[Marxism] Role of CPUSA in US Civil Rights Struggle

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hammer and Hoe
Alabama Communists during the Great Depression

http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/T-979.html

by Robin D. G. Kelley


Awards
Winner of the 1991 Elliott Rudwick Prize, Organization of American
Historians
Co-winner of the 1991 Francis Butler Simkins Award, Southern Historical
Association
Winner of a 1991 Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study
of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America


 <http://uncpress.unc.edu/images/bar_description.gif>

Between 1929 and 1941, the Communist Party organized and led a radical,
militantly antiracist movement in Alabama -- the center of Party activity in
the Depression South. Hammer and Hoe documents the efforts of the Alabama
Communist Party and its allies to secure racial, economic, and political
reforms. Sensitive to the complexities of gender, race, culture and class
without compromising the political narrative, Robin Kelley illustrates one
of the most unique and least understood radical movements in American
history.

The Alabama Communist Party was built from scratch by working people who had
no Euro-American radical political tradition. It was composed largely of
poor blacks, most of whom were semiliterate and devoutly religious, but it
also attracted a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers,
iconoclastic youth, and renegade liberals. Kelley shows that the cultural
identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens,
and city streets shaped the development of the Party. The result was a
remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little
tolerance for radicals.

In the South race pervaded virtually every aspect of Communist activity. And
because the Party's call for voting rights, racial equality, equal wages for
women, and land for landless farmers represented a fundamental challenge to
the society and economy of the South, it is not surprising that Party
organizers faced a constant wave of violence.

Kelley's analysis ranges broadly, examining such topics as the Party's
challenge to black middle-class leadership; the social, ideological, and
cultural roots of black working-class radicalism; Communist efforts to build
alliances with Southern liberals; and the emergence of a left-wing,
interracial youth movement. He closes with a discussion of the Alabama
Communist Party's demise and its legacy for future civil rights activism.

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About the author
Robin D. G. Kelley is professor of history and Africana studies at New York
University.

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