Biography
Lorenzo Stokes was a Black garage worker, a member of the Young Communist League and the Downtown Unemployed Council, and a Daily Worker seller in New York City. Transit officers arrested and beat him at the East 180th Street subway station, then accused him of breaking a window during the assault. Magistrate Anthony Burck sentenced Stokes and fellow newspaper seller Clarence Turner to six months on Welfare Island in January 1931. Writing from prison, Stokes thanked the International Labor Defense for its support and pledged to return to organizing after his release.
The March 23, 1931 Daily Worker, page 3, prints an explicitly identified portrait of Stokes and says he was then serving his six-month subway newspaper-selling sentence while an appeal was pending. The caption calls him a New York Red Builder and says imprisonment prevented him from joining the recent Albany Hunger March. It supplies no new arrest or release endpoint. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1931/v08-n071-NY-mar-23-1931-DW-LOC.pdf#page=3
The WIR picnic announcement says Stokes and Turner, sentenced in Bronx courts for selling the Daily Worker, would recount their prison experiences at the June 21 solidarity event. This supplies contemporary defense and planned speaking context; it does not establish an exact physical release day or complete time served.
Page 3 names Daily Worker seller Laurinzo Stokes and describes a subway guard’s attempt to expel him, defeated when women and other passengers defended his right to remain. This account establishes harassment but no completed arrest on that occasion; it is not merged into an invented January 9 custody interval.
Page 2 identifies Stokes as the Black garage worker and YCL member beaten by six transit officers in the East 180th Street station men’s room and accused of breaking a window during that beating. It reports Magistrate Anthony Burck sentencing Stokes and Clarence Turner yesterday, January 22, to six months on Welfare Island. The imposed term does not establish six months actually served; Stokes’s exact arrest day remains unreported.
Page 3 reports greetings from Stokes and Turner, then serving time on Welfare Island for selling newspapers in subway trains, read at the May 16 Red Builders banquet. This supplies a contemporary continued-custody observation, not proof of service through a later date or an exact completed six-month total.
