Thomas Graves
Biography
Thomas Graves was born about 1895 in Haverigg, England. Worked as a miner. Immigrated to the United States in 1913.
Worked as a miner in Arizona. In July 1917 he was among the striking miners forcibly expelled from Bisbee, Arizona, and abandoned in the New Mexico desert during the “Bisbee Deportation.” In January 1918 he joined the IWW’s Metal Mine Workers Branch 65, Local No. 800, and soon became an organizer. Arrested in May 1918 on a charge of vagrancy, and again later that year in Globe, Arizona, for allegedly violating the Espionage Act, and again in Globe in April 1919. In a confiscated letter, Graves wrote to a friend, “I have been trying to figure our this democracy for a long time but the only answer that I can come to is if you don’t do as I tell you, you must go to the can, therefore I don’t want any more of it, and the sooner they send me back to the lands of the Kings the better.” Deported to England on June 21, 1919.
After deportation, resumed work as a miner in England and married. In 1930 he was recruited work in a copper mine in colonial Rhodesia (present-day Zambia), where he acquired a reputation as a union militant and became a founding member and shop steward of a whites-only Northern Rhodesia Mine Workers’ Union. He returned to England in 1939 after being dismissed from his job, and died in 1966.
Adapted from Kenyon Zimmer, Red Scare Deportees (kenyonzimmer.com), compiled from INS deportation case files.
