Biography
Joe Gilbert was a militant leader of the 1934 New York City taxi drivers' strike. On June 2, 1935 he was arrested in Newark, New Jersey as chairman of a banned performance of Clifford Odets's strike play 'Waiting for Lefty' at Ukrainian Hall; one of nine people seized in the police raid, he was held without bail over the weekend.
Joseph Gilbert appears in the National Civil Liberties Bureau's March 1919 compilation "War-Time Prosecutions and Mob Violence" among people convicted and jailed under World War I–era free-speech statutes — chiefly the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act, draft-obstruction charges, or wartime state and local laws. Per that record, on February 12, 1918 in Lakefield, Minnesota, he was sentenced: secretary Non Partisan League, 3 months on charge of unlawful assemblage. The NCLB — the direct predecessor of the American Civil Liberties Union — compiled these cases from April 1, 1917 to March 1, 1919 as a public record of the wartime suppression of free speech, a free press, and peaceful assembly.