Biography
Laura Stark was the Southern district secretary of the International Labor Defense in Birmingham, Alabama. Police arrested her without a warrant at the ILD office on May 9, 1934, during a campaign against Communist and interracial labor organizing. She was jailed and tried on a vagrancy charge before Judge Abernathy on May 17. In court, Stark challenged the use of a racial slur against Black workers, while fellow defendants defended their organizing among Black and white miners.
The report identifies the ILD organizational secretary among those arrested at the Birmingham office on Wednesday, May 9. It corroborates the existing arrest without establishing a release or complete duration. Daily Worker, May 11, 1934, page 2. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1934/v11-n113-may-11-1934-DW-LOC.pdf#page=2
John Howard Lawson’s report, “In Dixieland We Take Our Stand,” attributes the ILD office arrests of Stark and Alexander E. Racolin to detectives Cole and Mozer after White Legion members led them to the office. He alleges the accompanying White Legion members destroyed light fixtures and sawed a desk in half. This adds an attributed account of the raid’s personnel and destruction to the existing May 9 office-arrest case; it does not establish another arrest or a new intake date. The report also says the six Communists tried for vagrancy were released May 21. The May 18 Daily Worker explicitly includes Stark among that trial’s defendants, but the collective release wording does not distinguish final disposition from a physical bail release; no precise physical endpoint is substituted. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1934/v11n09-may-29-1934-NM.pdf#page=13
