Anti-Labor Vigilantes

In 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression, Southern textile workers revolted. The wave of strikes that followed foreshadowed the labor conflicts of the 1930s. The pattern first emerged in Gastonia, North Carolina. Assisted by Communist Party organizers, workers walked out of Gastonia's Loray mill in April 1929. The weapons used to defeat this strike included National Guard troops, strike-breakers, mass arrests, red-baiting, and threats of vigilante action. An advertisement in the Gastonia Gazette, paid for by "citizens of Gaston County," claimed that the strike was for "the purpose of overthrowing this Government and destroying property and to kill, kill, kill. The time is at hand for every American to do his duty."¹ 

The threatened violence soon appeared, as a mob of vigilantes destroyed the strikers' headquarters while National Guardsmen stood by. Gastonia was unusual only in that the workers there fought back. When police entered a tent colony of strikers without a warrant, someone opened fire, and in the melee Gastonia's police chief fell dead. This led to the arrest of 16 strikers and union organizers, seven of whom were ultimately convicted of second-degree murder. 

Anti-union vigilantes continued to attack at will. After the first trial of Gastonia strikers ended in a mistrial, one angry mob destroyed union offices, while another gang flogged Morris Wells, a British communist found in the area. On September 14, 1929, vigilantes fired at a truckload of union members on their way to a rally in Gastonia. One of the bullets killed Ella May Wiggins, a 29-year-old textile worker who had become the movement's minstrel. As in other cases of anti-labor violence at Gastonia, local juries failed to convict anyone for the murder of Ella May Wiggins. Against such enormous odds, the Gastonia strike collapsed.² 

Leftist radicals and union organizers have frequently met defeat in the South. But the setbacks for labor and the left have not been due to an inability to attract a following among Southern workers. Indeed, some of the most radical mass movements in America, such as the Populist Party and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, have had Southern roots. How can we explain their ultimate failure? Among the many reasons given, historians have generally underestimated the role of vigilante violence. 

Simply defined as "taking the law into one's own hands," vigilantism is usually associated with the frontier, where it was often used to deal with common criminals. Vigilantism did not, however, disappear with the frontier. It has survived into the twentieth century as a method of social control directed at ethnic and religious minorities, labor organizers, leftist radicals, and anyone else who appeared to threaten the status quo. Although its victims have changed over time, vigilantism has remained (to varying degrees in various times and places) a well-organized and violent means of protecting the established order against dissident individuals or groups. Indeed, two political scientists have perceptively defined vigilantism as "establishment violence" — that is, illegitimate or illegal coercion directed at maintaining the existing socioeconomic order.³ 

Vigilante violence has erupted in every section of the country, but it has proven especially popular in the South. When the so-called "Southern way of life" has appeared to be under attack, vigilante movements have frequently emerged. This is particularly true when the challenge to the status quo comes from peaceful groups operating within the law. Faced with this situation, defenders of local power structures often resort to violence as an illegal but effective way of eliminating "undesirables."⁴ 

During the Depression, the South was plagued by vigilante violence directed against leftist radicals and labor organizers. In 1937 an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) investigation of centers of repression in the United States reported that six of the country's 11 most repressive areas were in the South.⁵ A survey of some of the decade's worst incidents shows a pattern of violent repression from which no Southern state was immune. 

 

Several of the best-known cases of anti-labor violence occurred in Alabama and Arkansas, where sharecroppers attempted to organize. Founded in 1931 under the sponsorship of the Communist Party, the Share Croppers Union of Alabama attracted thousands of black members.⁶ Although it was a perfectly legal group, the union encountered a wave of terror that resulted in the deaths of an unknown number of black sharecroppers. During a 1935 strike, for instance, the secretary of the Share Croppers Union charged that the Lowndes County sheriff had "personally organized a band of vigilantes," made up of deputies and landlords from the area. This well-organized group "raided strikers' homes, pulled them out of bed, rode them miles away and beat them unconscious." At least one of the sharecroppers was killed by vigilantes, and the strike ultimately collapsed.⁷ 

Similar tactics were used against the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) in Arkansas. Organized in 1934, the STFU fought to improve the conditions of black and white tenant farmers who were especially hard-hit by both the Depression and the New Deal farm program that rewarded landowners for restricting production at the expense of landless tenants. As an interracial union that won support from the political left, the STFU was thrice damned in the eyes of plantation owners and their allies. In Arkansas, sheriffs' deputies began a campaign of harassment by disrupting STFU meetings and arresting union leaders on bogus charges, such as "criminal anarchy." When official intimidation failed to stop the growth of the STFU, vigilantes resorted to violence in an effort to destroy the tenant farmers' movement.⁸ 

Mob violence against the STFU swept eastern Arkansas during 1935. Two of the first victims were Lucien Koch, the director of Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas, and Bob Reed, a Commonwealth student and member of the Young Communist League. The two young white radicals came under attack after speaking to black and white sharecroppers at a meeting held in a black church near Gilmore. While Koch was speaking to the group, a plantation riding-boss barged in, demanding to know what Koch was talking about. Upon hearing the four words "Southern Tenant Farmers Union," the riding-boss left and immediately returned with about four other men, who grabbed Koch and wrestled him into a waiting car. When Bob Reed rushed to Koch's defense, he too was kidnapped. Both men were released after being beaten with fists and pistol butts. The local sheriff dismissed the incident, explaining that Koch and Reed had attended a sharecroppers' meeting at a black church. Furthermore, he contended, "They were not hurt."⁹ 

Six weeks later, vigilantes struck again when Norman Thomas toured eastern Arkansas. The Socialist Party leader was accompanied by a group of STFU organizers, including H.L. Mitchell and Howard Kester. After several stops, the entourage arrived at the little town of Birdsong, where a crowd of some 500 sharecroppers had gathered to hear the speakers. When Kester tried to start the meeting, however, he was immediately interrupted by a gang of 30 to 40 planters who surrounded the platform. Norman Thomas insisted that the meeting was legal and protected by the state's constitution. Someone from the mob shouted back: "There ain't gonna be no speaking here. We are the citizens of this county and we run it to suit ourselves. We don't need no Gawd-Damn Yankee Bastard to tell us what to do." The armed gang then pulled Kester and Thomas from the platform, forced them into their car, and told them to leave Mississippi County. A deputy sheriff in the mob repeated the warning, and the Thomas party, trailed by several cars of armed planters, made its way to the county line.¹⁰ 

In the weeks that followed, vigilantes continued to use violence and threats of violence in an effort to destroy the STFU. One gang left a note for W.H. Stultz, president of the union, warning him to leave his home or face death. C.T. Carpenter, a lawyer in Marked Tree who went to the defense of the STFU, also came under attack. One night masked men riddled his home with gunfire. Carpenter and his family escaped injury, but a similar attack wounded two sons of E.B. McKinney, a black organizer of the STFU. Fearing for their lives, a number of STFU leaders moved across the Mississippi River to Memphis, where they continued their union activities.¹¹ 

Apparently no one died in the first wave of terror in eastern Arkansas, but vigilantes soon showed they would not hesitate to kill. Early in 1936 two masked men murdered Willie Hurst, a black sharecropper who reportedly was willing to testify against deputies who had attacked sharecroppers near Earle. Several months later another black sharecropper, Frank Weems, disappeared after a severe beating by a gang of planters and deputies. Investigation into Weems's presumed death resulted in one of the most widely publicized mob actions against the STFU.¹² 

In June 1936 the Reverend Claude Williams went to Earle to look into the disappearance of Frank Weems (who later turned up alive in Alton, Illinois). Williams, a radical minister and organizer for the STFU, was accompanied by Willie Sue Blagden, who was a socialist from a prominent Memphis family. Soon after arriving in Earle, Williams and Blagden were forced by six men to drive into the country. There the gang administered the highly ritualized flogging that had long served as a means of disciplining challengers of the Southern status quo. "I wouldn't have believed this," Blagden told the floggers. "You'll believe it now," one of them countered, "and you'll stay out of Arkansas."¹³ 

The flogging of Claude Williams and Willie Sue Blagden caused a furor. Not only were the victims both white, but one of them was a minister and the other a woman. This proved too much for a number of Southern newspapers, which condemned the flogging as an outrage. National publicity also helped prod President Franklin D. Roosevelt into appointing a commission to investigate the plight of tenant formers.¹⁴ One Arkansas lawyer concluded: "The situation over there in eastern Arkansas is plain hell. One risks his life to be there."¹⁵ The fears generated by the reign of terror continued to make it difficult to organize tenant formers. By World War II, neither the STFU nor other tenant farmer organizations was a powerful force any longer (see SE, Vol. I, No. 3-4). 

Most of the anti-labor violence during the 1930s occurred not in rural areas but in cities, where union organizers and radicals concentrated their efforts. Defenders of the existing order saw little difference between labor organizers and leftist radicals. On the one hand, strict trade unionists were often pictured as part of some communist conspiracy, especially when they tried to organize white and black workers in industrial unions. On the other hand, socialists and communists were frequently blamed for causing labor unrest. Moreover, the epithet of "outside agitator" was used to describe all organizers, even those born and bred in the South. Branding unwanted social and political movements as non-Southern often served conveniently to justify any means, including violence, of eliminating advocates of change. 

The notorious flogging of Joseph Gelders showed the lengths to which dominant groups would go in order to preserve the status quo. Gelders, the son of an upper-class Jewish family in Birmingham, discovered Marxism during the Depression. In 1935 he left his post as an assistant professor of physics at the University of Alabama to work full-time for the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, a leftwing group that included artists and writers such as Rockwell Kent and Upton Sinclair. From his hometown, Gelders openly defended Communist Party organizers who were being imprisoned for possession of allegedly seditious literature. Gelders took this stand at a time when Birmingham workers were trying, against enormous odds, to unionize steel and coal companies in a community dominated by the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company (TCI).¹⁶ 

In September 1936 Gelders was kidnapped by four men and viciously flogged with a strap. Public outrage forced local, state, and federal investigations of the attack, but none of the vigilantes was ever prosecuted, even though Gelders positively identified at least two of them — one a Birmingham lawyer and the other an employee of TCI. Despite some local editorial demands for justice, Birmingham's law enforcement establishment effectively blocked any action. The police showed little interest in the case. The city's chief of detectives privately observed, "We have had so much trouble with Communism in this district that I can not expect too much enthusiasm out of my own men."¹⁷ 

When the case was presented to a grand jury, the prosecutor emphasized Gelders's radical politics, his Jewish religion, and his support for the Scottsboro boys. In explaining the refusal to hand down any indictments, one grand juror declared: "I still don't think outsiders should take the law into their own hands, but what are you going to do when there's no law to deal with radicals and Communists?"¹⁸ In short, vigilante violence was justified as a last resort in dealing with radicals, even when they operated within the law. 

Birmingham's chief of detectives, G.C. Giles, had another explanation for the city's reluctance to prosecute perpetrators of vigilante violence. Noting that U.S. Steel, the parent company of TCI, was planning to expand its facilities in the city, Giles pointed to obvious economic considerations. In a letter to the governor, Giles reported: "Due to the recent announcement of the U.S. Steel Corporation's expenditures of 31 million dollars in this district and rumors of many other contemplated investments here, there is a strong sentiment against any kind of agitation or labor disturbance in this district. This, together with Gelders's own attitude, places us at a great disadvantage in prosecuting this case at this time."¹⁹

 

Similar considerations led to vigilante violence and official inaction in other Southern states, especially after the CIO began its drive for industrial unions. One of the CIO's most outspoken allies was Witherspoon "Doc" Dodge, a native Southerner and Presbyterian minister. Always a dissenter, even in his own church which had once found him guilty of heresy, Dodge had long taught at Southern seminaries and finally at Georgia's Oglethorpe University. During the early 1930s Dodge also operated an Atlanta radio program featuring "'radical' preaching for freedom, justice, and clean government." 

In 1937 Doc Dodge became an organizer for the CIO's Textile Workers Organizing Committee (TWOC). His first assignment took him to Columbus, Georgia, where he witnessed anti-labor violence. Dodge himself was anonymously warned to leave town. Although he escaped attack, three fellow organizers were assaulted in front of a textile plant in broad daylight. Dodge was so outraged that he encouraged the victims to swear out warrants against more than 20 of the attackers. At a hearing before a local judge, the defendants' attorney, a noted mill lawyer, called for dismissal of the charges on the grounds that "this C.I.O. organization which has created so much trouble all over the country has now come to Columbus to disturb the peace and harmony of our contented city." The attorney argued that his clients "were simply defending the welfare of our community against these outside agitators and trouble-makers." The judge promptly dismissed the charges. 

Despite the ubiquitous threat of violence, Doc Dodge continued to work for the CIO. In August 1938 he went to the south Georgia town of Fitzgerald, where workers at the Fitzgerald Cotton Mills Company had voted overwhelmingly for a union but management was refusing to negotiate a contract. Although union members warned Dodge that he was on a dangerous mission, he remained convinced that the law would protect his legal right to pursue a contract for the workers. On his first night in Fitzgerald, however, Dodge was told by company president J.M. Cox that the firm would never sign a union contract. While talking to Cox on the porch of a local hotel, Dodge was approached by a dozen men who asked him to go with them. When he hesitated, he was hit with a blackjack and thrown into a waiting truck — in front of half a dozen witnesses, including Cox. 

Dodge was hustled out of town and repeatedly beaten with a blackjack, while his captors debated what to do with him. Finally he was dumped in a deserted area and left with this warning: "Now, looker here, preacher, we don't want no union down here in Fitzgerald, and we ain't goner have none. Now, you got till daylight to git outer Fitzgerald. If you ain't out by that time, we're goner shoot you."²⁰ 

Dodge left town, but he decided to fight back. After local and state authorities refused to take any action, he finally contacted the Department of Justice, which began an investigation that uncovered evidence of a well-organized conspiracy by the management of the Fitzgerald Cotton Mills Company. This led to indictments against J.M. Cox, his vice-president, two company foremen, and 11 mill employees. But at the conclusion of a highly irregular federal trial in 1940, a jury — selected six weeks before the actual trial began — found all the defendants not guilty. Department of Justice attorneys called the proceedings "a complete abortion of justice, extending all the way from the United States District Attorney's office in Savannah through the jury and the presiding judge of the court."²¹ 

 

As in several other cases including that of Joe Gelders, the beating of Doc Dodge attracted national attention and an official inquiry because the victim was white and middle-class. During the same period, blacks received worse treatment at the hands of Southern mobs, but their plight usually received little notice. However, even the highly publicized acts of violence against whites rarely led to indictments, since the federal government rarely intervened and local authorities showed little interest in protecting the rights of workers. Indeed, in some cities, elected officials themselves set the tone for anti-union violence. One of the worst examples of this official incitement was in Memphis, where the city's political boss, Edward H. Crump, strongly opposed the CIO. In this case, the victims were not so well supported by Northern liberal groups (as in the case of the STFU) nor so closely connected to the South's dominant white elite (as in the cases of Gelders and Dodge). 

In September 1937 Mayor Watkins Overton issued a formal statement warning that "imported C.I.O. agitators, Communists and high professional organizers are not wanted in Memphis." The mayor pointedly added, "They will not be tolerated here." Three days later, CIO organizer Norman Smith was badly beaten on a Memphis street. Smith had been in the city for only a few weeks, but it was well known that his mission was to help organize the local Ford assembly plant for the United Automobile Workers (UAW). Just before the beating the city's police commissioner had declared publicly, "We know Norman Smith and his where-abouts and will take care of that situation."²² No action was taken to bring Smith's attackers to justice. Even the governor of Tennessee dismissed the incident as an ordinary fist fight. In this atmosphere of official indifference, Smith received another beating two weeks after the first. At that point, the UAW withdrew Smith from Memphis. Mayor Overton had made good his threat that the city would not tolerate CIO organizers.²³ 

New Orleans proved just as unfriendly to the CIO. During a 1938 recognition strike by CIO truck and taxi drivers, New Orleans police raided CIO offices and arrested dozens of union members on vague charges. The CIO also complained that some strikers were held incommunicado and beaten by police. The city's superintendent of police denied this charge but admitted that his men had escorted two CIO organizers to the parish line and left them with the warning to keep out of New Orleans. "Lawless police are acting as sappers and miners in an attempt to bring down the temple of freedom in the U.S.," national CIO director John Brophy told a meeting of several thousand strikers and their supporters in New Orleans. In the midst of the strike, the Louisiana state legislature passed a resolution condemning the CIO as "Communistic." One state representative openly called on New Orleans citizens to "dump Brophy into the Mississippi."²⁴ 

The same lynch-law spirit greeted CIO supporters in Dallas. At a meeting in front of the Ford assembly plant there in July 1937, a company spokesman railed against the CIO and boasted, "A Jew in Germany lives in a bed of roses compared to that position in which such a CIO organizer would be in that plant." Another speaker told Ford employees, "I haven't seen any CIO organizers lately and I may not see any because walking down Grand Avenue for John L. Lewis is going to be just like slapping a grizzly bear."²⁵ 

A month later, anti-labor violence erupted in Dallas. On the afternoon of August 9, three men assaulted George Baer on a downtown street. Baer, a vice-president of the AFL's Hat, Cap and Millinery Workers Union, was forced into a car and severely beaten with blackjacks. His kidnappers later dumped him outside the city. Baer could not explain the attack but claimed that two of the assailants were Ford employees. Several hours later, the Socialist Party held a previously scheduled meeting at Fretz Park in Dallas to show a labor film. As the program ended, its organizer, Herbert Harris, was attacked by a mob of several dozen men who knocked him unconscious and dumped him in a car. Fellow socialist George Lambert was hit and kicked when he tried to prevent destruction of a film projector and sound equipment. The vigilantes took Harris to a lonely spot outside of town, where they alternately questioned and threatened him and tried to get him to confess that he worked for the CIO. The gang finally tarred and feathered Harris and left him on the steps of a Dallas newspaper office. Harris later observed: "The vandals wished my plight heralded to the world. They desired that all and sundry would take heed not to molest, in the slightest, the easy berth that employers of labor are enjoying in this deep south country." Harris also emphasized that the vigilante action had been well orchestrated. "It had been executed with the precision of meshed gears," he recalled. "It could not have been effected so expertly unless there had been much rehearsing by the mob." Despite the failure of Dallas police to find die guilty parties, Harris remained convinced that "the Ford Plant was the nesting place from which sprang the outrage."²⁶ 

In October 1937 another man fell victim to Dallas vigilantes. Harry F. Bowen, a former Ford employee and UAW member, was seized in front of the Ford plant. Apparently mistaken for a CIO organizer, Bowen was taken to a remote place, whipped with a hose, and questioned about alleged CIO activities. Once again the Dallas police showed little interest in the case.²⁷ 

CIO organizers fared little better in the state of Mississippi. "Citizens of Tupelo . . . have politely asked organizers to leave the city," a local newspaper reported in 1937, "and if it takes bloodshed to accomplish the removal of agitators then they stand ready for action."²⁸ Shortly thereafter, an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union was escorted out of town and given a dire warning not to return. A year later, a Tupelo mob kidnapped Charles Cox, a local textile union leader, and beat him until he promised to leave town.²⁹ 

Although most anti-labor vigilantes successfully concealed their identities, their actions reveal a common pattern. First, as their victims often pointed out, the vigilantes appeared to be well organized and their attacks carefully planned. Second, their purpose was clearly to preserve existing power relationships by discouraging or driving out individuals who challenged the status quo. Third, vigilantes escaped punishment largely because of the complicity of local — and sometimes state — law enforcement officials. Police involvement in vigilante violence varied from outright participation to indifference and toleration. Finally, despite some exceptions, this form of mob violence was usually either endorsed or passively accepted by community leaders, who apparently felt that violence was a necessary means of defending the local establishment against leftist radicals and union organizers who operated within the law. This prevalent attitude helps explain why anti-labor vigilantes were so successful, at least temporarily, in achieving their aims during the 1930s. 

 

In a few cases during this decade, vigilantes created formal organizations that became widely publicized. In Atlanta, for instance, a group calling itself the Black Shirts carried on a brief campaign of threats against workers, and evidence shows that a self-styled White Legion was behind much of the antilabor violence in Birmingham.³⁰ The best-known of the many vigilante organizations, however, was the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan's following was relatively small during the Depression years, but in some areas of the South it remained the chief enforcer of the established order which excluded industrial unions and radical politics. The Klan also tried to revive its fortunes through appeals to anti-labor and anti-communist sentiment. 

In Greenville, South Carolina, the KKK resorted to vigilante tactics when communists tried to organize mill workers and the unemployed. In April 1931 Klansmen raided the headquarters of the local Unemployed Council and beat up several council members. During the next several months, robed Klansmen frequently marched and burned crosses in an effort to intimidate workers. When communists continued to operate despite harassment from Greenville police, five vigilantes kidnapped Clara Holden, an organizer for the National Textile Workers Union. Blindfolded and gagged, Holden was taken outside the city, lashed with a whip, and warned to leave town within 24 hours or face death. Despite her visible bruises, Holden was unable to convince local police that she had in fact been flogged.³¹ 

During the 1930s Klan publications repeatedly called attention to "the 'red' influence that has crept into labor organizations." The Klan newspaper, the Kourier, warned initially against a communist takeover of the American Federation of Labor. "Klansmen who belong to trade unions," advised the Kourier, "have a definite responsibility to maintain their union solidly behind their American leaders and to root out every radical alien agitator who worms his way in to wave the red flag of Communism."³² Once the CIO was created, the Klan saw this as proof that leftist radicals were determined to use organized labor as a communist tool. Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans declared that the CIO was "infested with Communists and the Klan will ride to wipe out communism." In addition to the "un-American" idea of industrial unions, the Klan naturally objected to the CIO's announced intention of organizing both white and black workers on an equal basis.³³ Summing up the CIO's reaction to Klan intimidation in the South, an organizer for the Textile Workers Union declared in 1939: "We did not think that we would have to fight the Ku Klux Klan. We felt it was dead and buried, but no sooner had we stepped into the field than they came with the Night Shirts and the fiery crosses."³⁴ 

Klan action against the CIO was centered in the KKK strongholds of Georgia and South Carolina. Atlanta Klansmen held rallies and burned crosses to protest CIO activities, and in 1939 beat up two CIO organizers near the city. When the Textile Workers Organizing Committee began a campaign in Greenville, the city was plastered with posters that read: 

 

C.I.O. Is Communism. 

Communism Will Not Be Tolerated. 

Ku Klux Klan Rides Again³⁵ 

 

After an outbreak of Klan violence in Anderson, South Carolina, a state investigation revealed that Klansmen had illegally spied on labor unions. 

The most intense outbreak of Klan violence during the 1930s was in Tampa, Florida. Long a center of Klan activity, Tampa also experienced a variety of antiradical confrontations. In 1931 more than half of Tampa's 10,000 cigar workers joined a communist union, the Tobacco Workers Industrial Union. City fathers went to the rescue of cigar manufacturers in a union-busting campaign that included police raids, arrests, a sweeping federal court injunction outlawing the union, and deportation proceedings against alien leftists. These official efforts were backed up by vigilante action. Communist organizer Fred Crawford was kidnapped and flogged, and leading Tampa residents formed a "secret committee of 25 outstanding citizens" to help cigar owners "wash the red out of their factories."³⁶ Under these pressures, the workers' communist union was broken.³⁷ 

Four years later, another radical leftist movement emerged in Tampa. This time it was led by unemployed socialists who formed a political party, the Modem Democrats, to challenge the city's corrupt political machine. In the 1935 municipal election the Modem Democrats fielded a slate of candidates who ran on a mildly socialist platform calling for reforms such as public ownership of utilities. The Modern Democrats were defeated in the election, but they continued to organize and demonstrate peacefully on behalf of workers and the unemployed. Several weeks after the 1935 election, a gang of vigilantes kidnapped, flogged, and tarred and feathered three leaders of the Modem Democrats. One victim, Joseph Shoemaker, was so badly beaten that he died as a result of his wounds.³⁸ National attention focused on the attack and on the tensions in Tampa, and investigations by local, county, and state authorities and by the Tampa Tribune implicated the Ku Klux Klan. Shortly before the flogging, Joseph Shoemaker's brother had received a phone call warning, "This is the Ku Klux Klan. We object to your brother's activities. They are Communistic. Tell him to leave town. We will take care of the other radicals, too."³⁹ In the wake of the brutal attack, Tampa Klansmen circulated a leaflet that declared, "Communism Must Go," and pledged "to fight to the last ditch and the last man against any and all attacks on our government and its American institutions."⁴⁰ 

Tampa police were reluctant to press the case, but county and state officials, who had no political ties to the city machine, produced arrests and indictments. The accused included Tampa's police chief and seven officers, along with three men from Orlando. The Orlando men, allegedly members of a Klan "wrecking crew," had recently served as special policemen in Tampa. Prominent Tampa citizens went to the aid of the accused. Bail money was provided by local businessmen, including several cigar manufacturers. The mayor's brother-in-law, who also headed the city's political machine, served as chief defense attorney, and a lengthy series of trials followed. In the first, a jury in the nearby town of Bartow found five policemen guilty of kidnapping. Each was sentenced to a four-year prison term, but Florida's Supreme Court overturned the convictions on a technicality. In two subsequent trials, the accused were acquitted and freed. 

Meanwhile, the Modern Democrats' organization collapsed, and vigilantes continued to operate in Tampa. In 1936 they prevented Earl Browder, the Communist Party candidate for president of the U.S., from speaking at a Tampa auditorium. The following year the ACLU put Tampa at the top of its list of centers of repression because the city was "dominated by the Ku-Klux-Klan."⁴¹ 

The Klan was perhaps the most powerful of the vigilante organizations that used violence to defend the established order during the 1930s. Throughout the South, however, a variety of local groups systematically took the law into their hands in order to prevent social change. These widespread campaigns of terror, either sponsored or tolerated by the local establishment, help explain why legal and peaceful challenges to the status quo by Southern labor and radical organizers met with little success, regardless of how much support they received from workers. 

 

NOTES 

1. Quoted in Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years (Boston, 1960), p. 22. 

2. Ibid., pp. 22-27. 

3. Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (New York, 1975), pp. 3-25; H. Jon Rosenbaum and Peter C. Sederberg, "Vigilantism: An Analysis of Establishment Violence," in Rosenbaum and Sederberg, eds., Vigilante Politics (Philadelphia, 1975), pp. 3-6. 

4. For suggestive comments on the roots of Southern violence in "a siege mentality," see Sheldon Hackney, "Southern Violence," in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (New York, 1969), pp. 524-525. 

5. The six "centers of repression" in the South were listed as Tampa, Harlan County, Eastern Arkansas, Atlanta, Birmingham, and New Orleans. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Let Freedom Ring! (New York, 1937), p. 12. 

6. Albert Jackson, "On the Alabama Front," The Nation 141 (September 19, 1935): 329-330; F. Ray Marshall, Labor in the South (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 156-157. 

7. Albert Jackson, "You Can Kill Me — But You Can Never Scare Me," Labor Defender 11 (October 1935): 6. 

8. Donald H. Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and the New Deal (Chapel Hill, 1971), pp. 62-71; H.L. Mitchell, Mean Things Happening in This Land: The Life and Times of H.L. Mitchell, Co-Founder of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (Montclair, N.J., 1979), pp. 1-59. 

9. New York Herald Tribune, February 2, 1935, clipping in ACLU Papers, Princeton University Library, Princeton, N.J., vol. 828. 

10. H.L. Mitchell, "Norman Thomas Visits the Cotton Fields," n.d. [1935], Southern Tenant Fanners Union Papers (microfilm edition). 

11. C.T. Carpenter to William B. Fennell, March 28, 1935, ACLU Papers, vol. 828. 

12. Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton, pp. 90-91, 109-110; Mitchell, Mean Things Happening, p. 89. 

13. Willie Sue Blagden, "Arkansas Flogging," The New Republic 87 (July 1, 1936): 236. 

14. Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton, pp. 113-117. 

15. Arley Woodrow to Roger Baldwin, June 17, 1936, ACLU Papers, vol. 925. 

16. Robert P. Ingalls, "Antiradical Violence in Birmingham During the 1930s," Journal of Southern History 47 (November 1981): 521-529. 

17. G.C. Giles to Bibb Graves, October 29, 1936, Graves Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery. 

18. Birmingham Post, November 14, 1936. 

19. Giles to Graves, October 29, 1936. For the full text of this letter, see Robert P. Ingalls, "The Flogging of Joseph Gelders: A Policeman's View," Labor History 20 (Fall 1979): 577-578. 

20. Witherspoon Dodge, Southern Rebel in Reverse (New York, 1961), pp. 68, 74, 98-99. 

21. Quoted in George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, (Baton Rouge, LA, 1967), p. 526. 

22. Quotes in Lucy Randolph Mason, To Win These Rights (Westport, CT, 1970), p. 104. 

23. Gordon Browning to Harry F. Ward, October 1, 1937, ACLU Papers, vol. 1059. 

24. CIO News, July 9, 1938. 

25. Herbert Harris, Terror in Texas (n.p., n.d.) p. 10. 

26. Ibid., pp. 1,4, 15. 

27. George Clifton Edwards to ACLU, August 31, 1937, ACLU Papers, vol. 1060. 

28. Quoted in Tindall, Emergence of the New South, p. 525. 

29. Mason, To Win These Rights, v. 53. 

30. Charles H. Martin, "White Supremacy and Black Workers: Georgia's 'Black Shirts' Combat the Great Depression," Labor History 18 (Summer 1977): 366-381; Ingalls, "Antiradical Violence in Birmingham": 524. 

31. Clara Holden statement, n.d. [1931], ACLU Papers, vol. 499. 

32. Kourier, August 1934, p. 5 and October 1934, p. 23. 

33. New York Times, July 12, 1937. 

34. Quoted in Walter Galenson, The CIO Challenge to the AFL (Cambridge, MA, 1960), p. 341. 

35. New York Times, October 31, 1937. 

36. Tampa Morning Tribune, December 4, 1931. 

37. Robert P. Ingalls, "Radicals and Vigilantes: The 1931 Strike of Tampa Cigar Workers," in Merl E. Reed, el al., eds., Southern Workers and Their Unions, 1880-1975 (Westport, CT, 1981), pp. 44-53. 

38. For a fuller discussion of this case, see Robert P. Ingalls, "The Tampa Flogging Case, Urban Vigilantism," Florida Historical Quarterly 56 (July 1977): 0-27. 

39. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 12, 1936. 

40. Tampa Morning Tribune, December 20, 1935. 

41. ACLU, Let Freedom Ring!, p. 2.