Bill Gibbons

Bill Gibbons is the Executive Director at The Public Safety Institute at the University of Memphis. Gibbons was previously Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security until 2016. He was appointed to the post by the Governor of Tennessee, Bill Haslam. He is a former District Attorney General of the 30th Judicial District of Tennessee, which includes Shelby County and the city of Memphis, Tennessee. He was a Republican candidate in the 2010 Tennessee gubernatorial election, but dropped out on March 26, 2010 due to "lack of sufficient campaign funds to go forward."

Gibbons was born and raised on a small farm in southern Arkansas, the youngest of six children. When Gibbons was 4, his father, an alcoholic, abandoned him and his family leaving it impoverished. As a result, he grew up without a telephone or TV despite them being common American household conveniences during his childhood in the 1950s and 1960s. Also, his mother had to sell their chairs, tables, silverware, dishes, and other staple household necessities to pay for food and electricity. Eventually, his mother lost the small farm to foreclosure. As a child, Gibbons was a habitual truant that skipped school; but it was his fourth grade school teacher that convinced him that education was the path out of poverty.

Even as his mother sold the bookcases containing the books, his mother refused to sell the books in their home, because she believed that literacy and education were the key to escaping poverty. One of the set of books she refused to sell was a six volume biography of Abraham Lincoln by Carl Sandburg. Gibbons is convinced that this was one of the major reasons he became a Republican. [1]

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