Biography
Wes Johnson was a Black prisoner in the Henry County, Alabama jail accused of attacking a white woman. Southern Worker reports that Sheriff J. L. Corbitt permitted a mob to remove him, hang him from a tree and shoot his body. Its July 1937 report describes an Alabama Supreme Court four-to-two decision rejecting Corbitt's impeachment for negligence and cowardice. The publication condemns the killing and the sheriff's conduct. The text establishes actual jail custody and subsequent racial lynching, but its relative three-month chronology does not justify an exact arrest or death date. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/southernworker/v5n16-jul-00-1937-sw.pdf#page=13
The March 1937 Southern Worker reports Johnson as eighteen, taken by a mob from Abbeville jail and found shot and hanging near Headland. It names Sheriff Louis Corbett, says he recognized some of approximately fifty assailants, and describes this as the first reported U.S. lynching of 1937. These details refine the existing Alabama jail-to-mob episode; the source supplies no exact arrest or death day. The printed Corbett spelling differs from Corbitt in the July report. PDF13. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/southernworker/v5n12-mar-00-1937-sw.pdf
