In Memphis last week Rev. Claude C. Williams heard that a Negro sharecropper named Frank Weems had been flogged to death in Earle, Ark. by unidentified vigilantes. Preacher Williams and plump Willie Sue Blagden, Memphis socialite and social worker, got into an automobile, started out for the funeral. They never got there. As they sat in their car in front of an Earle drugstore, sipping Coca-Colas, six well-dressed men drove up, seized them, commandeered their car, forced them to drive a mile outside town.
Taken across a field to a river bank, Preacher Williams was lashed 14 times with a mule's belly-strap. Miss Blagden's turn came next. The huskiest of the six swung the belly strap, laid four solid clouts on her back & thighs. Miss Blagden and Preacher Williams were then told never to come back to Crittenden County.
Week prior, to 50,000 enthusiastic Democrats in Little Rock, Ark., Preacher Williams' home, Franklin D. Roosevelt had felicitated himself on the opportunity "to enjoy the kindness and the courtesy of true Arkansas hospitality." The brand of Arkansas hospitality accorded Preacher Williams and Miss Blagden last week swung the spotlight of national attention on the 1936 Arkansas sharecroppers' strike which had been fumbling along unnoticed for four weeks.
Quick to pooh-pooh the furor over the Earle assault was Arkansas' tobacco-chewing Governor Junius Marion Futrell. Negro Weems's "funeral," he sputtered, was only strike propaganda. Negro Weems, he had been informed, was still alive. Though he failed to produce the missing Negro, Sheriff Howard Curlin of Crittenden County nodded corroboration. Some even suspected that Miss Blagden's beating might be a hoax. To prove her story she pulled up her skirts for Memphis photographers. To Arkansas. Attorney General Homer Stille Cummings sped Sam E. Whitaker to "investigate" the sharecroppers' plight, although Mr. Whitaker had just finished a similar investigation.
An old story is the long struggle of the Southern sharecropper for the right to buy food, gin & sell his part of the cotton crop wherever he wants, instead of where the landlord wants. Still older is the story of the sub-subsistence living level of some 2,000,000 Southern tenant farmers. But a newer and somewhat brighter tale is that of the incipient cropper colony movement, both public and private.
In Arkansas, the Resettlement Administration has planned three "model communities." Most advanced Federal settlement is the Dyess Colony, 18 mi. from Osceola, named in honor of the late State WPAdministrator William Randolph Dyess, killed in the crash of the The Southerner airliner five months ago (TIME, Jan. 27). At Dyess last fortnight 480 neat-looking cropper families gaped at Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt, who, beaming with pleasure, addressed a few words of encouragement, shook hands with one & all. Wrote Columnist Roosevelt in her diary, My Day: "They have a community house, a recreation hall, and a small hospital. All of these expenses are prorated back on the general expense of the land and house. They will begin to pay back in the course of the next few years, as the land comes into production. . . ."