Biography
Rob Hall was the delegation spokesman, described as a Southerner in his middle twenties, who demanded legal counsel and refused questioning without arrest. Charles Croix’s first-person account in the May 1932 New Masses describes armed Kentucky deputies and a mob intercepting this student delegation near Cumberland Gap, taking its bus to the Middlesboro courthouse and compelling the students to undergo questioning. When they refused further answers, armed men forced them back onto the bus and escorted them across the Tennessee line. This was actual coercive detention and expulsion for investigating repression in the coalfields; Smith evaded the question of formal arrest. No individual warrant, judicial charge, imposed prison sentence, exact day or measured detention total is established. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1932/v07n11-may-1932-New-Masses.pdf#page=13; https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1932/v07n11-may-1932-New-Masses.pdf#page=16 The account ends by reporting that the students had returned to their colleges; no precise physical release day is supplied. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1932/v07n11-may-1932-New-Masses.pdf#page=19
Kelley identifies Rob Hall as Robert Fowler Hall (born 1906).
