Biography
Ned Cobb 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 12 to 15 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.