Biography
Frank Weems, a Black Southern Tenant Farmers Union leader at Earle, Arkansas, survived an armed mob attack in 1936. The July 1937 Southern Worker reports from his safe location in Chicago that five carloads of planters and gunmen detained and questioned him, threatened to kill him and beat him with gun butts and clubs until unconscious. He hid in the woods for a week and escaped north. His affidavit named five attackers and was filed with the LaFollette civil-liberties committee. Claude Williams and Willie Sue Blagden had been separately seized and flogged while investigating the false report that Weems was dead. This is actual extrajudicial anti-union captivity; the subsequent week in hiding is not counted as captor-controlled detention. Exact seizure and release dates are unknown. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/southernworker/v5n16-jul-00-1937-sw.pdf#page=13
The July 10 Muskogee tenant-union council report described the 1936 Earle attack on Weems as a murder and connected the subsequent abduction of Claude Williams and Willie Sue Blagden to their investigation. This preserves what organizers believed at the time. It does not supersede the later report establishing that Weems survived, and no death date or new custody period is inferred.
