Ain't no foreign country in the world foreign as Alabama to a New Yorker. They know all about England, maybe, France, never met one who knew ‘Bama.’
—Anonymous black Communist, 1945
After spending several years hobnobbing with European, Asian, and Soviet dignitaries of the Third International, Daily Worker correspondent Joseph North made a most unforgettable journey to, of all places, Chambers County, Alabama. Traveling surreptitiously with a black Birmingham Communist as his escort, North reached his destination—the tumbledown shack of a “sharecropper comrade”—in the wee hours of the night. The dark figure who greeted the two men “had read the Worker for years; solid and reliable, he was respected by his folk here, who regarded him as a ‘man with answers.’ The sharecropper was an elder in the Zion [A.] M.E. Church, who ‘trusts God but keeps his powder dry’; reads his Bible every night, can quote from the Book of Daniel and the Book of Job . . . and he's been studying the Stalin book on the nation question.”1
Although North's visit took place in 1945, on the eve of the Alabama Party's collapse, the “sharecropper comrade” he describes above epitomized the complex, seemingly contradictory radical legacy the Party left behind. Built from scratch by working people without a Euro-American left-wing tradition, the Alabama Communist Party was enveloped by the cultures and ideas of its constituency. Composed largely of poor blacks, most of whom were semiliterate and devoutly religious, the Alabama cadre also drew a small circle of white folks—whose ranks swelled or diminished over time—ranging from ex-Klansmen to former Wobblies, unemployed male industrial workers to iconoclastic youth, restless housewives to renegade liberals.
These unlikely radicals, their milieu, and the movement they created make up the central subjects of this book. Heeding Victoria de Grazia's appeal to historians of the American Left for “a social history of politics,” I have tried to construct a narrative that examines Communist political opposition through the lenses of social and cultural history, paying particular attention to the worlds from which these radicals came, the worlds in which they lived, and the imaginary worlds they sought to build. I pluralize “worlds” to emphasize the myriad individual and collective differences within the Alabama Communist movement. Those assembled under the red banner did not all share the same vision of radical opposition, nor were they motivated by the same circumstances. Neither the “Jimmy (or Jane) Higginses” of historian Aileen Kraditor's mind nor the doughty, selfless caricatures of left-wing fiction, these women and men came from the farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets, not as intellectual blank sheets but loaded down with cultural and ideological baggage molded by their race, class, gender, work, community, region, history, upbringing, and collective memory. Their ideas and concerns shaped the Party's political practice and social life at the most local level. And, in turn, Alabama radicals were themselves shaped by local CP leaders’ efforts to change the way “ordinary” people thought about politics, history, and society. What emerged was a malleable movement rooted in a variety of different pasts, reflecting a variety of different voices, and incorporating countless contradictory tendencies. The movement's very existence validates literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin's observation that a culture is not static but open, “capable of death and renewal, transcending itself, that is exceeding its own boundaries.”2
And Alabama Communists had titanic boundaries to exceed. More than in the Northeast and Midwest, the regional incubators of American Communism, race pervaded virtually every aspect of Southern society. The relations between industrial labor and capital, and landlords and tenants, were clouded by divisions based on skin color. On the surface, at least, it seemed that there existed two separate racial communities in the segregated South that only intersected in the world of work or at the marketplace. Sharp class distinctions endured within both black and white communities, but racism tended to veil, and at times arrest, intraracial class conflict as well as interracial working-class unity. Alabama Party leaders could not escape the prevalence of race, despite their unambiguous emphasis on class-based politics. Indeed, during its first five years in Alabama, the CP inevitably evolved into a “race” organization, a working-class alternative to the NAACP. As Nell Painter observed, the rank-and-file folk “made the Party their own. In Alabama in the 1930’s, the CP was a southern, working-class black organization.”3
The homegrown radicalism that had germinated in poor black communities and among tiny circles of white rebels remained deep underground. Alabama Communists did not have much choice. Their challenge to racism and to the status quo prompted a wave of repression one might think inconceivable in a democratic country. The extent and character of anti-radical repression in the South constitute a crucial part of our story. When we ponder Werner Sombart's question, “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” in light of the South, violence and lawlessness loom large. The fact is, the CP and its auxiliaries in Alabama did have a considerable following, some of whom devoured Marxist literature and dreamed of a socialist world. But to be a Communist, an ILD member, or an SCU militant was to face the possibility of imprisonment, beatings, kidnapping, and even death. And yet the Party survived, and at times thrived, in this thoroughly racist, racially divided, and repressive social world.
Indeed, most scholars have underestimated the Southern Left and have underrated the role violence played in quashing radical movements. Religious fundamentalism, white racism, black ignorance or indifference, the Communists’ presumed insensitivity to Southern culture, their advocacy of black self-determination during the early 1930s, and an overall lack of class consciousness are all oft-cited explanations for the Party's “failure” to attract Southern workers.4 The experiences of Alabama Communists, however, suggest that racial divisions were far more fluid and Southern working-class consciousness far more complex than most historians have realized. The African-Americans who made up the Alabama radical movement experienced and opposed race and class oppression as a totality. The Party and its various auxiliaries served as vehicles for black working-class opposition on a variety of different levels ranging from antiracist activities to intraracial class conflict. Furthermore, the CP attracted some openly bigoted whites despite its militant antiracist slogans. The Party also drew women whose efforts to overcome gender-defined limitations proved more decisive to their radicalization than did either race or class issues.
I suppose I should say something about the now infamous debate over the CPUSA's relationship to the Communist International. Although it had been brewing since the “new social historians,” who sought to rewrite CP history from the “bottom up,” challenged earlier studies by Theodore Draper and others depicting American Communists as veritable puppets of Kremlin intrigue, the controversy reached a climax in 1985 when battle lines were drawn between pro- and anti-Draper forces and a deluge of letters and articles engulfed the New York Review of Books.5 As a twenty-three-year-old graduate student about to embark on what would have been a multivolume dissertation on the Communist Party in South Africa and the American South, I was eager to enter the fray. But as I was an unknown entity in the academic community with only a book review to my credit, no respectable journal or newspaper would have taken me seriously. Nevertheless, my youth and anonymity turned out to be a blessing in disguise, for after having spent the next four years living and breathing Alabama CP history, the whole debate seems, in retrospect, rather superfluous, even silly.
Of course the Alabama cadre dutifully followed national and international leadership, just as Birmingham NAACP leaders jumped at every directive handed down from their executive secretary Walter White. Local Communists cried out for direction, especially after wrestling with vague theoretical treatises on capital's crisis or on the growing specter of fascism. Though they knowingly bucked national leadership decisions on a few occasions, local cadre tried their best to apply the then current political line to the tasks at hand. But because neither Joe Stalin, Earl Browder, nor William Z. Foster spoke directly to them or to their daily problems, Alabama Communists developed strategies and tactics in response to local circumstances that, in most cases, had nothing to do with international crises. Besides, if Alabamians had waited patiently for orders from Moscow, they might still be waiting today. Not only were lines of communication between New York and Birmingham hazy throughout the 1930s and 1940s, but Birmingham Communists had enough difficulty maintaining contact with comrades as close as Tallapoosa County.
The complex and decentralized structure of Party organization in Alabama requires a nuanced, somewhat detailed narrative sensitive to local history. Hammer and Hoe examines Party activity in the neighborhoods, industrial suburbs, company towns of the greater Birmingham-Bessemer area, the black belt and its urban centers of Montgomery and Selma, and the eastern piedmont counties. When possible, I have tried to chronicle CP work in Mobile as well as in several northern Alabama counties, but Communists there did not have much of a public presence and left very few records. The organization of this book, therefore, reflects the Party's multiissue, multicommunity focus. Following a brief portrait of Birmingham from its inception to the Great Depression, Part I reconstructs the period from 1930 to 1935 in five thematic chapters. Chapter 1 documents the Party's origins and early organizing efforts among Birmingham's jobless from 1930 to 1933. Turning to the countryside, chapter 2 chronicles the Share Croppers’ Union's first five years and offers some insights into the context and character of rural radicalism. The Party's industrial organizing efforts and the intensification of antiradical repression during the 1934 strike wave are the focus of chapter 3. The fourth chapter looks at the CP-led International Labor Defense's challenge to black middle-class leadership and examines the racial, class, and sexual dimensions of the ILD's involvement in alleged rape cases. The final chapter in Part I steps back from the narrative for a moment and explores the social, ideological, and cultural foundations of radicalism among black Communists, the ways in which Marxist pedagogy influenced their outlook, and the Party's role in shaping class conflict within the black community.
Part II, which deals with the Popular Front (1935–39), adopts a similar thematic format. Chapter 6 (1935—37) traces local leaders’ response to and interpretation of the new policy, discusses Communist efforts to build alliances with Southern liberals, and examines the effect of Popular Front politics on the Party's rank-and-file. Chapters 7 through 9 analyze the Communists’ role in building both the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the Workers’ Alliance and document the collapse of the Share Croppers’ Union. These three chapters, along with chapter 6, explain the decline in black Party membership during the Popular Front. The Birmingham CP's retreat from working-class militancy and entrance into the world of Southern liberalism—the period from 1937 to 1939—are the subjects of chapter 10. Part III, which covers the historical moment from the Nazi-Soviet Pact to U.S. entry into World War II, consists of a single chapter. Here we find the Party on the road to revitalization, not as an autonomous organization but as part of a much broader, radical interracial youth movement. Finally, the Epilogue sweeps through the war and postwar periods, reconstructing the Party's ultimate demise and ruminating on the legacy it left behind.
In closing, I should add that some of the stories herein have been told before. Two decades ago an old black farmer named Ned Cobb shared his recollections of the Communist-led Share Croppers’ Union with Theodore and Dale Rosengarten. The result was the moving narrative All God's Dangers (1974). Another participant-griot, Hosea Hudson, preserved the struggles of Birmingham Communists in his heavily edited book, Black Worker in the Deep South (1972). A few years later, the richness and complexity of Hudson's life and the lives of his comrades were brilliantly captured by Nell Irvin Painter in The Narrative of Hosea Hudson, His Life as a Negro Communist in the South (1979). Two magnificent oral memoirs are a hell of an act to follow. No university-trained historian can match the beauty and grace of Cobb's and Hudson's storytelling, nor can she or he convey, with all the required subtleties, the feelings, the fears, the pride, the confusion—the mosaic of emotions that went with being black and radical in the depression South. In order to truly appreciate the men and women who made the movement, I urge all to read Rosengarten's and Painter's wonderful narratives as companion volumes to this book.
The saga of the Alabama Communist Party is but a chapter in a larger work waiting to be written. Communists were all over the South, from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Oxford, Mississippi, influencing communities and individuals in ways we have yet to understand, making history we have yet to know. Though they never seized state power or led a successful socialist revolution below the Mason-Dixon line, Communists deserve a place in Southern history. As former Alabama Party leader Robert Fowler Hall argued a few years ago, “If the courage of white liberals, though ineffective, is worth a book, the courage of Southern Communists during those three decades justifies some footnotes.”6 At the very least, some books.
Atlanta and Chapel Hill
July 1989