Biography
John “Black Jack” Kehoe, a Girardville tavern-keeper and county delegate of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, was reputed to be the “King of the Mollies.” He was convicted of the June 14, 1862 murder of mine foreman Frank W. Langdon — a case reopened years later — and hanged at Pottsville on December 18, 1878. In 1979 Governor Milton Shapp granted him a posthumous pardon, calling the case a product of anti-Irish and anti-labor bias. The Molly Maguires were a secret society of Irish and Irish-American coal miners in the anthracite region of eastern Pennsylvania, blamed for a campaign of violence against mine bosses and officials during the labor conflicts of the 1860s–1870s. Twenty men were convicted and hanged between 1877 and 1879 in trials driven by Franklin B. Gowen — president of the Reading Railroad and a major coal operator — and built largely on the testimony of James McParland, a Pinkerton detective who had infiltrated the group. Historians have long regarded the trials, in which a private corporation’s police investigated, its lawyer prosecuted, and coal-company interests shaped the juries, as a grave miscarriage of justice used to crush both the society and the miners’ union.
