Biography
Joseph Shoemaker was a leader of the Modern Democrats and the unemployed movement in Tampa, Florida, arrested in the November 1935 police raid, handed to a Klan mob, flogged and tarred; he died of his injuries after a leg amputation. In November 1935, Tampa, Florida police raided a meeting of the Modern Democrats and the Workers' Alliance and, after holding the men in the police station, delivered them to a Ku Klux Klan mob that flogged and tarred them. The ILD and a joint civil-rights committee pressed the prosecution of the police-Klansmen responsible.