Monday, May 7, 2007

Fried Chicken Too Much for Negro Hunger Strike

1913

Elizabeth, N. J., July 18. — The manner in which Warden Charles W. Dodd of the county jail broke up a hunger strike today may set a useful example, he thinks, to keepers of English prisons who become custodians of suffragettes.

William Turner, a negro prisoner incarcerated last Sunday, sought to gain his liberty by refusing to eat. This morning the negro had been forty-eight hours without food, when Warden Dodd appeared at the cell with a steaming plate of fried chicken and a large section of a juicy watermelon. One sniff and Turner's hunger strike came to an abrupt end.

—The Evening News, Ada, Oklahoma, July 18, 1913, p. 1.

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