Biography
Terrence Earl Barlow was a carpenter, World War I veteran, Communist Party organizer, and leader of the Fort Worth Unemployed Council. He was the Communist write-in candidate for lieutenant governor of Texas in 1932. Police arrested Barlow and two associates on August 31, 1933 after a relief protest at Bluff Park and charged them with unlawful assembly. Barlow suffered a fatal skull fracture while in custody and died on September 2. His associates alleged that police had beaten or shot him; officials blamed a fight with another prisoner. An independent autopsy commissioned by his family and comrades concluded that he had been murdered.
The September 6, 1933 Daily Worker identifies the dead organizer as T. E. Barlow and reports an autopsy and inquest after his death in Tarrant County jail, with the verdict withheld and a public funeral planned. It names co-arrestees McComb and Hardy and describes Barlow leading a two-thousand-member Unemployed Council. The paper alleges murder; the fatal August 31–September 2 custody remains distinct from an actual release. Its additional statement that he was held a week in a death cell after arrest last month is ambiguous against the independently recorded two-day fatal episode: it may refer to an earlier detention or conflict with the fatal chronology. No separate seven-day case or additive service is invented. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1933/v10-n214-sep-06-1933-DW-LOC.pdf#page=1
Printed T. E. Barlow, the review places his killing in the Fort Worth jail in its September 1933 entry, corroborating the existing custody death. The adjacent portrait on PDF page 4 is explicitly captioned; no replacement is made to the existing photograph.
The September 7 Fort Worth dispatch reports a grand-jury investigation of his death in jail, questioning of Mayor Bryce and City Manager Fairtrace, and subpoenas for twelve Unemployed Council members after a Wednesday mass protest. Two brothers endorsed the Council’s intervention. These are subsequent investigation and protest events, not a new arrest or a revision of the independently recorded death day.
