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Clinton Moss

Released
Gender:Male
Race:Black
Era:1930s
State:Alabama
Support
Communism Labor Organizing
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Biography

Clinton Moss was a Black sharecropper and Share Croppers' Union member wounded and arrested in the 19 December 1932 Reeltown, Alabama shootout, one of the survivors tried at Dadeville before Judge W. B. Bowling in 1933 and sentenced to 10 to 10½ years for "assault with intent to murder." (Ned Cobb was later the subject of Theodore Rosengarten's oral history "All God's Dangers.") On 19 December 1932 a sheriff's posse attacked members of the Communist-led Share Croppers' Union near Reeltown in Tallapoosa County, Alabama, when they resisted the seizure of a member's livestock for debt. Several croppers were shot; the survivors were charged with "assault with intent to murder" and held for the grand jury at the Dadeville jail under $750 bail. The case, following the 1931 Camp Hill affair, became a major ILD Southern defense.

Case

Charges: Assault with intent to murder (Reeltown Share Croppers' Union shootout)
Arrested: Dec 19, 1932
Sentence: 10 to 10½ years in the Alabama penitentiary. Verdict as recorded: Convicted at Dadeville, 1933
Convicted: Yes