Biography
Martha Roberts was a woman strike leader arrested during the 1933 Gallup, New Mexico coal miners’ strike. Page 7 reports that two thousand schoolchildren struck and picketed the jail demanding her release. It states that no striker or strike leader remained jailed when the miners returned to work. The source gives no individual arrest or release day, charge, sentence or actual duration. No identity link to another Martha is established. Source: Louis Colman, Night Riders in Gallup, International Labor Defense, third printing June 1935, https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/pamphlets/night-riders.pdf
The December 2, 1933 Daily Worker captions a photograph of a Gallup miners’ meeting identifying Roberts as the strike leader addressing it. The caption describes meetings under martial law and a sabre attack by troops during one of them, followed by the miners’ victory. This documents her organizing role and preserves a contemporary source image; it does not give a new personal arrest or exact discharge day, nor identify which meeting was attacked. The distant rear-view crowd image is retained in the evidence rather than assigned as a reliably identifiable face portrait. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1933/v10-n289-dec-02-1933-DW-LOC.pdf#page=4
Page 4’s Charles Guynn account of the 1933 Gallup strike says Martha and Bob Roberts led a women-and-children picket demonstration at the National Guard camp while the jailed miners’ release was demanded. This provides organizing and defense context; it does not establish another personal arrest or permit inferring a family relationship from the shared surname. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n113-NAT-may-11-1935-DW-Q.pdf
