Biography
The Rev. Claude C. Williams was a radical Presbyterian minister and Southern Tenant Farmers' Union organizer, earlier driven from his church at Paris, Arkansas for his union work. He was arrested during the 1935 Fort Smith (Sebastian County) FERA relief-workers' strike and charged with 'barratry,' one of the best-known Southern labor-radical preachers of the Depression.
Note: The Walter P. Reuther Library finding aid gives a death date of June 28, 1979; other references give June 29. No reliable exact birth month/day is established.
