I imagine that there were a good number of real life individuals who fit the mold of Lazarus by collecting the backpay they were due with a pistol or rifle. I do recall a Po' Lazarus-like figure from my reading years ago who I believe was called Blacksnake, and I imagine the story surrounding him was part factual and part mythical. If my memory is correct, the story was collected by John Work who collaborated with Lomax.
I will do another post today or tomorrow with more details.
It took me a while to find it, but it turns out the story about Black Snake was in the book Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942 which collected the writings of researchers John Wesley Work, Lewis Wade Jones, and Samuel C. Adams, all of whom worked with Alan Lomax.
The Black Snake story comes from Jones who writes of two legends in which workers refuse to be cheated out of their wages. According to one, after a contractor said that the next pay day would take place "when it snowed in Mississippi," the contractor found himself in the commissary with a gun pointing at him held by a worker named Black Snake who "informed" him the "snow done fell; we gonna have a pay day." In another story, when a newly hired worker was not paid for his first two weeks of labor, he went looking for the contractor, found him in the commissary, and forced him to pay him his earnings. The story ends by highlighting the fearlessness of the worker as he, in effect, issues a challenge to the contractor by telling him he can find him in Friars Point (a town in Coahoma County, Mississippi) if he chooses to go after him.