Biography
Mack Coads was a Black Communist organizer and candidate for judge in Chattanooga’s 1931 city election. In James S. Allen’s Organizing in the Depression South (published 2001, preface dated January 1984), Allen reports that police arrested Coads for vagrancy and loitering and kept him in jail until after the election, while false rumors claimed he had renounced the Communist Party. The memoir later describes his work organizing Alabama sharecroppers, his escape from the Camp Hill raid and return to Chattanooga. Those later activities establish that he survived and resumed organizing; the memoir does not give the exact Chattanooga arrest or physical discharge day or total jail duration. Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/allen/organizing-south.pdf#page=63
