Saga of 1930s Alabama Communists has lessons for today

Now that open racism is emanating from the highest levels of the U.S. government and white supremacist terrorism is stalking the land, it’s worthwhile to look back at times of our history when our people faced similar challenges. The book Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, by Robin D.G. Kelley, a professor of history at University of California Los Angeles, provides a view of one such period that is rich with lessons for today’s struggles. The book was originally published in 1990, but updated and re-published in 2015.

Alabama in the 1930s makes today’s Trump America look positively idyllic. Jim Crow terror against African Americans and trade unionists ruled, perpetrated not only by organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, which at that time was a “respectable” outfit claiming millions of members but also by law enforcement. Kelley tells of a sheriff who openly boasted of the number of union activists he had murdered. African Americans who tried to defend themselves against racist violence wound up in prison or the electric chair, while their attackers went free, and anyone who dared advocate racial equality or worked to organize a union put his life in peril.

That would hardly seem to be an environment in which progressive movements of any sort, let alone the Communist Party, could flourish. But as Kelley tells the story, the party, though for the most part forced to work underground, attracted many working-class and poor members, mostly African-American, and had considerable impact, organizing unions and helping make space for other progressive organizations to function. In particular, it was a major force in building the labor movement in the state (as elsewhere in the South and throughout the country).

The Alabama Communist Party succeeded in some of its key aims because it saw from the start the inextricable link between racism and anti-working class attitudes and actions. In the atmosphere of the South in the 1930s, it could hardly have done otherwise; as pointed out above, open terror reigned equally against African-Americans and unionists—who were often, of course, the same people, as some (unfortunately not all) unions were virtually the only integrated institutions in the region at that time.

Indeed, the Alabama Communists saw this...

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