Joseph Gelders

Joseph Sidney Gelders was a physicist, labor organizer, and civil-rights activist associated with the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. Birmingham police arrested him for vagrancy in August 1940 while he distributed leaflets challenging Ordinance 4902, which permitted warrantless detention of people deemed suspicious. The arrest and custody are documented, but the surviving account does not provide exact admission or release dates.

Anna Damon’s March 1937 essay reports that Joseph Gelders, Southern secretary of the National Committee for Defense of Political Prisoners, was kidnapped and flogged by steel-company thugs in September 1936 because of his work defending Jack Barton. It describes a campaign for prosecution of the kidnappers and testimony before the LaFollette Civil Rights Committee. This is political abduction by private assailants, distinct from his 1940 police arrest; exact abduction, release dates and detention duration are not established. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/communist/v16n03-mar-1937-The-Communist.pdf#page=94

Louis Colman’s February 1937 report on the January Senate civil-liberties hearings describes Gelders testifying that four men abducted him in Birmingham in September, drove him eighty-five miles into the countryside, and flogged him unconscious. He identified Alabama National Guard Captain Walter J. Hanna and Lieutenant Dent Williams among the assailants and reported that two Birmingham grand juries refused indictments. The article attributes corroborating testimony to state police Sergeant James McClung. This supplies the contemporary account of political kidnapping and violence, separate from Gelders’s later 1940 police detention, without inventing a judicial custody term. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1937/v13-%5B11%5Dn01-feb-1937-orig-LD.pdf#page=16

The account dates his kidnapping to September 23, 1936 and says he was whipped and abandoned near Maplesville after defending Jack Barton. It supplies the day of the existing September abduction, without fixing the exact end of restraint or attributing a judicial conviction to the victim. Labor Defender, December 1936, original PDF page 14. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1936/v12-%5B10%5Dn11-dec-1936-orig-LD.pdf#page=14

The January report says a second Jefferson County grand jury again returned no indictment in his September 23, 1936 abduction and flogging, following a first no-bill on November 13. Gelders said he had identified three attackers and sought a special prosecutor. This is an attributed account of the investigation, not a new detention of Gelders. Daily Worker, January 11, 1937, original PDF page 5. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1937/v14-n009-jan-11-1937-DW-Q.pdf#page=5

Pat Barr’s March 1937 Southern Worker report dates the Birmingham abduction to September 23 and says Gelders was carried fifty miles away, stripped, flogged and left in a ditch. This distance differs from Louis Colman’s eighty-five-mile account already recorded. It relays investigator James W. McClung’s testimony about National Guard officers on the T.C.I. payroll and two grand juries refusing indictments. These are attributed contemporary allegations, not adjudicated findings. PDF6. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/southernworker/v5n12-mar-00-1937-sw.pdf