Biography
William Gibbs was a Harlan County coal-strike prisoner in 1931. On September 15 he signed a statement with five other miners retaining International Labor Defense attorneys Albert Goldman and Leo Gallagher against criminal-syndicalism charges. A September 16 report explicitly identified the six as the labor defendants still confined in Harlan jail after other defendants had been released or transferred. Exact admission and release dates are not established in these newspaper issues. A September 18 report identifies him as Bill Gibbs, a wounded First World War veteran and miner at Sunshine, and states that he had been jailed for about six weeks after deputies found National Miners’ Union literature in his home.
William Gibbs was a Harlan County coal-strike prisoner in 1931. On September 15 he signed a statement with five other miners retaining International Labor Defense attorneys Albert Goldman and Leo Gallagher against criminal-syndicalism charges. A September 16 report explicitly identified the six as the labor defendants still confined in Harlan jail after other defendants had been released or transferred. Exact admission and release dates are not established in these newspaper issues. A September 18 report identifies him as Bill Gibbs, a wounded First World War veteran and miner at Sunshine, and states that he had been jailed for about six weeks after deputies found National Miners’ Union literature in his home.
Original contemporary source 1 ; Original contemporary source 2.
Titler identifies Bill Gibbs as an Evarts defendant and says he was held sixty-seven days because he could not furnish $30,000 bond, then released without trial by Judge D. C. Jones. This recollection is not automatically equated with the separately documented 1931 criminal-syndicalism confinement. Titler also reports a distinct 1941 conviction for killing a Berger Coal Company foreman, an imposed one-to-ten-year term, several years served and subsequent parole. He attributes responsibility to Bernard Long in a later deathbed confession; this is a memoir claim, not proof of a judicial exoneration. Titler says Gibbs died in 1963 at Grays, Kentucky; exact admission and release dates for the later case are not supplied.
