Biography
Willie Sue Blagden was a Memphis writer and social worker who traveled with Presbyterian minister Claude C. Williams to investigate the disappearance of a Southern Tenant Farmers Union member near Earle, Arkansas. Her first-person account in the Daily Worker, June 17, 1936, page 1–2 says that on June 15, 1936, men commandeered their car, forced them to drive into the countryside and took them to the St. Francis River area. Blagden described hearing fourteen lashes administered to Williams before being taken from the car and struck four times herself. She was then separated from Williams, taken to a railroad station and put aboard a train for Memphis with orders never to return. A Memphis physician reported severe bruising. This was extrajudicial captivity, with no formal charge or judicial sentence; its measured duration is unknown. The same issue inconsistently calls the missing sharecropper Arthur and Frank Weems and reports his alleged death. A later contemporary report, TIME, May 31, 1937, “Farmers: Resurrection,” states that Frank Weems appeared alive in Chicago after surviving the beating. The 1936 death allegation is not adopted as fact. Correction source: https://time.com/archive/6891681/farmers-resurrection/ Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1936/v13-n145-NY-jun-17-1936-DW-Q.pdf
Page 13 prints an explicitly captioned authentic portrait of Willie Sue Blagden beside the report of Frank Weems’s survival and the earlier seizure and flogging of Blagden and Claude Williams. This corroborates the investigation’s purpose without adding a new custody episode. Her existing profile lacks a portrait; a native-source crop and caption proof are preserved for publication. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/southernworker/v5n16-jul-00-1937-sw.pdf
A July 10 Muskogee report on the Southern Tenant Farmers Union executive council recounts that Blagden, identified as a Memphis writer, and Rev. Claude Williams were kidnapped, flogged and driven out while investigating the reported killing of Frank Weems. The contemporary killing allegation was mistaken: later evidence already documented in Weems’s profile establishes his survival. This supplies the union’s account of the attack, not another detention or a verified custody duration.
