Biography
Willie Witcher was a Share Croppers Union striker in Lowndes County, Alabama. He was shot and beaten on the Bell plantation when the cotton strike began on August 19, 1935. Authorities took him to jail in Haynesville while he was wounded and held him for twenty-seven days.
The October 9, 1935 issue reports from October 8 that Sheriff R. E. Woodruff still refused to free Witcher despite a court order obtained six weeks earlier. This conflicts with the previously recorded September 15 release and twenty-seven-day account; no unsupported rearrest or replacement discharge date is inferred, and the complete custody total remains unresolved. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n242-NAT-oct-09-1935-DW-Q.pdf#page=3
Al Jackson reports that Sheriff Woodruff attacked strike leader Willie Witcher at the Bell plantation on August 19, 1935, shooting at him eight times and striking him with a pistol before taking him to Haynesville jail. A later paragraph includes him among five men said to have been murdered. That internal assertion conflicts with the documented subsequent imprisonment and is preserved as a source discrepancy, without changing his death or release fields.
