Biography
Robert Wood was an International Labor Defense district secretary. Page 13 reports that on May Day 1935 he was kidnapped, beaten and thrown into a creek in woods near Birmingham, Alabama. The source supplies no formal charge, prison admission, sentence, precise end of restraint or actual jail duration. He is kept distinct from the Civil War detainee Robert Wood, the IWW prisoner Robert Woods, the Auto Workers Union organizer Robert Woods and the 1965 SNCC worker Robertson Wood. Source: Louis Colman, Night Riders in Gallup, International Labor Defense, third printing June 1935, https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/pamphlets/night-riders.pdf
The speaking notice identifies Wood as Southern ILD secretary twice attacked and kidnapped by the Ku Klux Klan. This corroborates extrajudicial political restraint without establishing a new individually dated episode or custody total.
The issue reports another postponement, on September 4, of the Birmingham Downs Ordinance trials of Robert Wood and R. F. Hall. Nora Elliot’s contemporaneous case was dismissed because the house raid found only the Bible and Shakespeare. The ordinance’s six-month maximum is not a sentence actually imposed on Wood.
