Biography
Sam Barman was a labor and unemployment organizer in Oakland, California. He was among the workers arrested at an Oakland City Hall unemployment demonstration on December 27, 1929, and sentenced to a $100 fine or forty days in jail. Police arrested him again during the Unemployed Council's street meetings in February 1930; the International Labor Defense obtained bail for the arrested speakers. He also faced a thirty-day sentence after a City Hall demonstration protesting police attacks on a Trade Union Unity League shop-gate meeting at the USL Battery Company. In letters to the Daily Worker, he described Bay Area layoffs and urged unemployed workers to organize hunger marches.
Page 3's individually labeled group photograph places this person among seven arrested at the Oakland City Hall unemployment demonstration on December 27, 1929. The enlarged original caption gives $150 fine or forty days in jail, differing from the $100 stated in some existing accounts. This nominal alternative is not a completed forty-day interval. Separate later USL Battery Company protest sentences remain distinct. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1930/v06-n334-NY-apr-02-1930-DW-LOC.pdf
In first-person correspondence Sam Barman reported being deported on the French liner S.S. Espango via Cuba to Glasgow, Scotland. He attributed the deportation to working-class activity and said guards beat him on an immigration train for speaking to other deportees, handcuffed his hands behind his back and guarded him overnight with a Thompson gun. The report supplies no exact arrest or departure date. Daily Worker, February 20, 1931, original PDF page 3. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1931/v08-n045-NY-feb-20-1931-DW-LOC.pdf#page=3
