Two leaders of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union fight run for office in Arkansas on the Socialist Party ticket, a brave thing to do today, in 1936. They received 733 votes that November. One was radical preacher Claude Clossey Williams.

‘Fighting for Socialism In The Terror-Stricken Cotton Counties Of Arkansas’ from Socialist Call. Vol. 2 No. 82. October 10, 1936.

Socialists Bear High The Torch Of Struggle

ARKANSAS! Throughout the length and breadth of America the name of this state has become one in the minds of millions with the plight of the most oppressed of all people…the nine million men, women and children known as sharecroppers. The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, just a little over two years old, has not only brought the attention of the nation to the poverty, the misery and hunger of its members, but it has been their weapon to fight against the terror of the planters and their agents, the Democratic Party of Arkansas. Fighting, shoulder to shoulder, with this heroic union has been the Socialist Party of Arkansas.

Several weeks ago the people of these United States were stunned to see headlined over the pages of the capitalist press an account of the brutal flogging of a young man and woman in Eastern Arkansas by a band of planters and deputies. They had come to find out about Frank Weems, who had been reported killed by planters’ agents in the recent strike led by the Southern Tenant Farmers Union.

The man was Claude C. Williams, now Socialist candidate for the United States Senate. Williams opposes Senator Joseph T. Robinson, skeptically known in Arkansas by workers and sharecroppers as “Greasy Joe,” a title he has well earned as a corporation lawyer and as political boss of Arkansas for over two decades. Senator Robinson, who is Roosevelt’s whip in the United States Senate and was chairman of the Democratic National Convention, has blithely ignored the embarrassing questions that Norman Thomas has asked him about conditions of the sharecroppers and the denial of civil rights in Arkansas.

Has Indian Blood

Claude C. Williams was born in the hills of Eastern Tennessee. In his veins flows a mixture of the blood of the American Indian and early pioneer stock. He fought in the World War to “make the world safe for democracy,” not only to find that the slogan was a lie but that we did not have it here. He was graduated from Vanderbilt University at Nashville and later became an ordained Presbyterian minister.

While holding a pastorate in Paris, Arkansas, in the western part of the “Wonder State,” he aligned himself with the U.M.W.A. Day and night, he worked with the coal miners in building their organization. In 1934 he was jailed in Fort Smith, Arkansas, for leading an unemployed demonstration. Withstanding loss of church for his labor activity, Williams moved to Little Rock and opened the New Era School, conducted under the auspices of the National Religion and Labor Foundation. The persecution of Williams, his brave wife and three little girls continued when they were evicted time and time again by landlords, who were obviously warned by the authorities to remove them. At the last convention of the American Federation of Teachers in Philadelphia, he was re-elected vice-president and southern organizer of the union. Despite his many duties he has time to work for the Workers’ Alliance and the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and conduct the workers’ school.

Quite naturally the selection of Claude Williams to run against Senator Robinson symbolizes the battle of the Socialist Party in this campaign in the South he who was flogged brutally by planters’ thugs while on an errand of mercy, and he who continues to choose to overlook the denials of civil rights to the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and mention nothing about the conditions of the sharecroppers.

J. Russell Butler

As his running mate in the coming Arkansas election Williams has that native son of the working-class pioneers who developed Arkansas–J. Russell Butler, president of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Russell Butler, born in the Ozarks, has been successively farm boy, soldier, country school teacher and the operator of a small saw mill. He is the very breath of all that is fine in the people of Arkansas–wit, courage and determination. With this he works on week after week, braving the planters’ mobs in building up the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, the only hope for the sharecroppers. Butler runs against one Carl Bailey, formerly Lieutenant-Governor under Gov. J. Marion Futrell, called by the Union members “Old Futile.”

Neither Futrell nor Bailey have done anything to stop the terror of the planters that has marked every step of the upward way of the Union. They “passed the buck” always to the Federal Administration or to the local authorities, two alternatives to oblivion so far as action was concerned. Bailey waged a demagogic campaign giving out enough promises to cover all the followers of those master fakers, both dead and alive, Huey Long and Father Coughlin. But not once did he or any of the other Democrats who support that smiling “liberal” Roosevelt ever say one word during the campaign for the Democratic nomination about what they proposed for the sharecroppers, either in relief or protection of their right to organize and assemble.

Up and down the most fertile cotton counties in the world and into the wooded hill counties of Arkansas, “The Wonder State,” our candidates for Senator, Claude C. Williams of Little Rock and J. Russell Butler of Pangborn, will take the message of struggle to sharecroppers and miners, the struggle for Socialism, the only solution to their problems–the struggle for which they must carry on every day until it is achieved.

Socialist Call began as a weekly newspaper in New York in early 1935 by supporters of the Socialist Party’s Militant Faction Samuel DeWitt, Herbert Zam, Max Delson, Amicus Most, and Haim Kantorovitch, with others to rival the Old Guard’s ‘New Leader’. The Call Education Institute was also inaugurated as a rival to the right’s Rand School. In 1937, the Call as the Militant voice would fall victim to Party turmoil, becoming a paper of the Socialist Party leading bodies as it moved to Chicago in 1938, to Milwaukee in 1939, where it was renamed “The Call” and back to New York in 1940 where it eventually resumed the “Socialist Call” name and was published until 1954.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/socialist-call/call%202-82.pdf