A CULTURE OF OPPOSITION A CULTURE OF OPPOSITIONStruggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation.
—Coretta Scott King, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr.
On August 23, 1939, Josef Stalin, who’d championed the Popular Front Against War and Fascism, entered into a nonaggression pact with Adolf Hitler, effectively destroying the European antifascist coalition and threatening united front collaboration in the United States. Progressive white southerners lost one of the best excuses they had for cooperating with the Reds.
Citizens on both sides of the Atlantic who’d witnessed fascism crawl across Europe feared another world war was inevitable. When Hitler invaded Poland two weeks later and Britain and France declared war on Germany, Stalin accused them of “perpetrating an imperialist war.” Earl Browder struggled mightily to translate that into something positive. Suddenly England and France were no longer allied with the Soviet Union in the fight against fascism but were rather imperialists promoting a war that Stalin wanted no part of.
Many U.S. communists experienced this mind-bending reversal as a bitter betrayal. One wrote sadly that “during the height of the Popular Front, despite the show trials, Russians stood for all that was good, rational and progressive and Germany stood for all that was evil, barbaric, and reactionary.” But the pact with Hitler caused many to wonder if there was any moral distinction between communism and fascism.1
Browder undercut his own leadership when he chose to toe the party line and defend the pact as a “master stroke for peace.” He tried to frame it as an attempt to delay and possibly prevent another European war. William Patterson also argued that signing the pact did not mean “that the Soviets endorsed fascism any more than the signing of such a pact with the United States indicated that the Soviets endorsed lynching and Jim Crowism.”2 That didn’t fly. And what did Germany get out of it? Nothing less than a guarantee that it would not have to fight on two fronts again.
Stalin’s treachery was insufficient to destroy CPUSA or its united-front policy. Despite the fact that many faithful comrades and fellow travelers abandoned their posts, enough hard-liners remained, as did those who were determined to continue their work on the local fronts. The greatest losses were counted among the alliances that had been so carefully constructed and the good-faith coalitions that were destroyed.
The district 17 Reds had muted their radicalism as the old Popular Front strategy mandated, but they had not buried it. As their alliances began to unwind in 1939, the district pivoted left to build new coalitions of what historian Robin Kelley calls “independent radicals, rebellious youth, Christian socialists, black nationalists and budding feminists.” A “culture of opposition” was fostered in Birmingham that year.3
Back in 1937, Hosea Hudson had established the Right to Vote Club in an effort to reach out to the black middle class. At the time, he and Rob Hall believed that the NAACP, black clergy, and black businessmen could be persuaded to join with the district in assisting poor and working-class blacks to navigate the voter registration process. Right to Vote Club volunteers coached first-time voters through the obstacles that registrars were likely to throw before them.
Hudson was convinced that he could replicate the success that he, Henry Mayfield, and Mack Coad had within the black labor–civil rights coalition led by Hartford Knight, black district representative of the United Mine Workers, and Emory Jackson, editor of the Birmingham World. But the Magic City’s black middle class remained elusive. Collaboration with Reds would endanger their standing with the city’s white elite.
Undaunted, Hudson continued to conduct his voting clinics, teach his citizenship classes, and to file charges every time a club member was denied registration. As a result, between 1938 and 1940, the percentage of Jefferson County black voters nearly quadrupled. In 1939 he began working with the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), an organization founded in 1937 in Richmond, Virginia, as the youth component of the National Negro Congress. James Jackson, its twenty-two-year-old chair (and a party member), described the SNYC as “dedicated to challenging white supremacy, ending segregation and lynching.”4 Angelo Herndon, who’d been appointed chair of the Young Communist League that year, attended SNYC’s inaugural meeting and was recruited as an advisor.
In 1938 SNYC declared itself an independent southern black-led interracial organization of teachers, young professionals, intellectuals, sharecroppers, domestic and industrial workers, and the unemployed—its focus was regional reform. Membership was open to those of all races, classes, and political leanings. But it was essentially a militant movement—one that did not seek confrontation but refused to avoid it.5
Southern Negro Youth Congress volunteers joined forces with Hudson in Birmingham, with the CIO, and with a growing number of local black fraternities and churches. Several SNYC members joined black churches in order to establish trust with the preachers and solidarity with the congregations. Whatever their religious beliefs, or lack of them may have been, SNYC’s social justice mission came first. SNYC also collaborated with Birmingham’s white League of Young Southerners (LYS), founded in 1938 as the youth division of the SCHW. SNYC and LYS members jointly offered literacy and leadership classes in the city’s black Prince Hall Masonic Temple and organized voter registration drives and campaigns to end the poll tax. SNYC members assisted the NAACP with antilynching campaigns and promoted the National Urban League’s vocational education programs as well as the CIO’s labor organization drives. This cooperation reflected a high-water mark in a budding Southern Freedom movement in the Magic City.
In April 1938, Hosea Hudson attended SNYC’s second annual conference in Chattanooga, and in November SNYC sent several delegates to the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. In 1939, SNYC held its annual conference in Birmingham and the following year moved its headquarters from Richmond to the Magic City. Rob Hall was thrilled by the infusion of energy. Here was a new crop of young radicals stepping up—dedicated, smart, tough, and right on time—district 17 needed all the help it could get.
Theophilus “Bull” Connor, a popular radio sportscaster was Birmingham’s new commissioner of public safety. Just as Chief Fred McDuff once made life miserable for Tom Johnson and Harry Jackson, so Connor continued the tradition. Early on he had demonstrated his anti-Red zeal by attempting to close down Birmingham’s SCHW in 1938.
That year the CIO launched a massive organizing campaign focused on southern tobacco, rubber, lumber, and textile workers. Unfortunately, John L. Lewis’s Red organizers, who’d demonstrated great skill in utilizing sit-down strikes in 1936, were unable to replicate those successes. Sit-down strikes had eliminated strikebreaking in 1936, but two years later HUAC had struck them down as “conspiracies in restraint of interstate commerce.”
Philip Murray, who succeeded Lewis in 1940, considered himself a labormanagement advocate, and under his watch CIO organizers were instructed to quash all sit-down strikes.6 This caused the remaining Red organizers to bitterly regret scrapping the old TUUL unions, which were “revolutionary” rather than “reform” operations. Vladimir Lenin himself had counseled that “workers who put their trust in reformists are always fooled.”7
On January 25, 1940, Joe Gelders, chair of the SCHW Standing Committee on Civil Rights, launched a weekly tabloid, the Southern News Almanac. It served the functions that the defunct Southern Worker once had—keeping its constituents informed, motivated, and connected. His white coeditor Sam Hall (no relation to Rob Hall), a chubby, affable former North Carolina district organizer, was another Alabama native and former editor of the Anniston Star. He’d helped Gelders launch the SCHW.8
The Southern News Almanac published essays, editorials, and general news about labor issues, police brutality, the coming war in Europe, antiwar activity in the United States, racism, and capitalism. Contributors ran the gamut from organizers, politicians, students, radical clergy, and musicians, to social philosophers, hourly workers, and anarchists. Gelders tried to reach as broad a constituency as possible.
Fred Maxey, a white former negotiator with the U.S. Department of Labor and pastor of the Mount Hebron Baptist Church near Leeds, Alabama, wrote a weekly column “Pulpit in Print.” Maxey had worked among Kentucky coal miners for years. A fiery social gospel preacher, he accused the church of turning its back on the New Testament mandate of caring for the poor. The Jesus he proclaimed preached radical social justice and would have opposed the poll tax and supported black voting rights.9
Don West, a white ordained Presbyterian minister who’d left the church to preach the social gospel and organize workers, strikers, and the unemployed, also contributed a column titled “The Awakening Church.”
In October 1940, folksinger Pete Seeger visited a struggling coal miner’s family in rural Kentucky and wrote a piece about his experience for the Southern News Almanac. In a second article, “No More Labor Wanted Until Further Notice: Camp Blanding, Florida,” he documented the story of hundreds of unemployed men who’d been lured to Florida by the prospect of building a new army camp. When they arrived and found there was no work, many were rendered homeless as well as jobless.10
In 1941, Gelders, in partnership with Montgomery activist Virginia Durr, founded an independent National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax and petitioned Congress to eliminate the tax in federal elections. That was the year Germany invaded the Soviet Union and Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, changing Josef Stalin’s worldview radically. He subsequently pursued an alliance with the United States and Great Britain. Incredibly, a capitalist, a colonialist, and a communist formed a successful alliance of convenience to overcome fascism. The coming of war had changed everything.
During the war the CIO’s Philip Murray declared a moratorium on strikes and demanded that all his organizers sign no-strike pledges. Harry Haywood deeply resented that mandate, as he did Murray’s subsequent refusal to support a march on Washington to demand opportunities for black workers in defense plants. In 1942, despite the large number of blacks in the CIO ranks, Murray refused to recognize the Pittsburgh (PA) Courier’s popular “Double V” campaign for Victory over fascism abroad and Victory over racism at home. Murray argued that both the march and the Double V campaign would distract from the war effort.11
By early 1942, James Jackson and Ed Strong of SNYC, Rob Hall, Sam Hall, Joe Gelders, and many of Birmingham’s steel and smelter workers, coal miners, and district organizers had either enlisted in the armed forces or had been drafted. The Southern News Almanac stopped publishing at the end of 1941.
While the Allies were ultimately victorious, the alliance with the Soviet Union did not survive the peace and Earl Browder’s leadership barely survived the war. In his 1944 decision to dissolve CPUSA and replace it with a “political association,” he’d clearly overplayed his hand. The Comintern expelled him a year later.
After the war, Rob Hall accepted a journalistic assignment in Washington, D.C., Nat Ross subsequently returned to Birmingham as southern district director. He worked with Sam Hall, recently discharged from the navy. The International Labor Defense, the National Negro Congress, and the National Federation of Constitutional Liberties ultimately merged to create the Civil Rights Congress, led by William Patterson.
The LYS never reassembled after the war, and the SCHW disbanded in 1948. On April 23, 1948, SNYC held its eighth and final conference in the Magic City. In 1949 the organization was placed on the U.S. Attorney General’s list of subversives. Nearly fifteen years later Bull Connor would still be grousing, “the trouble with this country is communism, socialism and journalism.”12
Phil Murray fired the last of John L. Lewis’s Red organizers in 1949. They were a bad fit in the new postwar anticommunist environment.13 In 1950 the Birmingham City Council drafted legislation to outlaw the Communist Party within city limits. Bull Connor vowed to make an example of Sam Hall. Since Nat Ross was gone by then, Hall was the city’s “top commie.” In June, members of Connor’s Red Squad arrested him for vagrancy, the charge that Sheriff McDuff had so successfully utilized. Despite the fact that Hall could verify his employment with the Communist Party, he was indicted anyway since his employer was considered “disreputable.” Sylvia Hall contacted a local attorney to get her husband released on bond and they drove to New York City. While they were there, the Birmingham City Council passed the anticommunist ordinance. Reds had forty-eight hours to leave town; if they refused, they would be subject to both a $100 fine and 180 days in jail.
While in New York, Sam Hall consulted with William Patterson at the Civil Rights Congress who engaged attorney John Coe of Pensacola, Florida. Coe brought suit in federal court to invalidate the ordinance because it violated the Fourteenth Amendent’s “due process” clause. In October 1950, he argued before U.S. District Judge Seybourn Lynne of the Fifth Circuit of Appeals that “by passing such ordinances we rush headlong into fascism because we are afraid of communism.” Coe allowed that a member of the Communist Party might be excluded from a sensitive government position, but as a general rule Americans should not be imprisoned for their beliefs, even if those beliefs extend to the overthrow of the government.14
Judge Lynne concurred, not only invalidating the ordinance but overturning the vagrancy charge against Hall. Bull Connor complained that “if the Fourteenth Amendment protects communists in this country then it is time for Congress and the people to start amending the Fourteenth Amendment.”15 The Halls returned to Birmingham staying just long enough to pack and leave Alabama permanently.
In 1951 the Birmingham City Council passed a Communist Control Law requiring members of the party to register with the Department of Public Safety. Clifford Durr, a white Montgomery attorney who’d chaired the Federal Communications Commission during the New Deal years, recalled that “life in the South in the early 1950’s could be pleasant only if one took a firm stand in opposition to the boll-weevil and in favor of white face cattle and crimson clover and avoided the petty issues of domestic and international politics.”16
The struggle to build a strong interracial southern social justice coalition eventually passed to a new generation. While district 17, the ILD, the SCHW, SNYC, LYS, and the NNC were all gone, they’d provided working models for the generation that would shape the movement culture in Birmingham. New organizations emerged: SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), whose shock troops helped to sustain Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Fred Shuttlesworth’s Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Projects like the Freedom Rides, the Mississippi Summer, the Freedom Schools, and the Mississippi Free Democratic Party have district 17’s influence woven all through them.
History may be cyclical, but there is still that arc of the moral universe to consider. While it reveals itself to be long and bending toward justice, it still requires human beings to do the heavy lifting.