Biography
Clinton Jencks was the Mine-Mill international representative who led the Empire Zinc strike of Mexican-American miners in Grant County, New Mexico — the strike depicted in Salt of the Earth. Convicted of contempt during the strike, he was later prosecuted for allegedly false Taft-Hartley non-Communist affidavits in the case that became the landmark Jencks v. United States (1957).
Christine Marin’s Mining History Journal article reports Jencks’s arrest on the Empire Zinc picket line on June 12, 1951 and a separate April 1953 arrest over his non-Communist affidavit. Its sixteen-month solitary-confinement claim lacks a complete custody chronology. The affidavit case is distinct from the strike-contempt case: the Fifth Circuit recorded concurrent five-year sentences, and the Supreme Court reversed the conviction on June 3, 1957 because defense access to government-witness reports had been denied. That decision was not a finding of factual innocence or a documented prison-release date.
Christine Marin, Mining History Journal 7 (2000), pages 64–70; 226 F.2d 540; 353 U.S. 657.
The July 18, 1951 National Guardian reports that Sheriff L. K. Goforth arrested Clint Jencks on June 11 after Jencks refused to halt the Empire Zinc picket line. This account does not establish his physical release date or confinement duration. Contemporary report, page 5.
In a letter published August 2, 1954, Virginia D. Jencks reports her husband then confined in Silver City, New Mexico, under a ninety-day injunction-contempt sentence which the New Mexico Supreme Court had ordered the strike negotiating committee to serve the previous month. She identifies Fred Barreras, Vicente Becerra, Cipriano Montoya, Pablo Montoya and Ernest Velasquez as his five fellow prisoners, and says Clint was held separately in solitary confinement by the district judge’s order. This is a contemporary observation of actual 1954 strike-related confinement, distinct from the separate five-year Taft-Hartley affidavit sentences then on appeal. The letter does not establish an exact admission, physical discharge or completion of ninety days. Virginia D. Jencks letter, printed page 2.
