Near Clarksdale. Miss., a colored sharecropper named James Wiggins and his commonlaw wife. Ethel Davis, owed $175 to their white boss, Joseph Shelley Decker, who was afraid they might decamp without paying. What this situation led to was described last week by Clarksdale’s Sheriff H. H. Dogan after he had been summoned to the 200-acre Decker farm by Sharecropper Wiggins. Said Sheriff Dogan:
“I went to the Decker place and in a sharecropper cabin I found the woman chained to a bed with a trace chain locked around her neck. She had been there several days. She had been fed well and other than being chained apparently had not been harmed. I ordered the woman unchained and took her and Wiggin off the farm.”
Pending arraignment on a charge of peonage. Farmer Decker was last week released on a $1,500 bond. Sharecroppers Davis and Wiggin stayed in a Clarksdale jail voluntarily as material witnesses.
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