Joseph Gelders

Joseph Sidney Gelders (born November 20, 1898 in Birmingham; died March 1, 1950 in San Francisco, California) was a physicist and civil rights activist. He co-founded the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax. He narrowly survived a brutal abduction and beating in Birmingham in 1936.

Joseph was the son of Louis Gelders, owner of Gelders' Restaurant and part-owner of Parisian, who had immigrated to the United States from Hilsbach in Germany's present state of Baden-Württemberg. His mother, the former Blanche Loeb, was a native of St Louis, Missouri. Joseph's older sister, Emma gained renown as a writer, and his younger brother, Louis Jr, worked as an architect in New York City.

After high school, Gelders enrolled at the University of Alabama, and then transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. On July 2, 1918 he enlisted in the U.S. Army for service in World War I. He was iniitally assigned to the 1st Company of the Coast Artillery Corps in Mobile where he was promoted to the rank of corporal, and then transferred on October 1 for specialized training at Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia. Following the armistice he was honorably discharged on November 25.

Afterward Gelders returned to Birmingham where he was active in the American Legion and labored at a series of jobs, including as a helper at the open-hearth furnaces at TCI's Ensley Works. He was later given an opportunity to operate an automobile dealership, but did not succeed. He returned to Alabama in 1929 and completed his bachelor's and master's degrees in physics in 1930 and remained on campus as head of the physics laboratory and as an assistant professor. He married the former Esther Josephine Frank on November 19, 1919 in Montgomery. They had two daughters, Margaret, who also became a prominent social activist, and Blanche, who became co-abbess of the San Francisco Zen Center.

During the Great Depression Gelders became involved in organizing against anti-labor actions. Motivated by the state's violent suppression of interracial unions organized by the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers he and Esther began hosting discussion groups with students. The group drafted a petition against a proposed anti-sedition bill that was being pushed by the American Legion. That May he attended the All-Southern Conference for Civil and Trade Union Rights at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. He joined the Communist Party USA's National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners that August. In the fall, he was forced to resign from the University and moved to New York to serve the NCDPP as secretary. He organized its Alabama-based committee to help defend nine Black teenagers who were convicted in Scottsboro, Jackson County of raping two white women on a freight train.

As NCDPP secretary, Gelders led investigations into civil liberties complaints involving the RCA Corporation in New Jersey, and worked to secure the release of Communist Party organizer Jack Barton. In August 1936 Gelders was tapped as the organization's southern representative.

Gelders was abducted in Birmingham after a September 23, 1936 meeting of the International Labor Defense. He was bound and taken to a wooded area near Maplesville where he was stripped, severely beaten and flogged by a group of men who crudely criticized his political and racial views. Governor Bibb Graves, who had previously vetoed the anti-sedition bill, authorized a $200 reward for the capture of Gelders' assailants, who were presumed to have been members of the Ku Klux Klan. The American Civil Liberties Union posted another $500 reward. Gelders identified three of four suspects who were taken into custody, recognizing them as TCI employees. A grand jury empaneled in Birmingham declined to indict them. The U.S. Senate's La Follette Civil Liberties Committee reviewed the case but took no action. In 1937 music documentarian Alan Lomax recorded Gelders and his wife singing "The Ballad of John Catchings" and "The Workers Have No Vote In Alabama" (to the tune of "The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga")

In 1938 Gelders visited President Franklin Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, to discuss the formation of a Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) as a forum for addressing topics related to social justice, electoral reforms, and race relations. He worked with Lucy Randolph Mason to establish the organization and secured the participation of Alabama CIO Director and UMWA District 20 president William Mitch. Mrs Roosevelt attended the inaugural 1938 Southern Conference for Human Welfare meeting at Municipal Auditorium, at which Gelders was elected executive secretary of the organizations Civil Rights committee. The focus of his subsequent work was abolition of poll taxes, a cause for which he worked alongside Virginia Durr. They co-founded the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax (NCAPT) in 1941.

Gelders reenlisted with the Army on March 30, 1942 and served as a technical sergeant with the Western Signal Corps, at Camp Kohler near Sacramento, California, a base which was used as an internment facility for Japanese Americans during World War II. He was honorably discharged on July 24, 1944.

After his discharge, Gelders lived in San Francisco. The internal injuries he suffered in 1936 contributed to his death in 1950. He was buried at the Golden Gate National Cemetery.

References

• "Joseph Gelders (March 14, 2024) Wikipedia - accessed March 21, 2024
• Reidy, Tom (March 17, 2024) "Birmingham, a story of communism you may not know." Comeback Town / AL.com

External links

• Joseph Sidney Gelders at Findagrave.com