Biography
Elizabeth Lawson was an unemployed-workers’ organizer arrested in Chattanooga,Tennessee on February10,1931 when police broke up a demonstration of3,000 people. The Daily Worker of March25 reports that Gordon,Lawson and MaryDalton remained defendants while nine others had been released. They faced vagrancy and incitement-to-riot accusations; Attorney GeorgeW.Chamlee represented the defendants, whose trial was postponed to March31. Their eventual dispositions and release dates are unestablished.
In James S. Allen’s Organizing in the Depression South (published 2001, preface dated January 1984), Allen recalls the February 10, 1931 Chattanooga unemployment demonstration and his observation of the arrests of Gordon, Dalton and Elizabeth (Elsa) Lawson. He says they spent two months jailed under high bail pending a four-day trial. They were acquitted except for inciting to riot, for which fines were later reversed on appeal. Blocking traffic was among the accusations; lewdness concerned Gordon and Dalton only. The memoir supplies reported pretrial service and outcome, without an exact physical-release day. In this Chattanooga account the memoir calls Gordon Hy; the earlier contemporary report names Harry Gordon. Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/allen/organizing-south.pdf#page=67
Allen also recalls a separate Elizabethton vagrancy prosecution in which the judge ordered Lawson to spend a night in jail and cook breakfast the next morning as an insulting test of her womanhood and sanity. He later identifies her as the Southern Worker editor using Jim Mallory after publication resumed in May 1933. The overnight episode is distinct from the longer Chattanooga case and has no invented calendar endpoints. Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/allen/organizing-south.pdf#page=68
