Biography
Marshall Lakey was a sculptor, teacher, and member of the John Reed Club in Oklahoma City. He had led the sculpture department at the Santa Barbara School of Arts and taught free art classes for Black children in Oklahoma City. On February 6, 1935, federal agents arrested him for supporting workers prosecuted over the May 1934 relief demonstrations. He had offered to sculpt a portrait of the person who contributed the most to their defense fund. Charged with conspiring to obstruct justice and intimidating a federal court, Lakey was jailed during part of his campaign for the Oklahoma City Board of Education, in which he received 886 votes.
Daily Worker, February 21, 1935, page 1: The Friends of the Soviet Union protested the federal raid on his household following his arrest for defending Oklahoma City unemployed workers. The paper reports seizure of two thousand special-issue copies of Soviet Russia Today and a bundle of its current issue from the home of Mrs. Marshall Lakey, the local FSU organizer. The organization sent protests to Attorney General Cummings and Oklahoma City federal officials. The account documents a search and defense campaign within his existing prosecution, not his wife’s arrest or a new custody episode.
Page 3 lists Lakey among fourteen workers and intellectuals due for federal trial June 19 in Oklahoma City after protesting the imprisonment of ten relief demonstrators. It says the protest defendants were seized in midnight raids and indicted for attempting to obstruct justice after sending resolutions and telegrams to U.S. District Attorney W. C. Lewis. They rejected proposed leniency for nolo contendere pleas. The one-year-to-eighteen-month sedition sentences in the article belong to the original ten, not automatically these fourteen. Judge Ed S. Vaught and ILD counsel J. O. Cooke are named. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n125-NAT-may-25-1935-DW-Q.pdf
Page 3’s June 3 Oklahoma City dispatch again individually lists this defendant among fourteen facing June 19 federal trial for attempting to obstruct justice through protests against the earlier ten relief workers’ imprisonment. It reiterates midnight raids, indictment, rejected offers of leniency and ILD counsel J. O. Cooke. The earlier ten workers’ one-year-to-eighteen-month sentences are not assigned to the fourteen protest defendants, and no new arrest or verdict is established. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n133-NAT-jun-04-DW-Q.pdf
Daily Worker, May 25, 1935; relevant page stated in the accompanying profile note.
Daily Worker, June 4, 1935; relevant page stated in the accompanying profile note.
The Oklahoma City letter identifies Lakey, a former university instructor and American League Against War and Fascism member, among eleven people seized in predawn raids for protesting the federal relief prosecution. Its Thursday chronology implies February 7, while the existing documented arrest is February 6; the discrepancy is retained. The threatened maximum of twenty years under the cited federal provisions is not an imposed sentence.
The March 15 dispatch identifies Lakey and Irene Richardson as out on bail in the federal protest prosecution.