Chicago after surviving the 1936 Earle mob attack, and that his affidavit naming five attackers had been filed with the LaFollette civil-liberties committee. It connects Williams and Willie Sue Blagden’s prior abduction to their investigation of the mistaken death report; it supplies no new Williams custody episode or endpoint. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/southernworker/v5n16-jul-00-1937-sw.pdf
Daily Worker, June 4, 1935; relevant page stated in the accompanying profile note.
The Southern Tenant Farmers Union council report identifies Williams as a Little Rock teacher and says that he and Willie Sue Blagden were kidnapped, flogged and driven from the region while investigating the alleged murder of Frank Weems. The death report is a contemporary allegation later disproved; the reference concerns the already recorded June abduction, not a new arrest.
