On this day in 1974, the life story of Ned Cobb, a radical black worker in the American South who served more than 13 years in prison to keep his farm, was published under the title "All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw".

In 1969, author Theodore Rosengarten came to Alabama to search for and interview surviving members of the Sharecroppers Union, a radical union that helped both poor black and poor white farmers fight back against an exploitative system of agri-business. When Rosengarten sat down to interview Ned Cobb, then 84 years old, for this purpose, his memories became the book "All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw".

Cobb was the fourth of more than twenty children of a father who had been enslaved. Ned left his father's house to begin sharecropping on his own at the age of 19. Realizing that the men needed help, he joined the Alabama Sharecroppers' Union in 1931.

In 1931, when the Communist Party arrived in Alabama, Cobb was impressed with them because he was saw the Party defending the Scottsboro Boys, nine young black men accused of raping two white women.

In December 1932, a sheriff tried to take the home and livestock of one of Cobb's friends. Cobb defended his friend and in turn was involved in a shootout in which he was wounded and arrested. Cobb was sentenced to thirteen years in jail.

Cobb was offered parole if he would agree to give up his farm and relocate to Birmingham. Instead, he served his full sentence and, after release in 1945, returned to his farm.

Cobb was one of the most successful black men in the highly Jim Crow-ed county and lived to the age of 89. He was also one of few former sharecroppers to be able to pass on property and a means of making a living to his progeny.