Biography
David Butler was a 17-year-old Black Communist in Fort Lauderdale, Broward County, Florida, arrested on a trumped-up 'vagrancy' charge in a 1938 raid in which about fifteen Klan-affiliated police broke up a Communist Party meeting. Jailed and beaten with fists and blackjacks by Sheriff Walter Clark and a deputy to coerce testimony against his comrades, he was forced to repudiate his ILD lawyer and plead guilty, then fled town leaving a signed note exposing the coercion.