Education
On this day in Labor History the year was 1934.
That as the day that the bank robber known as Pretty Boy Floyd was gunned down by federal agents in Ohio.
He was born Charles Arthur Floyd in 1904 in Georgia.
His family moved to Oklahoma when he was a boy.
Like many Oklahomans during this era, he fell on hard economic times.
Floyd turned to crime.
He did a four year stretch in a Missouri prison for a payroll robbery.
When he got out, he tried to get a job in the Oklahoma oil fields.
Unable to find work, Floyd took up bank robbing.
He robbed banks in Kentucky, Ohio and Missouri.
He got caught and convicted in Ohio, but escaped on his train trip to prison.
He made his way back to Oklahoma.
There he became a folk hero.
Locals called him the “Robin Hood of The Cookson Hills.”
Legend had it that Floyd destroyed mortgage papers when he robbed banks, winning him friends among farmers reeling from the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.
Floyd became a national fugitive when he was accused of killing federal agents in Kansas City.
He denied he was involved in the killings.
J. Edgar Hoover, head of the U.S. Bureau of Investigation, named Floyd Public Enemy Number One.
Finally, the law caught up with Floyd in an Ohio cornfield.
His body was returned to Oklahoma, where as many as 40 thousands came to his funeral.
Woody Guthrie remembered Floyd in song.
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