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HOW ALABAMA COMMUNISTS ORGANIZED IN THE JIM CROW SOUTH  
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Robin D.G. Kelly, Daniel Denvir
April 11, 2024
Jacobin [[link removed]]


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_ In 1930s Alabama, Communist Party members fought brutal repression
to organize black and white workers in the Jim Crow South. Their
efforts remain a source of inspiration for those fighting racism and
exploitation today. _

Evicted Arkansas sharecropper who was active in the Southern Tenant
Farmers' Union, now building his new home in Hill House, Mississippi.
, (Heritage Art / Heritage Images / Getty Images)

 

Interview by Daniel Denvir

As the United Auto Workers (UAW) set their sights again on organizing
factory workers in the Deep South, they do so keenly aware of the
difficulties campaigning in a center of union-busting reaction
[[link removed]]. In
2019, bosses at a Chattanooga Volkswagen plant led a vicious
anti-union campaign, abetted by Donald Trump’s National Labor
Relations Board, that defeated an earlier UAW campaign there. When
Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, waged an audacious
effort to unionize in 2021, against one of the largest corporations on
Earth, they likewise faltered in the face of widespread interference
and intimidation
[[link removed]].

At the same time, those warehouse workers inspired many by framing
their struggle as a fight for black freedom and for the working class
as a whole. The UAW’s latest campaign in the South is backed by a
greater momentum after their victory against the Big Three automakers,
and a renewed commitment to “justice across the globe,” as the
union said when calling for a permanent cease-fire
[[link removed]] in Gaza.

These efforts tap into a long history of radical struggle in the
South, including the Alabama Communist Party (CP)’s fights
throughout the 1930s to organize sharecroppers, mine and mill workers,
and unemployed people in a fight against a brutal regime of capitalist
rule and racist repression.

In an interview
[[link removed]] with
Daniel Denvir for Jacobin Radio
[[link removed]]‘s the _Dig_ podcast, Robin
D. G. Kelley, professor of history at the University of California Los
Angeles, spoke about this vital history, documented in his 1990
book, _Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great
Depression_. The Alabama Communists and their allied organizations won
major victories, but they also lost many fights and lost many lives to
police and vigilantes. _Hammer and Hoe_ reminds us that, then and
today, the class struggle and fight for black freedom has never been
easy. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The Pittsburgh of the South

DANIEL DENVIR

What sort of place was Birmingham, an area where deposits of iron ore,
coal, steel earned it the nickname the Pittsburgh of the South? How
did these industries make the Birmingham area distinct from the rest
of Alabama? And how did these industries, being located in Alabama, in
the heart of the Deep South — how did that make Birmingham a very
different sort of industrial metropolis than Pittsburgh?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Well, first of all, Birmingham is a new South city, which means that
there wasn’t really any Birmingham to speak of as a major metropolis
until after the Civil War. And it was precisely the discovery of
deposits of iron ore and coal, everything you need to connect all the
supply chains to make steel. And the capacity to produce mass amounts
of steel through the Bessemer system was a new phenomenon. Along with
railroads to move the steel and all the raw materials, they need the
most important element: labor. The post–Civil War period is marked
by a real struggle over labor.

We think Reconstruction ended with the compromise of 1877 and the back
dealings of the federal government, but the struggle continued around
labor, biracial, multiracial labor organizing, and Alabama is one of
the centers. The Knights of Labor, the Greenback Labor Party, and
others are fighting for mine workers as the mining industry is taking
off, for farmers, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers. The textile
industry hasn’t really taken off yet, but there are workers who are
organizing and also fighting for political power.

So think of the region as a site where capital is trying to discipline
the labor force — to create a cheap, available labor force to
basically take this coal out of the ground, take the iron ore out of
the ground, and work in iron factories, steel factories, pipe fitting,
all the different factories manufacturing metal products.

A huge conglomerate emerges, the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad
Company (TCI), which has subsidiaries. There are other steel
companies. Republic Steel and others are there. But they have to
figure out how to tamp down workers’ resistance and discipline this
labor force.

This required several things. One, convict labor, which in Alabama was
a big thing for the coal industry at first. They’re a captive labor
force, almost entirely black labor. The other thing is to create —
this is a bad word for it — corporate welfare. That is, Tennessee
Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, which was an outgrowth of US Steel,
had to figure out how to own the workers similar to how landlords own
sharecroppers. They build shotgun houses, create commissaries, provide
scrip instead of cash for workers to buy the supplies they need as
well as food, and create an armed guard to police these compounds.

Bessemer was one of several industrial suburbs surrounding Birmingham,
basically company towns at the edge of the city. And then finally,
race is used to discipline the labor force. Formerly enslaved people
doing the hardest, most difficult work in the mines, working alongside
whites, some of whom have been dispossessed from the land in the
region or migrated from Europe.

We always think of European immigration coming to New York and
Philadelphia, places like that. But a significant number ended up in
Birmingham precisely because of the presence of industrial jobs. You
had people from Southern Europe: Bulgarians, Greeks, Czechs. You had
people from Western Europe all showing up, and a lot of Italians, both
Northern Italian and Southern Italians from Sicily, Naples, places
like that. They end up in Birmingham. Some of the Italians and Greeks
opened alternative stores to the company stores and made their money
that way.

That’s what we’re seeing. A racially structured labor force, forms
of racial violence, privatized police, and the control of housing,
food, wages in this segregationist setting.

Exactly. In the heart of the Deep South, an industrial center with a
multiracial, multiethnic, multinational working class, but under the
heel of white supremacy. Because white supremacy in its most modern
form — what my friend and colleague Sarah Haley calls Jim Crow
modernity — that’s what we’re seeing. A racially structured
labor force disciplined by racial violence, privatized police, control
of the labor force through control of housing, food, wages, but also
very much tiered in this segregationist setting. It was dubbed the
Pittsburgh of the South because it produced so much steel and iron and
became a hub of transportation because the railroads were moving raw
materials and people.

 

DANIEL DENVIR

It’s so striking, because this is a city that by the ’50s or
’60s becomes a global icon of the entire Southern Jim Crow system
and of the South. But it’s really unlike most places in the South.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Definitely. It’s fairly cosmopolitan. It’s hard to think of it
because we have images of Bull Connor and water hoses and dogs. But
actually, if you saw a picture of Bull Connor in the 1930s when he was
commissioner of public safety, he’s dapper; he’s got his suit on.

DANIEL DENVIR

He looks like a dandy, in the photo in your book.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Exactly. A lot thinner. Birmingham was a modernizing city, but unlike
Atlanta it required an incredibly repressive state apparatus. The
violence was there from the get-go.

Why? Coal mines in Alabama are not just situated [in Birmingham] but
in other parts of the state such as Tuscaloosa. The United Mine
Workers of America (UMWA) organized coal miners, one of the few
interracial organizations. They created a leadership structure with
black vice presidents of locals. Black workers were still subordinate,
but they exercised control. Richard Davis was one of the most famous
UMWA leaders. So Alabama, even before the Communist Party (CP) showed
up, already had a tradition of labor militancy, especially in coal
mines and the iron ore mines as well, in the late nineteenth century.

The other factor is Birmingham’s proximity to Montgomery, Alabama,
the capital, where there are a number of universities and colleges.
Those university campuses were sometimes places of reaction, but they
were also hotbeds of left-wing militancy.

Birmingham’s large black population created civil society
institutions. The churches play a kind of mixed role, alongside
fraternal orders, mutual benefit associations, various societies,
women’s groups. All represented an incredibly organized community
but were also markers of class stratification. There are black elites
who actually have the right to vote, and they control that vote.

Even after the disfranchisement of the black community after 1895 in
Alabama, you do see some black elites on the payroll of Tennessee
Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company; some of them are aligned with the
white political elite. In some ways, they see themselves as power
brokers. They make this Faustian bargain saying, “Look, you give us
limited citizenship rights, and we’ll keep these Negroes in line.
We’ll teach them how to behave. We’ll make sure that there’s no
kind of militant organizing going on.”

Of course, that doesn’t work because you can’t stop the working
class. They just keep going for some reason. And so, there was always
this class tension within the black community, and often unspoken, but
obvious class tensions within white Birmingham.

DANIEL DENVIR

How did Birmingham fit into Alabama’s broader social, economic, and
political geography at the time, from Mobile on the Gulf Coast to the
Black Belt to the heavily white farmer upcountry?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Of course, Birmingham is the center.  Forgive the South African
analogy, but your audience will understand this: Mobile was kind of
Cape Town. Montgomery would be like Durban. Durban was a port city,
but Montgomery had that role in that Montgomery was also an
interesting, smaller, but cosmopolitan kind of city in Alabama. Around
Johannesburg was the Rand region, which is the mining region. The
farming belt — maybe Orange Free State might be the upcountry,
although there are way more Africans there.

But when you think about it in terms of economic geography, then
political geography, there’s some interesting discoveries. The Black
Belt had majority-black counties.

DANIEL DENVIR

And that’s just north of the coastal region, right?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Right. It’s north of the coastal region. Montgomery is situated in
the Black Belt. And these were mainly cotton plantations. These
plantations were not broken up after the Civil War. Instead of land
reform, we get a lot of sharecroppers — mostly black sharecroppers
and some white tenant farmers.

But they’re not backwaters. These were the centers of political
power because the Southern Democrats represented these Black Belt
counties, not just in the state legislature but also Congress.
They’re running the New Deal policies. And we can talk about that.
This is a dictatorship.

DANIEL DENVIR

The so-called big mules.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Exactly. The big mules and industrialists are two ruling-class symbols
in Alabama. They’re producing for a global market hampered by the
Great Depression. The upcountry farmers tended to be white landowners
or white tenant farmers. This is the Appalachian region on the edge of
the mountains or in the mountains. The land is not as arable.
There’s not much in the way of global production.

And there are mines there too; there are mines everywhere. You could
find a mine almost everywhere in Alabama, basically. Also some of the
textile factories are situated in the upcountry area. Huntsville
becomes a center for the Alabama textile industry. So you have poor
whites working as wage laborers in that industry, many women in
particular.

But the upcountry is interesting. The relative level of poverty caused
resentment of both the big mules and black sharecroppers on their
land, who they blame for their poor access to land, for their poverty.
And this is a sentiment against the big mules that lasted for a long
time, because those counties happen to be the ones that had the
largest socialist vote.

DANIEL DENVIR

And prior to that, Unionist.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Yes, Unionist. Yes, you read the book carefully!

DANIEL DENVIR

My mom is from Birmingham.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Oh! So she knows.

DANIEL DENVIR

I grew up learning a little about it and family from Cullman as well.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Oh, really? Yeah, Cullman was the first place where the Communist
Party tried to organize farmers. Before the Black Belt, Cullman was
the first place they went. Many Confederate deserters were from this
region. And you’re right, they gave significant support for the
Union in the Civil War, and later socialists and Republicans.

We often err in thinking, “Oh, poor white people? They’re
backward, we know how they’re going to vote.” There was a reason
why they didn’t like the Democrats. Because Democrats didn’t do
anything for them. Despite efforts to prove otherwise during the era
of populism, when they had this kind of attempt at fusion, the
Democrats still represented, in the state of Alabama and throughout
the South, big capital, rural capital, urban capital.

DANIEL DENVIR

But in a dynamic that’s familiar today, they simultaneously saw the
white business elite as a threat alongside the poor black people.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Absolutely. We think of it as countervailing tendencies, but they see
them hand in hand. And part of what the Left had to do in those days
was to destroy the myth of an alliance between capital and black
labor.

Black workers were perceived to be strikebreakers and therefore allied
with capital. Booker T. Washington advanced this idea that black
labor’s best friend is the capitalist because he’s the one who’s
going to hire you. He takes care of you. White workers are the ones
that you need to distrust, right? Wrong. But this racial dynamic is
what a left movement was up against in Alabama.

Mobile is a little different. Mobile is like the Eastern version of
New Orleans. It had a large Catholic population. It was a port city.

DANIEL DENVIR

It has a Mardi Gras.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

It has a Mardi Gras. Exactly.  It was under French occupation, French
colonial rule, at one point, and it has that history. Interestingly
enough, the party didn’t make as much headway there. Not because
there wasn’t interest. I think they just didn’t have the capacity
to really build a strong following there. But they did have some
support. And the dockworkers, the waterfront workers, were ripe for
left politics at the time.

But like any waterfront, race became the kind of Achilles’ heel in
trying to organize, because the jobs are highly segregated and tiered.
All you have to do is start bringing black workers or the threat of
black workers to break through that tier, and then you just have
nothing but chaos because it’s the black workers who become the
victims of racial violence, not the company.

The Communists Come to Alabama

DANIEL DENVIR

The Communist Party’s commitment to black freedom won them an
enthusiastic response from black Alabamans. But you write that
initially, communism was a rather foreign and abstract concept in
Alabama and a heavily demonized one as well. What did those early
moments look like with white radicals from the North preaching
anti-racist revolution to black crowds in Alabama?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

I’m still surprised there is no movie because it’s a great image.
It took a while. The party begins in 1929, and it was a steelworker, a
Sicilian, named James Giglio. And he, like a lot of Italian
immigrants, had a history, knew the history of left organizing from
home. The United States deported Italians often because they were
accused of being anarchists. I mean, they weren’t entirely wrong
about that.

And so, Giglio writes the Communist Party asking for help to build a
party and the CP sends people like Tom Johnson and other white
radicals south. They actually didn’t go down there to organize black
workers, because they presumed black workers were harder to organize,
more ignorant, backward, easily influenced by employers. They focused
on the white working class.

Now, this is 1929–30. This is a time when the Communist
International, with the help of some black radicals like Harry Haywood
and others, are saying that in the South, black people represent the
majority in the Black Belt counties and therefore should be the focus
of organizing. Moreover, black people constitute a nation much like
Georgia of the Soviet Union, and therefore have a right to
self-determination, which includes the right to secede. The white
Communists who went down south like, “We don’t believe that.
That’s not our politics.” They just rejected it.

Anyone who says American Communists were slaves to the Comintern,
that’s just not true! The_ Daily Worker_ emphasized the need to
organize white workers, that black workers are backward, but might be
organized too. But the focus was on the “advanced” white workers,
especially the white industrial working class. They didn’t think
they could organize farmers.

DANIEL DENVIR

And these other people are feudal relics.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Exactly. It’s in the book! So they’re going by the book, and they
get down there, and then they hold a meeting. And who shows up? Black
workers! And a few white workers, but black workers show up. The
immediate response is, “OK, well, it’s good that you’re here.
Let’s try to organize some more white workers.” They hold another
meeting and more black workers show up. Then they’re like, “OK,
well, what do we do?”

Now, in fairness, these same radicals, both the supporters and those
on the ground, were also deeply anti-racist. I mean, that’s just a
fact. There were some racist things that were said. And a lot of those
folks ended up being expelled from the party. But for the most part,
they were anti-racist, but still believed that white workers were the
vanguard.

When they made an effort in 1931, to form some kind of farmers’
union, thinking they could reach out to the rural areas, they went to
Cullman County. They went to try to organize white workers, but
because the party now had a black majority, even the most
well-meaning, working-class white people, said, “I can’t possibly
join an organization that’s mostly with black people, for black
people, populated by black people. Because if I do, even if I believe
in this, I’m going to be ostracized.”

They end up having to turn to the people who came there first, who
showed up and kept showing up over and over again. These are folks who
come from gospel-quartet circuits, from churches, from the steel
plants, the iron ore mines. They’re the people who come from the
lowest orders of the working class. But people also have aspirations
to be like Negro leaders. People like Hosea Hudson, Al Murphy, Ebb
Cox, and Mack Coad. They are people who were more than just workers.
They cared about the plight of their people. And they felt like the
Communist Party was the answer.

Ironically, spatial segregation meant that the initial white
leadership of the party could easily meet with white workers, but it
was hard to meet with black workers, because they would be suspect.
And that meant that they really couldn’t control the party, which
meant homegrown black leadership made decisions.

That’s not to say that they didn’t meet in interracial spaces.
They did. And they did have debates, and it was very dangerous and all
that. But it meant there were homegrown black, working-class, organic
intellectuals and organizers who charted the path for the party on the
ground, and only a handful of courageous and incredible white radicals
like Clyde Johnson and Mary Leonard and Alice Burke and Donald Burke
— these are the people who basically risked their lives to organize
with black workers or try to bring in white workers.

So you have a mass black base, a handful of white workers who are
Alabamians, and then a handful who are from other places around the
country. Many are Jewish radicals who change their names, or
college-educated people from Minnesota or New York who go there and
stick around and build a party. Because of that, the party took on the
characteristics of a kind of black liberation movement with a class
analysis.

The African Blood Brotherhood was an organization formed in 1919 right
after the Red Summer that was meant to be an underground, left-wing,
black nationalist organization: armed self-defense, the right to
self-determination, anti-lynching, the right to vote. Imagine that
organization in Alabama, but larger. That’s sort of what the early
formation of the Communist Party looked like, except that they had
white allies close by.

DANIEL DENVIR

These white Communists from the North came there to fight the class
struggle, but you write that it turned into a “race organization”
and “a working-class alternative to the NAACP [National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People].”

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Exactly. And a working-class alternative both in composition and
outlook. It became a race organization, but a race organization
committed to class struggle. This has been my mantra since I learned
it from my teacher Cedric Robinson many years ago: that an
organization that is fighting for power and justice and focusing on
the conditions of black people doesn’t mean that they’re not also
fighting for everyone else.

Reconstruction was a fight for everybody. It was a fight for free
universal public education, for decent wages, for protections from
violence, for land. And the Communist Party did that too.

Reconstruction was a fight for everybody. It was a fight for free
universal public education, for decent wages, for protections from
violence, for land. And the Communist Party did that too.

The African Americans who became the leaders of the party, Estelle
Milner, Helen Longs, Eula Gray, Hosea Hudson — they saw themselves
fighting for the race and for the class. They would say, “We wish
the white people would go with us. We wish the white working class
would join us.”

They are begging the white working class; they’re not trying to be
exclusive. Because they know if they can get the white working class
as a whole, they can win, and they can’t win without them. I mean,
that was just basic common sense without having to read any Vladimir
Lenin or Karl Marx.

The party was the first organization that they confronted that said
exactly what they thought and gave them a plan. One of the shocking
numbers I found was that the party was way bigger than the NAACP in
Birmingham. There’s a point around 1931 when the NAACP had maybe six
dues-paying members, and the party had at least three-hundred-plus
dues-paying members. The International Labor Defense, the Communist
Party’s auxiliary devoted to the criminal justice system and to
fighting for what they called “class-war prisoners,” had six
hundred, seven hundred members. And it was a much more robust
organization than the NAACP.

The leaders of the NAACP in Birmingham were so afraid of that that
they’re writing back and forth to Walter White saying, “We’re
being overshadowed. We need to do something.” That’s when the
Scottsboro case comes up as a source of a fight between the
organizations.

DANIEL DENVIR

The black elite is a big part of your book. From Birmingham
businessmen and ministers to the NAACP and the Tuskegee Institute,
they weren’t only uninterested in the struggles of poor and
working-class black people, but actively opposed them. You write:

The party’s ideological assault on Southern society affected the
black elite. Because black professionals and businessmen depended on
friendly relations with white elites, maintaining the color line was
as much a concern for the black petite bourgeoisie as it was for the
entire white community. Indeed, black middle-class anti-communist
rhetoric was sometimes indistinguishable from the utterances of white
Southern liberals and mild racists. The Birmingham branch of the NAACP
assailed the Communists for their refusal to recognize the color line.

Why was Alabama’s black elite so reactionary?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

I think that could be replicated in every state of the United States.
I got in so much trouble for that line, I have to say — because it
challenges this idea that Jim Crow created a deep racial solidarity
and, therefore, the recognition that we are an oppressed race. What
Jim Crow also did was build up and make dependent on it the power of a
black elite. It’s not to say that there were not black elites, black
landowners, black entrepreneurs, black doctors and professionals
before that moment, but there was a kind of dependency.

DANIEL DENVIR

Because their elite status depended on this brokerage role that they
were playing through Jim Crow.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Yes. Being able to get the right to vote in the Jim Crow South period,
not just in Alabama, usually required a sponsor if you were black. You
had to have a white sponsor who would vouch for you, and then they
would let you register. That meant that you owed them.

More important, they depended on a captured working class, both as
consumer base and as a community to be controlled in some respects.
But to be fair, the black elite also were afraid of losing the little
status that they had. The Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company
often owned the land the churches were on, or it would give donations
to the church, or ministers would literally be on the payroll of the
company. It replicates the system of slavery where you have African
American ministers who were given special treats or payments from
slave masters to preach obedience and to preach that the slave master
is the father and this is the law of the land and that to resist is to
sin.

To be fair, some of the black elites were caught up in this situation
and eventually, in the postwar period, would try to liberate
themselves from it. But you have the early examples of the
anti-communism of the NAACP and the various businessmen’s leagues
and that sort of thing.

You also see it later with the Right to Vote Club. When the Right to
Vote Club was formed in Birmingham, and black and white workers were
pushing through CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations] voter
registration, there was a black organization of elites that emerged
that said, “This is not acceptable. We need to actually push for
property requirements. We need to push to disenfranchise these black
people,” because it wasn’t in their interest. So the complicity of
the black elite was always a problem.

Some of my favorite episodes in the book are those where black elites
are challenged directly. There’s this almost circus-like story that
Hosea Hudson tells in his memoir about confronting a black minister
who’s sort of a stool pigeon [or snitch]. Hosea was devout, but they
knew a traitor when they saw one. So members of the church confronted
this preacher. [The black elites] play a kind of notorious role
handing over people to the police, informing on welfare recipients who
may have too much flour or too much oil, or are getting aid from
someplace else.

The most notorious example, of course, is the Tuskegee Institute.
There was a first shootout in Camp Hill, Alabama, in 1931 between
members of the Sharecroppers’ Union (SCU) and the police, and a
second one in 1932. Two people died as a result — more than two, but
two died in Tuskegee, Cliff James and Milo Bentley. They were members
of the Sharecroppers’ Union.

James had been shot in the back, and was bleeding, and he walked
seventeen miles to get to Tuskegee, because there’s no hospital for
Negroes anywhere near there in Reeltown, Alabama. And Tuskegee has a
hospital; it is allegedly a safe place. Same with Milo Bentley, but
James is the main figure. He gets there, and they dress his wounds and
immediately call the police, the Macon County Sheriff, who shows up.

They arrest him and Milo Bentley. They strip them naked, put them in a
jail cell, give them no medical treatment at all. And they both die.
James dies of infections from his wounds in a jail cell.

Thanks to the Communist Party press, thanks to the stories that
circulate through the _Southern Worker_ and the _Daily
Worker_ that people read all over the country, all these black people
were writing letters to Robert Russa Moton, who was the president of
Tuskegee, saying, “You are such a traitor. How could you as a Negro
turn those boys in to their death? What’s wrong with you?” They
got all this hate mail from African Americans around the country.

That proved to a lot of black working people who their friends were.
If you thought Tuskegee was your friend, now you found out that the
ILD [International Labor Defense] is your real friend, the Communist
Party is your real friend, the working-class struggle is your real
friend.

The International Labor Defense and Class-War Prisoners

DANIEL DENVIR

The CP’s reputation among black people everywhere, but in Alabama in
particular, skyrocketed after the Communist-aligned organization the
International Labor Defense moved to defend the Scottsboro Boys, who
were nine young black men accused of raping two white women in 1931.
What was the ILD? How did its involvement in this case make it so
explosively high-profile and, in places like Alabama, such a threat to
the status of the black elite?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

The ILD was formed in 1925, to defend what they called “class-war
prisoners.” It wasn’t founded specifically for African Americans,
but the most famous case that many people know about is Sacco and
Vanzetti, the two Italian anarchists who were accused of armed robbery
and murder in South Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1920. There was very
little evidence, and they were executed in 1927.

That kind of put the ILD on the map. But then it also defended the
trade union leaders Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, who were framed
for the 1916 bombing in San Francisco. They’re looking at class-war
prisoners as basically working-class activists, organizers, leftists
who are being railroaded. Some are being deported.

But Scottsboro in some ways led to a shift. I should name the the
defendants, because we always say “Scottsboro Nine,” but we
don’t say the names. When [the ILD] defended Charlie Weems, Ozie
Powell, Clarence Norris, Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, Haywood
Patterson, Andy Wright, Roy Wright, and Eugene Williams — these cats
were not trade unionists. They were not Communists. They were not
anarchists. They were not organizers of anything.

They were just some young people riding the rails trying to find work.
A lot of them were from Tennessee. They were passing through Paint
Rock, Alabama, March 31, 1931. The only reason they were arrested was
because they got into a fight with some white boys who were on the
train.

The police stopped to try to figure out what happened with this fight.
When the word got out that some black kids were fighting white kids,
they discovered two white women riding the rail. And the white women
felt compelled, in order to not be arrested for vagrancy or for
prostitution, to say that they’d been raped by these black kids.
That was what got them off, but it was also a lie.

The ILD did something that the NAACP would not have done. The NAACP
was hemming and hawing, like, “We don’t know the character of
these kids. Maybe they really did it.” And eventually it got
involved in the case. But the ILD’s thing was that the Scottsboro
Boys were class-war prisoners because they were oppressed by class and
race, and the only reason that they will not be lynched or sent to the
electric chair [would be] because of our intervention. And they
decided to basically bring this trial to the court of public opinion
by spreading the word all over the world: an injustice had occurred
— they’re victims of systemic racism and class oppression.

As a result, they got people in the streets: thirteen thousand people
in Cleveland, twenty thousand people in New York City, protests in
Tokyo, South Africa, Paris, and Moscow all demanding freedom for the
Scottsboro Boys. It changed the narrative, and it allowed them to go
on tour. The mothers of the Scottsboro trial became heroes.

The Communist press countered all the racist and gender stereotypes
that painted black men as violent and dangerous rapists and all the
white women as pure and virtuous, and basically flipped that narrative
on its head. And through the Scottsboro mothers, it showed black women
as grieving mothers who might lose their children to the electric
chair. It was so dramatic and powerful for reversing a lot of the
racism.

That brought a lot of black people and others into the party, more so
than fighting evictions or relief or economic arguments. It was that
struggle for justice that did it.

One last thing is that Ruby Bates, one of the two [white women
accusers], decided to recant her testimony, and she was embraced by
the party. She went on speaking tours. That emboldened a lot of the
working-class white women and other white women who were forced into
testifying that they’d been raped. There was a case in 1934 where
the ILD defended a man named Ed Johnson in Selma who was charged with
raping a white woman, and the woman who filed the charge in the first
place told the police, “I’m not going to be forced by the police
to invent a story. It’s not true.” She said she “would not be
like Victoria Price, but like Ruby Bates. She would tell the truth.”

DANIEL DENVIR

What’s fascinating and important there is the CP and the ILD’s
understanding of the everyday persecution of poor and working-class
black people by the police, the courts, and the entire criminal-
justice system. They understood these young men as class-war prisoners
because of that structural dynamic, even though those nine were not
being repressed in direct response to labor or political work, but
just going about their daily lives as poor black people. That’s a
rather advanced analysis, given where we find ourselves today with the
carceral state.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Exactly, and I want to give credit also to the Communists on the
ground who helped develop the analysis. Because before Scottsboro,
local Communists were actually doing this work on the ground.

There’s the case of Tom Robertson in 1930, who was lynched over a
dispute with an employer or a farmer. The Communists began to frame
this, again, as race and class oppression. They saw the ILD’s role
as to take up all these local cases of criminal injustice, of people
being arrested or prosecuted or lynched.

Before that, in 1930, the American Negro Labor Congress, which was one
of the Communist Party auxiliaries, held an anti-lynching conference
in Chattanooga.

Lynching, in the Communist worldview, becomes a class weapon. And once
you see lynching as a class weapon, then you can see poor black people
being corralled by the police for crimes they didn’t commit as class
war prisoners.

What ends up happening is that lynching, in the Communist worldview,
becomes a class weapon. It’s weapon of racism; they don’t deny
that part, but it’s also a class weapon. Once you see lynching as a
class weapon, then you can see poor black people being corralled by
the police for crimes they didn’t commit as class-war prisoners.

One of the tragedies is that you have another case that no one ever
talks about where a twelve-year-old black girl named Murdis Dixon was
raped by a white man. The local ILD took up that case. Hosea Hudson
himself was like, “We need this guy to go to jail. We need to defend
her.” But for some reason, the Communist Party press at the national
scale did not cover it. The ILD didn’t get resources or support for
it, because the Communist Party didn’t see twelve-year-old Murdis
Dixon as a class-war prisoner. The only publication to carry an
article about it was the Garveyite _Negro World_.

DANIEL DENVIR

An important piece of context here is that as soon as Communists
started doing their early organizing, even among unemployed people in
Birmingham, they were targeted immediately for advocating social
equality. You write: 

Social equality was such a potent, all-encompassing, anti-communist
slogan that the party’s demand for black self-determination, with
its separatist implication, was surprisingly ignored in the Southern
press or in the various forms of Southern anti-communist propaganda.
The cry of social equality, with all its multiple, specifically sexual
meanings and apparent ambiguities, was particularly effective because
it symbolized the ultimate threat to white supremacy, class power,
civilization, and Southern rulers’ most precious property: white
women.

 This is not a term in general circulation anymore. What did
“social equality” mean in Jim Crow Alabama and the Jim Crow South,
and why did reactionaries emphasize that above all else in their
anti-communism?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

That’s an excellent question. The concept of social equality as a
race leveler goes back to the antebellum period. In fact, we can see
it not just in the South, but across the country, where, during
Reconstruction, the biggest slogan against the Republican Party,
against Abraham Lincoln for that matter, was that abolitionists want
social equality. Republicans want social equality. Social equality
equals miscegenation.

If you say you want equal wages, that’s one thing. If you say you
want equal access to land, it’s nothing. But the domain of the
social is the intimate domain. It’s definitely the domain of sex. So
social equality is a euphemism for, “You’re going to marry a white
woman,” for example.

It also meant the domain of housing. One of the things that’s
important to realize is that the violence against school integration
and home integration as neighborhood integration was much more
intense, because it was considered social equality as opposed to
economic equality or equality of wages. You can be a left-leaning
person on economic matters, but not social matters.

That’s where social equality became the wedge to try to drive white
workers out of even being interested in the Communist Party. And it
worked.

DANIEL DENVIR

It was the weakness in prior forms of organizing in the South around
the Populist movement, where, while there was interracial organizing
for economic and political equality, social equality was not exactly
on the table.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Right. In fact, social equality was a way to undermine all the
political and economic struggles. One of the great stories where this
becomes clear is Danville, Virginia, in 1886, when you had Republicans
and the Readjusters, which was a biracial party that was really
influenced by Republicans, in the state. You had black people elected
to local office.

You had a kind of biracial coalition happening. And all they had to do
was elect a black man to the school board in Danville, and all the
people who were like, “This society is pretty good. Wages are not
bad. We have political participation” — all they had to do was
say, “This black man being elected to school board is an example of
social equality.” Why? Because he’s going to have access to all
the white teachers — because as a member of the school board or the
superintendent of schools or whatever, he’s going to rape all the
white women. That’s where the white people go crazy.

Claude McKay gave a presentation at the fourth congress of the
Communist International, where he talks about the Negro question. In
his speech, he said the biggest Achilles’ heel for white working
people is sex, the fascination with black sexuality. This is the thing
that always drives them.

Part of the story of chivalry is that — and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
writes beautifully about this — chivalry was a bludgeon, in the name
of protecting white women, to keep white women in their place, and to
keep black people in their place as well. So chivalry was the Faustian
bargain that white women had to make to protect their wombs and limit
their own sexual freedom, to be placed on a pedestal and protected
from black rapists. There can never be any conception of consensual
relationships between white women and black men, unless you’re dirt
poor. That’s different. Because poor white women didn’t have
chivalry, and we know this because there’s a whole history of poor
white women legally marrying black men.

In some ways, that question of chivalry and the protection of white
women become the foundation for some of the most important cases that
the ILD gets involved in. Scottsboro’s one; the other one was the
Willie Peterson case.

Willie Peterson was an Alabama black man falsely accused of shooting
three white people and killing two white women, and he was accused of
rape. He didn’t fit the description at all, but it didn’t matter.
What mattered was that he fit the description of the black brute, the
black rapist.

That was a case where, when the ILD took it up, it had to proceed very
cautiously and carefully because it couldn’t give the impression of
defending black rapists, despite the fact there’s no evidence of it.
So the ILD took a very bold position and shot down the entire question
of what chivalry and the defense of white women really means. And they
didn’t say anything that was new. They said what Ida B. Wells and
others had been saying since the nineteenth century. But this is one
of the land mines that the party had to navigate, this question of
race and sex.

Organizing the Unemployed

DANIEL DENVIR

Let’s move on to the CP’s organizing campaigns in Alabama,
starting with its work among unemployed people. Why did the CP start
with unemployed people? Who were they organizing? What were they
organizing people to fight for? And how did they use those fights to
begin to build out cadre and mass organization?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

The party’s unemployed campaign, which took the form of the
formation of unemployed councils, was a national campaign. It was
organizing the unemployed everywhere. This is deep into the first wave
of the Great Depression.

You got the stock market crash of 1929. The years 1930, ’31, ’32
were just high unemployment. And if you can’t get into a plant, then
those are the folks who are most likely to be organized. They were
demanding immediate cash relief; they weren’t necessarily pushing
for a kind of labor regime. If the federal government could not
produce jobs, they wanted cash relief. The CP organized a massive
march to Washington DC of unemployed people.

Alabama is no different from any other state. It was the first to be
organized, the first available. That period from 1930 to ’32 was all
before the New Deal, by the way. This is important because you don’t
have New Deal relief agencies there, you don’t have work relief.
What you do have is city relief, community chest, private relief, some
state relief — but no significant, robust federal relief.

Organizing the unemployed wasn’t easy because of mobility. The
Scottsboro Boys are examples of the kind of mobility where people go
from state to state looking for work. If you want a cadre to stay in
one place, then the unemployed are not always your best bet.

But initially, they made a strong foundation. Some of the early
demonstrations were led by people like Joe Burton, a nineteen-year-old
African American Young Communist League leader — they were marching
to city hall in Birmingham demanding relief and bringing white
unemployed people with them as well. Men, women, and children would
show up. At one point, I think 1932, Birmingham had the largest
Communist-led demonstration in its history — five to seven thousand
people showed up, an interracial group, demanding relief.

DANIEL DENVIR

It’s a good model for organizers to not only identify
what their ideal struggle is, but the struggle of what makes the
most sense to where people are at, at any given moment.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

That is true. Even if you believe that industrial workers at a plant
have the most power, if you have jobless people in the streets. . .
people have to fight the battles where they are. For a lot of jobless
people, it meant not being evicted from your house or your rental
property. It meant having your electricity cut off or your water cut
off and trying to figure out how to get it back.

What the party did was not simply to organize rallies of jobless
people, but to attend to their needs. For example, the cases of people
in Harlem and Chicago being evicted, and your furniture is on the
street and the cops are there overseeing the eviction, and the
Communists show up and dramatically put the furniture back in, and
then the cops put the furniture back out. . . . Those kinds of
dramatic scenes are what we see.

But in Alabama, where being a communist was a dangerous thing, they
would do these amazing actions. If someone’s electricity was cut
off, the Communists would show up with these heavy-gauge copper wires
as jumper cables, and they would attach the public electricity line to
the home and get their electricity working again. They would figure
out how to turn on water mains that had been turned off.

When working people were renting, and they were about to be evicted,
the Communist Party would send a delegation to the owner of the house
— and it could be a black owner, it didn’t have to be a white
owner — and they would say, “You have a choice. You can evict this
family, and I guarantee you by tomorrow you will not have a house.
Because people need firewood and your house looks really good. It’s
a wooden house; it has a lot of really good burning materials. Or you
could keep them there, pay them a dollar a week or whatever to take
care of your property, and you’ll have a house. The choice is
yours.” That kept people in. That’s very different from the drama
of fighting the police in the streets and getting recruits that way.

DANIEL DENVIR

They also made similar things clear to black people in the
neighborhood who they thought were snitching to the relief
administrators about people’s hidden assets.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Yes, exactly. In those days, they would police people who received
public welfare. If you had too much flour, or if you had extra cash,
or if you had nice furniture, they would cut you off. They would pay
what they called “stool pigeons” — known today as snitches —
who would inform on their neighbors, and they would get a little bit
of extra relief — cheese, flour, meat, oil, whatever.

The party would write out these penny postcards; if they know someone
snitching, they would write dozens of them saying, “The workers are
watching you. We know what you did at Ms Collum’s house. You better
watch out.” Same thing with social workers. Some of the black social
workers’ jobs were to deny people relief. [The party] would send
penny postcards anonymously: “The workers are watching you.” Could
you imagine? You get home and you have twenty-five or thirty postcards
saying, “The workers are watching you.” You’d be scared to
death!

All these things are examples of mutual aid. When firemen — people
who stoke the fires of trains — were passing through Birmingham,
they would kick big chunks of coal off the train for people to pick
up, to use for fuel. They would accidentally knock a whole bunch of
coal off, and people would just pick it up. That’s mutual aid.
Turning people’s water mains on — that’s mutual aid.

It’s like, “We’re going to help each other out to make sure we
survive.” It wasn’t just a tactic of gaining recruits. It was what
Communists are supposed to do. Because these Communists were driven by
the Bible; they were driven by being good neighbors, caring for other
people in the midst of the Depression, and crossing the color line,
which was required to do so.

DANIEL DENVIR

You mentioned the Bible and Southern black Christianity was enormously
influential among black Alabama Communists. Important black Communist
leaders like Hosea Hudson were active on the local gospel quartet
circuit.

But as you also mentioned earlier, black ministers were part of a
black elite that was staunchly anti-communist. You had ministers
preaching against communism, even as black Communist parishioners sat
in the pews. But meanwhile, the Communist Party, in official terms,
did not look very kindly on religion of any sort at all. How did that
all shake out on the ground?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

The spatial segregation allowed for self-development of a black
Communist Party in alliance with whites. The [national party]
couldn’t tell people what to do, so [the local party] developed on
its own. And of course, once the party learned the power of biblical
injunctions, it didn’t disagree.

Alabama may not be that exceptional compared to other parts of the
United States in terms of the presence of devoutly religious members
of the party. I think it was everywhere. No one was disciplined for
starting meetings with a prayer. It was very much part of the culture,
part of the African American culture, and I would guess part of white
working-class culture as well.

There were ministers who were close to the party, or at least close to
labor. There were some critical figures among the radical clergy in
Alabama who opened their churches up for the International Union of
Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, for example, for their meetings.
Later, after the war, some more progressive ministers played a role in
supporting the Southern Negro Youth Congress [SNYC], for example.

My guess is that the majority of black clergy in Alabama probably was
either indifferent, afraid, or sympathetic to what the party was
doing. Those who exercised more power often were those who were
empowered by corporate interests, empowered by the Tennessee Coal,
Iron and Railroad Company and local police. But they were not the
majority.

Organizing the Sharecroppers

DANIEL DENVIR

Let’s turn to the CP’s first big push into the countryside, which
was to organize sharecroppers across the Black Belt. You write:

It is tempting to characterize the Black Belt as a timeless, static,
semi-feudal remnant of the post-Reconstruction era. But such an
idyllic picture ignores the history of rural opposition and does not
take into account significant structural changes that have occurred
since the 1890s. Black and white populists waged a losing battle
against the expansion of tenancy. And in the wake of defeat, many
landless farmers resisted debt peonage with their feet.

What did the Black Belt economy, society, and politics — and black
people’s place within it — look like when Communists arrived amid
this period of the early Great Depression and the early Great
Migration?

 

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

The Depression hit the rural South almost immediately after World War
I. People think of the stock market crash as the change, but the
cotton market collapsed. It collapsed for a variety of different
reasons, some of it having to do with the global economy and the fact
that after the war, the Southern cotton economy is competing with the
global market. That has a huge impact. The boll weevil infestation has
a huge impact.

Ralph Gray, who was one of the first lead organizers of the
Sharecroppers’ Union, is one of those figures who got hit with the
boll weevil — things were really rough. He left Alabama, he
sharecropped in Oklahoma; he ended up, I think, in New Mexico,
someplace in the West. He ends up coming back and sharecropping again
and starts to accumulate a little money to buy land. This kind of
constant movement was par for the course. The other factor is that
there was nothing going on in terms of improved conditions. Every year
was like starvation.

The way sharecropping worked was that you’re always in debt. You
grow on your acreage. You chop the cotton. You cultivate it. You
harvest it. You take it to the gin, and they gin it and bale it.
You’re paying all these expenses, and in the end, you settle
accounts with the landlord. So you end up with nothing, and have to
beg for furnishings or food.

This is a key demand that led to the growth of the Sharecroppers’
Union in the first place. That is, during the winter months, you
don’t have anything and you have to borrow or beg to get it. It was
a demand saying, “We need a fairer system, and we want
furnishings.”

And they were asking for higher wages to pick cotton. They were paid
thirty cents per one hundred pounds of cotton. Most people, even
strong people, can’t pick more than two hundred pounds a day, which
means you’re basically getting sixty cents a day. That meant that
people often had to travel to other places to pick cotton when the
crop was coming in a little later, just to make ends meet.

That was the context for the Sharecroppers’ Union organizing
initially. It wanted to get white workers and tenant farmers, but at
first it could not.

The sharecroppers organized themselves with the help, specifically, of
a black woman named Estelle Milner, a schoolteacher. She was from
Tallapoosa County, in the Piedmont region, just north of the Black
Belt; it’s sort of part of that.

Tallapoosa had a cotton economy, and because she was from there, she
knew people. She had family there. Milner was the one who started
distributing the _Southern Worker_ and pamphlets and getting people
organized. When they began to see that, sharecroppers began to write
the _Southern Worker_ letters, thanks to her. They began organizing
around extending furnishings, food, raising wages for cotton picking,
and that sort of thing. It took a long time. When they ended up in a
shootout with police, Milner was one of those who was beaten badly and
had broken vertebrae.

Women were really central. Ralph Gray was killed in this kind of
police raid, and his body was riddled with bullets. His corpse was
thrown under the county courthouse steps in Dadeville. There was very
violent repression. After that, it was the daughter of Ralph Gray,
Eula Gray, who was nineteen years old, who kept the union together.

One thing that changes, though, is the New Deal and the Agricultural
Adjustment Act. It was basically one of many attempts to save
capitalism. Rather than figure out a way to take the harvest or maybe
redirect the harvest to grow food, what they did was pay farmers to
destroy crops, to let the land lie fallow, and to kill pigs — to do
whatever they could to keep the price of commodities up at the expense
of people starving.

Long story short, landlords got these checks that were supposed to be
double endorsed. They were supposed to cash the check and then
distribute the proceeds, related to acreage, to the sharecroppers.

DANIEL DENVIR

Seems like a foolproof system in the Jim Crow South. What could go
wrong?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

What could go wrong? With the Agriculture Adjustment Act, part of what
happened was that the landlords kept the money and used the money to
buy mechanical cotton pickers.

DANIEL DENVIR

All while evicting the tenants.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Exactly. So you transformed this potential small-land-holding group
into landless wage laborers. The potential for land is now just a pipe
dream, and they end up being evicted. This happens especially after
1935, because the workers wage a cotton-picker strike that is
incredibly successful in terms of raising wages. But then it’s
followed by evictions.

DANIEL DENVIR

How did they manage to organize in a climate of such brutally violent
terrorism? You write that the Sharecroppers’ Union scored its first
big victory with the 1934 cotton-picker strike. That was just three
years after its founding. Then they had another victory, the cotton
chopper strike of ’35.

But you write that in the ’35 strike, the SCU won in counties where
it was strong. But in other counties, it was just brutally and
thoroughly repressed. What sort and scale of repression did the
Sharecroppers’ Union confront? Why were they better able to weather
it in some places than others?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

I can say a couple of things. Organization is always a factor. Armed
self-defense is a factor. In places where people were organized and
armed, they were able to defend themselves. Or at least the landlords
knew that you can’t just send a local sheriff in and get out alive.

The other factor, I think, has to do with the strength of the
landlords’ relationship to the economy, to the middleman. I don’t
write about this, but there were some plantations where a landlord was
quick to agree to a wage increase, even without party influence. Part
of it was that they thought that they could actually liquidate the
party through cooperation.

There was also just sheer courage on the part of organizers. And this
is a funny story that I love to tell. One of the people I interviewed
was a man named Lemon Johnson. Johnson became a Communist, and he was
the secretary of the Hope Hull local of the Sharecroppers’ Union. I
was in his shack, and I’m sitting on his bed, and he has one chair.
I asked him, “How did you all win that cotton-chopper strike?”

He said, “Let me show you how we did it.” He takes out a box of
shotgun shells and puts it on the bed, and then he takes out a copy of
Lenin’s _What Is to Be Done?_ and puts it next to the shotgun
shells. And he says, “Right there. Theory and practice. Theory and
practice.”

He takes out a box of shotgun shells and puts it on the bed, and then
he takes out a copy of Lenin’s _What Is to Be Done?_ and puts it
next to the shotgun shells. And he says, ‘Right there. Theory and
practice. Theory and practice.’

Then, he proceeds to tell me this amazing apocryphal story. They all
knew, that if anything were to go wrong, if the planter class and the
police were to come down and start massacring black people, he knew
that [Joseph] Stalin would send ships across the Atlantic, they would
dock in Mobile, and send troops in groups of men who would defend
them, who would start to kill landlords.

We think of internationalism as kind of a dream. For them, it was so
real. It was like, they could fight because they knew they had the
world’s proletariat behind them. It’s funny because the rebellions
in the 1960s, they said, “There are Cubans behind it, there are
Russians behind it, there are Communists behind it.” There are
always some Communists behind it. But for a lot of African Americans
in the party or close to it, that works! It’s like, “There are
Cubans behind us? They are Russians?”

DANIEL DENVIR

Thank God the Cubans are here.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Yeah! “We’re ready to fight now.” Like, “I know I’m not
alone.” That’s where I set upon this idea, which became clear in
my interviews, of Reconstruction redux — that the Communist Party
represented the new Yankees. Because part of the image or the memory
of Reconstruction wasn’t just that it was an experiment in democracy
and in freedom, but it was an experiment in democracy and freedom that
was only possible because of the Yankees.

DANIEL DENVIR

That was a popular memory that the CP, probably unbeknownst to it, was
tapping into.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Exactly. It didn’t have a clue. The white mainstream conservative
press tapped into it too. Because they’re the ones saying, “These
are Yankees, Communist Yankees, Yankee Reds,” all this stuff.

Imagine: you have black people saying, “Yankee Reds here in Alabama?
I’ve got to find one! Where are they?” And they start to ask
questions. Even when I was interviewing people in the 1980s for the
book, they would tell stories about the civil rights movement, where
there was something about the white people who came from the outside,
who didn’t talk like neighbors — they were the ones that they
automatically trusted. There’s something about, “You’re like the
Yankees.” The same thing happened in the 1960s, this kind of
recognition that you’re a friend.

DANIEL DENVIR

Because you’re a white person without a Southern accent.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Exactly. Of course, people learned that many of them actually worked
for the FBI, but that’s another story.

DANIEL DENVIR

The rural repression of sharecroppers was probably the most brutal
thing in your book, but there’s so much brutal repression.
There are police working with lynch mobs all over the place; police
torture; red squad raids in Birmingham seizing radical literature and
arresting people; company goon squads meting out beatings and torture;
the white legion; the KKK [Ku Klux Klan].

What was this web of repression that existed in Alabama? How did it
exercise these various forms of terror against black people and
Communists across the state? The repression you described was so
brutal and widespread, it makes me wonder does that level of
repression force us to take a second look at classic questions like
why the United States has never had socialism or a strong socialist
party?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

The repression was brutal in part because it did not rely entirely on
the state. You had a very strong repressive state apparatus and police
departments and local county sheriffs. But a lot of times, the police
depended on mob violence. They were incredibly careful sometimes about
not taking responsibility. They would let people out of jail, or they
would withdraw, so that mobs that they worked with could do the dirty
work.

People like Joseph Gelders [were targeted]. [He was from] a prominent
Jewish family and an intellectual, someone who was quite public in
terms of his work around civil rights and anti-labor repression. He
was kidnapped and beaten and left outside the city limits. It was just
common stuff. The big corporations, TCI in particular, had their own
private police, and they did their dirty work.

To me, this shows the deep fear of an interracial or black
working-class response. Because the party was winning. It was winning
adherents. It was winning small battles. The party was blamed for the
strike waves of 1934, despite the fact that a lot of Communists
didn’t play a major role in it. They played roles in very particular
places, but they were the ones blamed.

[Companies and the state] used every single force at their disposal to
crush the Communists, because they knew they couldn’t win by
persuasion. The genie had been taken out of the bottle. They also had
other ways of repressing: all these hearings — the Fish Committee
hearing in 1930, they had the Dies Committee hearings in 1938. You
also had all these different kinds of investigations, the passage of
the criminal anarchy ordinance in Bessemer and elsewhere. All of this
was meant to tamp down the Communist threat.

But what’s amazing to me is I’ve never found any evidence of
someone being beaten by the police badly and saying, “I quit.”
Saul Davis is one: beaten, skull-fractured, comes back to work.
Estelle Milner, Helen Longs. Helen Longs was a Communist black woman
— the description of her beating is no different from what Fannie
Lou Hamer experienced thirty years later. And yet she didn’t quit.
They keep coming back and coming back.

[The repression] may help explain why there’s no communism in the
United States. Although I would say that the repression kept [the
Communists] at bay to a certain degree, but it didn’t succeed fully.
Because if it had succeeded, there would be no presence, and they
continued throughout World War II. It wasn’t until the Cold War
where you have a national repressive apparatus, with Taft–Hartley
and the Red Scare, that a lot of the Communists actually went
underground and left the South. They didn’t all leave; a lot of them
ended up in the civil rights movement.

But it’s amazing how [despite] all that repression that we see in
the early ’30s and in the rural areas, by the second half of the
1930s, the Popular Front, the party’s bigger than it had been, and
it continues to grow.

So I think [the repression] is a factor. I think the reason we don’t
have a robust Communist Party has to do not with hard power but soft
power. The soft power is more effective in convincing people. For
example, during the Popular Front, the party got involved in
organizing the CIO. And the CIO was pretty successful. It wasn’t
Communist, but those Communists in the rank and file succeeded in
doing their work building an effective organization, and many of them
saw no need for being in a party anymore. People left more often over
that than being beaten.

It showed that you can have some kind of extension of the social
democratic promise through these other organizations, and the party
was not necessary. Also, the party itself abandoned the underground
period of working-class organization and embraced the Popular Front
for the purposes of building an alliance with liberals, many of whom
would not even be sympathetic to communism anyway.

Alabama Communists and the Popular Front

DANIEL DENVIR

You write, in a recent foreword to the book, that your “suggestion
that the Popular Front led to the party’s demise in Alabama is still
perhaps the book’s most controversial argument.” What was the
Popular Front, and how did it change how the party operated in
Alabama? Why, as you argue, was it a significant factor leading to the
party’s demise?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

The shift to the Popular Front was an international shift in Communist
policy. In a nutshell, it was an attempt to resist fascism by creating
the broadest front possible with labor, with liberals, including with
socialists. [The Communists had] a policy that was anti–Socialist
Party. And then they said, “We’re just going to take everyone.”
It came from Stalin.

In Alabama, the party underwent a shake-up. It got new leadership, who
was supposed to represent the new Popular Front strategy. Rob Hall was
sent to Alabama to basically run the party. The way the Popular Front
was conceived across the United States was to build alliances with
liberals, with intellectuals, with artists, to come above ground in
order to say, “We’re harmless, but most important, we’re going
to get the broadest support to fight fascism.”

The problem with Alabama is that you had another set of liberals who
were deeply anti-communist and segregationist. That’s the issue.
You’ve just risked all these people’s lives for the past six years
fighting a deeply anti-racist social justice movement that was
class-based, that focused on the working class, that waged war on
elites, black elites and others. . . to suddenly turn around and say,
“All these racist liberals, we’re going to try to embrace them and
recruit them” — it wasn’t a winning strategy if the point was to
build a working-class movement.

To suddenly turn around and say, ‘All these racist liberals, we’re
going to try to embrace them and recruit them’ — it wasn’t a
winning strategy.

That’s when black working people began to drift away from the party.
Because they saw no need for it. If you’re organizing the CIO and
the CIO becomes a vehicle to do working-class organizing — or the
Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers or the Steelworkers [union], all part
of the CIO at the time — then you don’t need the Communist Party.

That’s one side of the story; it’s not the whole story. But the
numbers and the focus on the black working class start to dwindle.
That’s right around the time when black workers are working in Works
Progress Administration projects; the Communists were trying to
organize them. It was the most incongruous campaign, because they’re
not focused on workers. Then, they shift again in 1937 to the
Democratic Front, which is more of a liberal orientation. They lose
their black base, but not all of them.

What changes things, though, was when the Southern Negro Youth
Congress is formed in 1937, and they move the headquarters to
Birmingham in 1939. And in many ways, the timing is really important
because the Southern Negro Youth Congress is a new generation of black
radicals.

DANIEL DENVIR

It’s almost a proto–New Left. The same with the League of Young
Southerners, who are the kind of white counterpart.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Right. It’s smaller, but significant. People like Joe Gelders’s
daughter, Marge Gelders, and Laurent Frantz. This is a number of
people who come together, and they’re allied with the Southern Negro
Youth Congress. They’re kind of like precursors to the civil rights
movement, except that their orientation is still focused on the
working class.

The Southern Negro Youth Congress fought things like segregation in
public accommodations and transportation. They were working with
sharecroppers, doing art projects, cultural projects with youth,
fighting for the right to vote, expanding democracy. And then they
were also organizing tobacco workers in Virginia. So they were a
pretty radical force.

The timing is interesting, because they get a hold in Birmingham.
Their leaders are amazingly dynamic folks, many of whom are
Communists, like James Jackson, Esther Cooper Jackson, Dorothy
Burnham, Ed Strong, Augusta Jackson, and Louis Burnham. They’re
couples, and they’re brave and courageous. They end up doing this
work at the very moment when you have the Nazi-Soviet pact.

DANIEL DENVIR

It’s disastrous for American Communists in a lot of obvious ways,
but it has this kind of silver lining in Alabama.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

What happens is the Popular Front falls apart around this. For the US
Communist Party, it was a devastating policy, because it was a kind of
reversal of fortune. It was like, “Fighting fascism is not going to
be our main thing.” But in Alabama, it played out as, now we don’t
have to bend over backward — or bend over forward, depending on how
you think about it — to build support.

DANIEL DENVIR

To kiss wealthy white liberals’ asses, who are not even positively
responding to said ass-kissing.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Exactly. It also led to power struggles within those organizations
that had been set up to bring liberals in. The Southern Conference for
Human Welfare was radicalized as a result. There were no holds barred
in either the League of Young Southerners or the Southern Negro Youth
Congress. There was a publication called the _Southern Almanac_ that
became a de facto Communist Party publication. Many amazing radicals
— white radicals especially, like Don West — were writing for
the _Southern Almanac_.

Then we get into World War II. In 1941, the war starts, and then
there’s a flip again, where the party’s focus is on anti-fascism.
By then, the Southern Negro Youth Congress has become the dominant
force fighting for civil rights in World War II. It builds new
alliances with folks on the left of the NAACP orbit, like, for
example, John LaFleur from Mobile, quite a militant himself.

They start to build power until 1948, and in 1948, they hold the SNYC
meeting there in Mobile. It ends up being the last one, because
that’s when Bull Connor really makes a name for himself, along with
others. They repress that meeting. They drive people out of the city.
They crush what was left of the Communist Party, which then is
resurrected again in the form of individuals in labor and civil rights
organizations in the state.

DANIEL DENVIR

Labor organizing was a big part of what Communists were doing in
Birmingham. You write that initially the CP failed because their
dual-union strategy didn’t make sense, because outside of some
exceptions in the steel industry, there were no “competing labor
organizations.” But that changed after the passage of the National
Industrial Recovery Act of 1933.

What was the CP’s dual-union strategy, and why did it become more
successful as the New Deal labor regime took off? More generally, how
and around what issues did Communists mobilize workers? How did they
mobilize workers in these workplaces where racial segregation was a
tool used with great effect by the boss to divide and conquer workers?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

The Trade Union Unity League was formed as an umbrella organization
for this dual-unionism strategy. Dual unionism goes back to William Z.
Foster, who was a syndicalist more than a Communist initially. The
idea was that they needed militant industrial unions. They wanted to
draw workers away from the established American Federation of Labor
unions — this is all before the CIO exists — draw away through
militancy or at least pressure the mainstream unions to become more
militant.

If you can’t draw workers away, at least pressure the unions. That
was part of the strategy. But it only works in places where you have
an established union presence. Like waterfront workers, for example
— the National Maritime Union was a good example of a successful
strategy in the South. So in some cases, they were the first unions in
certain industries.

But the three big industries were coal and iron-ore mining, steel, and
textiles. In textiles, they never really made any headway.

DANIEL DENVIR

Because it was all white.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

It was all white. Despite the fact that one of the best labor
organizers the party ever had in the South was a white man named Clyde
Johnson. Despite the fact that he was a white organizer, he could only
organize black workers. I mean, he could not win over most of the
white workers because they were captured.

The place that had the most support as a result of the New Deal, the
National Industrial Recovery Act, were industries like steel and coal.
That’s where the party’s dual-union strategy began to have some
impact. Because one of the things that William Mitch of the
Steelworkers accepted was the wage differentials imposed by the New
Deal, which is to say that Southern workers made less than Northern
workers. So it didn’t take that much effort on the part of
Communists in the opposition — now they’re inside the union —
to say, “We need to equalize that. Just because Southern Democrats
tell us we should be paid less, we’re still starving here.”

That generated some support and kind of pushed the union in new
directions. The International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers,
which was probably the most left of the unions in Alabama, was formed
in 1933. Its roots go way back to the Western Federation of Miners and
the IWW [International Workers of the World]. But the Communists
played probably the strongest role in that union, and they were able
to build support that way.

But it was never easy. Even during the strike wave of 1934, when it
seemed like you had a lot of momentum, organizing was hard for
Communists. If anything, the role that the Communists played was to
bring to the fore questions of racial justice, issues of the
franchise, and issues of shop-floor control.

One other thing the Wagner Act did was allow for National Labor
Relations Board elections for unions. But competing company unions
that also had the right to run elections. So part of what the party
was able to do was to convince people not to go with the company
unions. A lot of this agitprop work was very important.

It just so happens that black Communists also made the best labor
organizers. Because they knew the landscape, they were good
organizers. Ebb Cox is a legend in Alabama trade union organizing, but
he started out as a Communist.

DANIEL DENVIR

The next big change is the arrival of the CIO, which offers Communists
a new opportunity to participate and lead more progressive unions. But
the flip side of that, you write, is that “Communist labor
organizers essentially subordinated themselves to the CIO during the
Popular Front era.”

What did that mean for black Communist workers and for the labor
movement in general? What did that subordination ultimately mean when
the CIO was seized by the anti-communist reaction that took hold in
the late 1930s, this moment of the “little red scare”?

 

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Their decision to subordinate themselves to CIO leadership was not a
directive. It didn’t come from the top of the party. This was
strategic. I think what they realized is that they were more concerned
about the CIO winning than they were about trying to push the CIO
left. The Communists felt like the very existence of an industrial
union movement was itself left enough. So a lot of folks became very
professional organizers.

Most important, in this setting, they did not announce their Communist
bona fides or affiliations. Some people knew. But keep in mind, [CIO
president] John L. Lewis was deeply anti-communist. He was willing to
bring Communists on because he knew they were the best organizers. But
he also was like, “We don’t want their influence. We want their
skills.” In Alabama, I think the Communists who came into the CIO
understood that.

So they kept a low profile while doing the work of organizing. But to
their credit, they fought for things that you don’t think unions
usually fight for. The Right to Vote Clubs were products of the CIO.
They existed before that, but the CIO captured them. They talked about
pushing for voter registration for black and white voters; they saw
the CIO as a possible political force.

The Communists become absorbed into the CIO. The Mine Mill was
different in that they didn’t care about Communists. They invited
Communists, they embraced them. You could be an open Communist. In
1949, after Taft–Hartley — one of the provisions of Taft–Hartley
is that you had to sign an affidavit saying that there are no
Communists in your organization, that you’re not a Communist. Part
of the split was [due to the fact that] the CIO agreed to that. Some
of the unions were like, “We’re not going to do it.” And CIO
leadership said, “You know what, if you don’t do it, we’ll kick
you out.”

That wasn’t necessary. Taft–Hartley didn’t demand that. What
Taft–Hartley demanded was that you sign an affidavit. The penalty
for not signing was you don’t have access to National Labor
Relations Board elections. You can’t go through the process. They
would deny you that right. So, the entire CIO could have said,
“Absolutely not. We boycott.” They could have had a general
strike.

After World War II, that’s sort of what happened. What we see in
1945, ’46 was one of the biggest strike waves in US history before
the 1970s. Some of those strike waves were against union leadership.
There were wildcat strikes, similar to the wildcat strikes that took
place during the war, which were often over race.

Those set the stage, possibly, for resisting Cold War labor policies,
but leadership at CIO ultimately embraced them. And that led to the
expulsion of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter
Workers union, along with the Electrical Workers (UE) and Maritime
Workers, the Food and Tobacco Workers — these were the left unions.
These were the ones that were kicked out.

DANIEL DENVIR

The unions that got expelled then got raided and destroyed,
essentially. The UE still exists and is led by amazing progressive
people, but its footprint is a small fraction of their size once upon
a time.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Right. They got raided, and they also experienced the repressive force
of the state. They lost members, they lost leaders, people were
jailed, and it was devastating. But in Alabama, one of the main
leaders of Mine Mill was an African American named Asbury Howard, who
ended up playing a critical role in civil rights and black politics in
Alabama.

One thing I write about is the treacherous role that the NAACP played
in undermining Mine Mill. Herbert Hill, who later became a major
scholar of US labor, went down to Alabama on behalf of the NAACP and
did his own investigation. He promoted the expulsion of Mine Mill and
called out Communists who were in the organization and basically
red-baited them.

In the NAACP’s ongoing efforts to undermine any kind of left
presence, or Communist presence at least, Herbert Hill becomes known
as a heroic liberal figure — one of those who undercut the union. So
it wasn’t just federal repression. It was a repression coming from
all different directions, because of the overwhelming culture of
anti-communism.

You’ve got to imagine what it meant for so many people who joined
the party in 1930, ’31, or ’32 to have gone through about twenty
years risking their lives, getting beaten, jailed, all that, and
suddenly the whole thing is crushed. It kind of disappears and is
remade.

It wasn’t just federal repression. It was repression coming from all
different directions because of the overwhelming culture of
anti-communism.

Hosea Hudson leaves Alabama: he ends up living in New Jersey up in the
North. A lot of folks end up having to flee. The Jacksons. . . Louis
Burnham dies in 1957. But they all have to leave Alabama after all
that work.

It’s almost like starting from scratch with the civil rights
movement. But when [the Left] does reemerge, when the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), for example, comes to
Alabama, whose homes do they stay in in the Black Belt? The homes of
former Sharecroppers’ Union leaders.

DANIEL DENVIR

We sketched out the trajectory of the CP and of the CIO and Communists
within the CIO. What about the decline of the Sharecroppers’ Union?

You write that it was complex. You had the CP central committee
turning away from rural organizing during the Popular Front; you also
cite the rise of the socialist-led Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union
and a radicalizing National Farmers’ Union, with its Alabama
chapter, the Alabama Farmers’ Union, which had locals in the
northern upcountry among poor white farmers. But at the end of the
day, I think, you argue that none of these factors contended with
enormous changes in the cotton industry that were taking place,
pushing sharecroppers off the land and into the Great Migration.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

That led to the demise. When the CIO started to organize rural workers
through the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers
of America (UCAPAWA), they formed a chapter to take over the
Sharecroppers’ Union’s jurisdiction. They didn’t even know how
to organize sharecroppers. They only knew how to organize wage
laborers.

The focus now is on wage workers who don’t want to be wage workers
picking cotton when the industry is transforming. You have these huge
mechanical cotton pickers and hardly any labor. The labor force is
disappearing. The former Sharecroppers’ Union is moving west to
Louisiana.

There’s some organizing taking place. But again, it’s the Great
Migration. It’s the collapse of the cotton industry. There’s also
the takeover by the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, which also gets
folded into UCAPAWA. It sort of fades away.

What doesn’t fade away, though, are those people who experience
union organizing. They end up doing things like running for office.
Charles Smith becomes a local political leader, an elected official,
in Montgomery County. Some members of the Deacons for Defense [and
Justice] in Louisiana came out of the Louisiana Farmers’ Union. So
there’s a legacy, but it doesn’t take place in the rural areas in
the same place.

You see the continuation of that legacy. But to me, the story someone
else needs to follow up on is: What happened to those ten thousand or
fifteen thousand people? If many migrated north, what did they bring
with them, what memories? What political organizing work did they do?
Did they give up? Or did they continue in this kind of struggle?

DANIEL DENVIR

You write, “In our current moment, anti-capitalism and struggles
against state violence and incarceration tend to be separate
movements. For Communists and their allies, especially in the Deep
South, they were inextricably bound together. The African Americans
who made up the Alabama radical movement experienced and opposed race
and class oppression as a totality.”

How did class struggle and anti-racist struggle become separated from
one another — and often held out as somehow contradictory political
projects? Do you see steps being taken today to recombine them, to
fight this totality of oppression in the way Alabama Communists once
did?

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

On the question of how it happened: I went to sleep one night and woke
up, and all of a sudden, I don’t even recognize some of these
tendencies. It happened so fast. One of the things I’ve been arguing
for years is that we don’t even do a good job of understanding the
class dimensions and class critique coming out of what’s called the
civil rights movement. SNCC had a class critique — they actually had
an anti-capitalist position.

There’s so much evidence for it, but we don’t look at that. We
tell the story of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as if it
ends in Atlantic City in 1964. But when you look at their platform in
1968, it is deeply anti-capitalist, deeply anti–US empire, and
deeply struggling around the question of reproductive labor and
compensation for that.

In every movement I’ve been a part of — and I was a member of the
Communist Workers’ Party, I’ve been a part of lots of different
movements — even if there was a debate about the relative weight of
race or class — which is, I think, is a useless debate, too —
there was no question that these things operate and function together
and that they’re fought together. In the 1960s and ’70s, the
socialist feminists also talked about anti-racism being fundamental in
class politics, as well as fighting patriarchy — that these things
are together. The Combahee River Collective — they were socialists.
They made it clear that capitalism is not going to save anybody.

When I wrote [the new foreword to _Hammer and Hoe_], it was a
critical moment around 2014 and 2015, when you begin to see in certain
places, like Ferguson for example, where there was a kind of race and
class critique on the ground. Because they’re fighting against the
extractive processes of state repression, taking money from poor black
people to pay for government, and there was an understanding of that.

But a particular kind of “Afro-pessimist” position slowly started
to become popular. I say “particular kind” because there are many
different manifestations of it. It didn’t say that class doesn’t
matter, but that anti-blackness is the way that the modern world was
structured. With it comes a similar position on the part of the black
elite as the black poor and working class — that they occupy a
similar position within the structure of anti-blackness, and therefore
they’re all basically slaves, and that all white people,
irrespective of their class, somehow are all anti-black and therefore
participate in reproduction of the system.

That’s not to say that there’s not working-class anti-blackness.
But it’s to say that even working-class anti-blackness is part of a
class politics, [and there needs to be] a class analysis of what is
required to be able to reproduce the class as a subordinate, landless,
impoverished, immiserated class without the means of production.

So our analysis has to be better. I think there’s a struggle right
now over this. The flip side is there’s an unfair critique of
anti–state violence, of anti–police brutality struggles, as if
they’re not class struggles. Part of what I said about Ferguson is
that it is very much a class struggle against racism.

DANIEL DENVIR

In the same way the Communist Party saw the Scottsboro Boys as
class-war prisoners.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Exactly. What ends up happening is that the critique of struggles
against racism often gets dismissed as race reductionism — that is,
the only way we understand the reproduction of inequality and
repression and violence and oppression is through racism. And that is
a position that some people take. There’s a whole new body of work
on implicit bias, and how we’ve got to deal with racism. Racism
becomes like personal work.

DANIEL DENVIR

Do the work. It’s all about psychotherapy for white people.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

Yeah, it is. It is therapeutic. Even the way that people experience
racism is on the same terms — that is to say that they don’t feel
seen, that they feel violated, that this is a kind of violence.

Imagine if you thought that way, and you’re in a meeting trying to
figure out how to build a class struggle, and someone says to you,
“Comrade n-word.” That’s in the book. And then all these
comments like, “Comrade, you can’t use that word here.” But they
still stay together.

In this circumstance, that would be trauma. That moment of trauma is
like, “Oh my God, we’ve got to not only expel you, but punish you,
and then figure out how to revive this person who had to hear the
n-word.” Right? Those conditions make it impossible to transcend the
ideological chains that are holding back our capacity to build a
movement.

So, I’m very heartened by some of the more recent struggles where
people are seeing themselves as abolitionists, but also thinking about
workers at the Amazon plant in Bessemer, and thinking about
steelworkers, and thinking about internationalism, and thinking about
labor and class and the carceral state and feminism and patriarchal
violence and all that stuff together. I see that more and more.

It’s like _West Side Story_: race reductionist versus the class
reductionist, and who’s got the sharper knives? Of course, no
one’s claiming the mantle — they’re just using it to blame each
other.

I think that we’re now at a point where we’re moving beyond that,
hopefully. It’s not just Alabama, but the Communist heritage in much
of the United States and elsewhere is not class reductionism at all.
It doesn’t mean they didn’t make errors, but it does mean that
they understood how these things were connected. We may be more
sophisticated now, but we have to be able to see how these things are
connected.

_ROBIN D. G. KELLEY is the the Gary B. Nash Professor of American
History at UCLA, and the author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists
during the Great Depression
[[link removed]]._

_DANIEL DENVIR is the author of All-American Nativism
[[link removed]] and the
host of The Dig on Jacobin Radio._

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