Ned Cobb

Ned Cobb (also known as Nate Shaw) (1885–1973) was an African-American tenant farmer born in Tallapoosa County in Alabama.

[2] Ned left his father's house to begin sharecropping on his own at the age of 19; he married and began a family about the same time.

Realizing that the men needed help, he joined the Alabama Sharecroppers' Union in 1931 to fight for justice for black people and against exploitation.

Many were increasingly victimized by white landowners who sought to recoup their own monetary losses by seizing the property of their tenant farmers.

Ned, by now a middle aged man and successful by the standards of the time (he was particularly proud of the fact he supplied his grown sons with mules and other means of making a living) saw many of his fellow sharecroppers dispossessed due to debt to landowners and then even saw others such as himself, who were not in debt, lose property on highly specious allegations.

[3] Cobb's autobiography was pseudonymously published in the book All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, an oral history told to historian Theodore Rosengarten.

A Los Angeles Times reviewer praised Little's performance as "virtuosic, laced with sly wit and vocal legerdemain, with the actor slipping into the persona of several rural characters.