1. Joseph Sidney Gelders was an American physicist who later became an antiracist, civil rights activist, labor organizer, and communist.
16 Facts About Joseph Gelders
1. 2.
In September 1936, Gelders was kidnapped, beaten, and nearly killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan for his civil rights and labor organizing activities.
3.
Joseph Gelders collaborated closely with other activists including Lucy Randolph Mason and Virginia Foster Durr.
4.
Joseph Gelders was the son of Blanche Loeb, of Mississippi, and Louis Gelders, a restaurateur and real estate businessperson.
5.
Joseph Gelders attended the University of Alabama for a year and a half before attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a year.
6.
Joseph Gelders went back to Birmingham and joined the American Legion.
7.
In May 1935, Joseph Gelders attended a southern conference on civil liberties hosted by left-wing groups in Monteagle, Tennessee.
8.
Joseph Gelders was moved by the stories of communists, including Blaine Owen, about beatings and illegal raids.
9.
In fall 1935, Joseph Gelders resigned from the University of Alabama to pursue civil liberties advocacy fulltime.
10.
Joseph Gelders moved to New York City to serve as secretary of the NCDPP.
11.
Joseph Gelders established an Alabama committee to work on the Scottsboro Boys case.
12.
Joseph Gelders investigated civil liberties denial at the RCA Corporation in New Jersey.
13.
Joseph Gelders obtained the support of William Mitch, the President of District 20 of the United Mine Workers, and the Alabama Director of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
14.
Joseph Gelders was a model of southern femininity and a member of a prominent family.
15.
Durr, Joseph Gelders, and their circle of southerners who supported New Deal liberalism believed that abolition of the poll tax was a necessary step in reshaping the Democratic Party in the South and defeating the conservative oligarchy of large planters and industrialists that kept most southern citizens disenfranchised and impoverished.
16.
Joseph Gelders worked as an official for the National Youth Administration.