Biography
James McAllister was a young Black farmworker detained in Helena, Arkansas, over the alleged killing of a six-year-old boy. A Helena December 9 dispatch in the Daily Worker of December 10, 1929, page 2, reports that county officers placed him in an electric chair and applied current until he signed a confession to choking the boy. It attributes to McAllister the statement that he confessed to avoid another shock session and reports Sheriff Barlow admitting use of the chair on other prisoners. The newspaper presents the episode as racial police torture and compares it with the repression after the 1919 Phillips County massacre. That comparison does not establish McAllister as a 1919 defendant or union member. The allegations of coerced confession are attributed to the newspaper; guilt, innocence, verdict, sentence and ultimate release are not established. Actual detention is explicit, but exact arrest, admission and release days and duration are unknown. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1929/1929-ny/v06-n237-NY-dec-10-1929-DW-LOC.pdf