Biography
Sophie Melvin, a nineteen-year-old youth organizer and one of the three women charged with murder, was one of the sixteen Gastonia defendants held in the Gaston County jail on the first-degree murder charge — facing the electric chair — after the 7 June 1929 killing of Police Chief Aderholt. The murder charge against the defendants outside the convicted seven was dropped before the October retrial. On 7 June 1929, police attacked the National Textile Workers Union tent colony at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina, and Police Chief O. F. Aderholt was killed in the exchange of fire. Sixteen strikers and organizers were charged with his murder — a frame-up, the defense held, aimed at breaking the communist-led Southern textile drive. The International Labor Defense mounted a national campaign for the Gastonia defendants.
From a second record of the same person, merged here so nothing is lost:
Sophie Gerson, wife of New York Communist Party figure Simon Gerson, faced denaturalization and deportation under the Walter-McCarran Act for alleged concealed Communist affiliation. Her case was part of the McCarthy-era use of immigration law against suspected Communists.
