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Unrelated, on the same front page *TW, antiquated racial terminology/slurs*
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LITTLE ROCK, Sept. 24.-A Federal grand jury investigating reports of peonage in the East Arkansas Cotton Belt indicted a city official today on charges of violating the Federal anti-slavery laws by obtaining laborers for his farm through false arrests.
The indictment named City Marshal Paul D. Peacher of Earle, Ark., a cotton planter and former deputy Sheriff of Crittenden County, on eight counts alleging violation of a law enacted just after the Civil War.
Fred Isgrig, Federal Attorney, said the charge specifically was "aiding and abetting in holding in slavery."
After the grand jury was discharged, Mr. Isgrig joined Gordon Dean, special assistant to the United States Attorney General, and Richard P. Shanahan, attorney for the Criminal Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who were in charge of the inquiry, in announcing that steps had been taken 'to protect all witnesses before the grand jury from intimidation.
Only a few hours before the Federal grand jurors completed their work the Crittenden County grand jury returned a report denying that any peonage conditions existed in that section.
Peacher's bond was fixed at $5,000, but he was not immediately taken into custody.
Explaining the indictment, Mr. Shanahan said:
"The eight counts charged Peacher with falsely charging eight Negroes with agrancy and bringing them before Mayor Mitchell in Justice Court at Earle, where they were illegally convicted and senenced to work on Peacher's farm for his own use and benefit." Mr. Isgrig withheld the names of the eight Negroes involved, asserting, "I don't want them intimidated."
"The truth of the matter is the investigation involved twenty to twenty-five Negroes railroaded on trumped-up charges," he added. Mr. Isgrig said that he had notified all witnesses appearing before the grand jury to report to him "any threat of intimidation as a result of their testimony," and that he also had discussed this with Mayor T. S. Mitchell of Earle and A.B.Carter, Crittenden County deputy clerk of court, who were summoned before the jury,
''I notified Mitchell and Carter to go back home and tell the citizenship of the community they had better see that these witnesses are protected," said Mr. Isgrig. "These people must not be molested, even by suggestion. There will be prompt prosecution by the government of any threat against them."
Mr. Dean said he had written to Sheriff Howard Curlin of Crittenden County, "requesting that he see that none of these Negroes who appeared before the grand jury is intimidated.''
Mr. Isgrig said he planned to try the Peacher indictment at the regular term of District Court in Jonesboro in November
Nine Negro field hands were among those called before the Federal investigators.
Witnesses on leaving the grand jury room said they had been cautioned not to discuss their testimony.
The Department of Justice investigation followed upon charges by individuals and by the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, with headquarters at Memphis, that peonage was practiced in the sharecropper belt.
Miss Willie Sue Blagdon, 29-year-old Memphis social worker, who charged she and the Rev. CIaude C. Williams, Little Rock minister, were flogged at Earle last June during a cotton-choppers' strike called by the tenant union, ex- pressed "surprise" today at the Crittenden grand jury report, saying she "would have been glad to go over there and testify."
The county grand jurors, in their report, decried allegations "that conditions in Crittenden County are not safe, that crimes have been committed against defenseless visitors."
"It has been charged that humble citizens have been forced to labor by threats, intimidation, guns and illegal process," said the report, "Consequently we have felt it our duty to make an investigation into such alleged law violations and we beg to report that we have not found any evidence of violations of the law in any instance,
"We have further found that laborers are being well paid, farm conditions are good, and that since 1933 farm labor has received more money after the disposal of the annual crops than in many years, and propaganda to the contrary is misleading to the nation."
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There's nothing here!