Biography
Walter Brown was a Black worker framed on a "rape" charge in the 1935 Birmingham, Alabama terror against the Share Croppers Union and given twenty years.
The Share Croppers Union was a Communist-led union of Black tenant farmers and agricultural labourers in the Alabama black belt, and the 1935 Birmingham repression was a campaign directed at it. Brown was framed as part of that campaign. His own membership of the union is not documented in the sources this record rests on, and the frame-up is political regardless: he was prosecuted because of a movement the state was trying to destroy, which is what distinguishes his case from a frame-up with no organisation behind it.
This record was removed in batch 146 and restored in batch 147. It was removed on the reading that no political activity of his own was recorded; that reading took the absence of a membership card for the absence of politics and ignored the sentence it sat in. The context is now stated here so the record is not misread the same way again.
