We were the slaves in Pharaoh's land
You and he and I,
And we were serfs to feudal hands
Now that times gone by.
Prentices in cities, prisoners for debt.
Hunted vagrants, parish poor,
Our life is a lie.
We move an invisible army. . . .
—“All of Us Together” (Southern labor song, ca. 1930s)
For Communists eager to get on with the task of revolution, the South was a new, mysterious frontier. Arriving in Gastonia, North Carolina, Chattanooga, Tennessee, Greenville, South Carolina, and Birmingham, Alabama, they brought with them the cultural and ideological baggage of a Northern, urban-based movement, including assumptions about the backwardness of Southern workers. Yet, gnawing at the edges of their preconceptions was a policy that situated Southern blacks at the heart of the region's revolutionary movement. Following nearly a decade of resolutions and reassessments on the “Negro Question,” in 1928 the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International insisted that blacks concentrated in the black belt counties of the Deep South constituted an oppressed nation. This region, dominated by cotton plantations, consisted of counties with a numerical black majority. As an oppressed nation, the resolution maintained, African-Americans had the right to self-determination: political power, control over the economy, and the right to secede from the United States. In 1930 the resolution was altered to account for the differences between North and South. Northern blacks, the new resolution argued, sought integration and assimilation, and therefore the demand for self-determination was to be applied exclusively to the South.1
The new position opened a new chapter in CPUSA history. With the possible exceptions of B. H. Lauderdale, a white Communist from Becken-bridge, Texas, who tried unsuccessfully to place the Communist Party on the ballot in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama in 1922, and William Z. Foster, who orchestrated a Southern presidential campaign tour in 1928, the Party never ventured south before 1929. Apparently unaware of the region's own history of working-class and rural radicalism, national Communist leaders presumed the South to be an impenetrable bastion of racist conservatism and derided the notion that Southern blacks had their own radical tradition. Communist John Owens opposed bringing Southern blacks into the Party because “the vast majority of southern Negroes are not revolutionary, not even radical. Given a society of peace, prosperity and security, they are content to drift through life.”2
On the other hand, Southerners evaluated Northern radicals through their own ideological lenses. When the Communists entered the Magic City to extend their form of immigrant, urban, working-class radicalism to the industrial South, they entered a world unaccustomed to “Reds” outside the pale of mythology. Residents became familiar with Communism through radio and newspapers or through hearsay and urban folklore—stories of North Carolina textile strikers were hardly ignored by Southerners, black or white.3 Popular myths of evil Reds wishing only to sow the seeds of discord were intended to neutralize the Party's message. But the depression had hit Alabama so hard that many working people, especially blacks, viewed hunger and joblessness as the greater evil. Thus, for some the Communists were devils incarnate; for others they were avenging angels. But for all Birminghamians the CP was a new and strange addition to the Southern landscape.
The Central Committee of the CPUSA chose Birmingham, the center of heavy industry in the South, as headquarters for the newly established District 17, encompassing Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Located on the fringe of the black belt, Birmingham also served as a jumping-off point for the organization of sharecroppers and agricultural workers.4 The first full-time organizers in Birmingham were Tom Johnson and Harry Jackson, two veteran white Communists who had been active trade union organizers in the North. Johnson had worked in Cleveland, and Harry Jackson had spent considerable time as a longshoreman in San Francisco. The precise moment of their arrival is rather hazy, but they were visibly active late in 1929, having established contact with Italian metal worker James Giglio before arriving. Giglio had earlier written to the CP-led TUUL in New York and shortly thereafter established a Birmingham chapter of the Metal Workers Industrial League. Through Giglio, Johnson met with black TCI workers in Ensley, an industrial suburb of Birmingham, and subsequently recruited the first Communist Party unit at a street-corner meeting in a black section of town. The Party even opened an office downtown (2117!/2 Second Ave. North), though its presence was brief. A few weeks later, on March 23, 1930, the TUUL held its first mass meeting. Some two hundred participants, about three-quarters of whom were black, piled into the Joy Boys Dance Hall in downtown Birmingham to hear speeches by Giglio, Tom Johnson, and Walter Lewis, a newly recruited black steel worker from Montgomery. The meeting went without incident, but within days Giglio's home was firebombed.5
The bombing was enough to convince Party leaders to lie low for the next two months. Meanwhile, the Central Committee dispatched an additional veteran organizer to strengthen the Birmingham cadre. Fresh from a year in the Soviet Union, the twenty-four-year-did, New York-born Frank Burns had been an active Communist since 1926. Bolstered by Burns's appointment, the Party resumed its organizing efforts with a mass meeting on May 22, at which Tom Johnson delivered a poignant address before a sympathetic and predominantly black crowd of over two hundred. Citing examples of recent lynchings in Georgia and Texas to excoriate Southern racism, Johnson proposed the idea of black self-determination in the black belt, advocated social and economic equality for blacks, and was reported to have “lauded the Soviet government.” The other two speakers, Burns and Walter Lewis, called for the abolition of segregation in the city's cafes and public transportation and strongly condemned racism as the stumbling block to improving all workers’ lives.6
The meeting made a lasting impression on several participants, including an eighteen-year-old black coal miner named Angelo Herndon, whose incarceration for organizing black and white workers in Atlanta two years later would make him one of the most celebrated black Communists in the country. Born on May 6, 1913, in the steel and coal mining town of Wyoming, Ohio, Herndon and his thirteen brothers and sisters grew up amid poverty. Herndon's mother, a very religious woman who had hoped young Angelo would choose the ministry as his livelihood, was left alone to care for fourteen children after the death of her husband. At age thirteen, Herndon and one of his brothers left home in search of jobs, eventually finding work in the coal mines of Birmingham. The grueling labor and unfair practices of coal operators ignited a number of confrontations between groups of workers and foremen—encounters that would eventually play a significant role in Herndon's radicalization. Persuaded by the Party's commitment to social justice and racial equality, Herndon joined the Communists and quickly became one of Birmingham's most active organizers.7
As the summer approached, Communists moved their gatherings from indoor halls to outdoor parks. In May, about seven hundred blacks and one hundred whites gathered in Capitol Park to demand relief for unemployed workers and to protest the recent arrests of six Communists in Atlanta. The organizers then led an impromptu march to the Birmingham Community Chest headquarters to demand immediate relief but were turned away by nearly one hundred police officers.8 The incident prompted city commissioner Jimmie Jones to conduct a full-scale investigation into radical activities and to introduce a strict criminal anarchy ordinance to “curb communism.” Passed unanimously by the city commission on June 17, 1930, the new ordinance made it unlawful for anyone to advocate “criminal anarchy” by print or word of mouth or to be a member of an organization which does so. Conviction could result in fines up to $100 and 180 days in jail.9
In defiance of the new ordinance, the Communists held an open meeting to elect delegates to the National Convention on Unemployment in Chicago, and a few days later a group of 250 black workers attended a demonstration in Capitol Park. The Party's disregard of the new law, compounded by heightened racial tensions surrounding black congressman Oscar DePriest's announced visit to Birmingham, induced greater police repression. During a demonstration in Wilson Park held on June 28, city detectives arrested several Communists, including leading black organizer Gilbert Lewis, charging them with “advocating social equality between whites and negroes.” Earlier that day, Tom Johnson and Oscar DePriest were burned in effigy by a mob of whites.10
Throughout the summer, Birmingham police invoked the criminal anarchy ordinance to arrest known activists and raid the homes of black workers suspected of possessing radical literature. Although the arrests led to few convictions and the charges were usually dropped or reduced to vagrancy violations,11 the constant harassment took its toll on Party work. Conceding that the repression in the South was much greater than elsewhere, the district bureau formulated plans for creating armed and unarmed defense corps in Birmingham and Chattanooga. The unarmed groups were to be trained in street fighting tactics to protect demonstrators and delay police, while the select armed corps was supposed to protect organizers in mining camps and other isolated areas. Although the armed defense corps were apparently never activated, Communist leaders kept firearms for self-defense and occasionally pawned them when funds were low. When police raids failed to turn up documents, guns were often confiscated.12
In the midst of heightened police repression, the Party initiated a Southern-based radical weekly and established a workers’ school for its new recruits. At the behest of the Central Committee, twenty-four-year-old James S. Allen (né Sol Auerbach) left his post as editor of the Labor Defender, the journal of the ILD, and traveled south with his wife and comrade, Isabelle Allen, and a paltry sum of $200 to launch the Southern Worker. Datelined Birmingham in order to confuse police, it was originally published in Chattanooga where anti-Communist repression was not as great.13 The first issue of the Southern Worker appeared on August 16, 1930. Selling for two cents a copy, three thousand copies were printed and distributed throughout Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Allen's first editorial statement described the new publication as “a paper of and for both the white and black workers and farmers: It recognizes only one division, the bosses against the workers and the workers against the bosses.” The only way to achieve the demands of the working class, he reasoned, was through proletarian revolution. Surprisingly, the editorial statement did not mention the Party's position on self-determination in the black belt, and it contained very little discussion regarding the specific struggles of African-Americans. The paper's credo notwithstanding, so much space was devoted to the problems of black working people that Southern-born white Communists occasionally commented on the paper's perceived problack bias. In a letter to the editor, one white Party member complained that he could not sell subscriptions for a paper that “devotes 90 percent of its news to Negroes and 10 percent to whites.”14
Allen had good reason to devote more space to black working people. From the beginning, Birmingham blacks exhibited a greater interest in the Party than did whites. The Communists’ original cadre of three organizers in 1929 was augmented to over ninety by the end of August 1930, and over five hundred working people populated the Party's mass organizations, of whom between 80 and 90 percent were black.15 There was little doubt in the minds of district organizers that “Negroes ... are the decisive strata among [the] toiling masses in the South.” During the 1930 election campaign, the Communist Party did what no political party had done in Alabama since Reconstruction: it endorsed a black candidate, Walter Lewis, for governor. The election platform included complete racial equality and maintained that the exercise of self-determination in the black belt was the only way to end lynching and achieve political rights for Southern blacks.16
Alarmed by the Communist Party's growing support among black working people, leading white citizens and government officials temporarily breathed a sigh of relief when a congressional committee to investigate “communist propaganda” under Congressman Hamilton Fish decided to hold hearings in Birmingham. Predictably, as the Communists in Birmingham assailed the hearings as part of a sustained effort to outlaw the CP, local authorities and the press expressed confidence that the Fish Committee would end the radical menace once and for all. The hearings intensified anti-Communist hysteria, as various witnesses described the intricate workings of a secret, foreign-led movement whose predominantly black ranks numbered up to eight thousand strong in Alabama alone. In retrospect, these exaggerations are astounding since the Birmingham CP possessed just over one hundred members at the time.17
The publicity surrounding the hearings did not hinder the Party's growth that fall. Party units were established in three metal shops, in a mine, and on a cotton plantation some forty miles north of Birmingham, and Communists employed by the U.S. Pipe Company began publishing a shop newsletter entitled the Red Hammer. By late 1930 the Party had spread beyond the borders of Jefferson County and gained a few adherents among white farmers and miners in the northern Alabama counties of Cullman, Winston, Walker, St. Clair, Morgan, and Marshall—a region with a Republican, Populist, and to a lesser degree, Socialist tradition. In January 1931, Tom Johnson helped a group of Cullman County farmers form the Alabama Farmers’ Relief Fund, an affiliate of the Communist-led United Farmers’ League in North Dakota, and within two months at least nine small locals were scattered throughout the state.18
At the Seventh National Convention in June 1930, Party leaders elected to postpone the ambitious industrial organizing drive in Alabama in favor of a campaign that would focus on the immediate needs of the jobless. Central Committee as well as local Party leaders realized that, because of recent plant closures, the pressing need for work or relief eclipsed all other issues affecting Birmingham workers. The demand for jobs was so great that numerous independent efforts were launched by industrialists and middle-class organizations to relieve the situation. In addition to sponsoring public works projects, in 1930 the chamber of commerce worked out a plan through which meal tickets redeemable at participating restaurants could be purchased by needy citizens. The League of Women Voters instituted a “clean up, paint up, repair up” campaign in an attempt to relieve unemployment, but these efforts did little to remedy the situation. There was, however, one organized effort generated from the working class itself that was independent of, and even hostile to, the Communist Party. In April 1930, white labor organizer John Bago formed an all-white unemployed organization with about one hundred members. When one of its members suggested a march on city hall to demand $50,000 from the Board of Revenue, Bago opposed the idea, labeling such a march “communistic.” Having achieved nothing tangible, the organization disbanded within a few months.19
As the winter approached, the CP stepped up its own relief campaign by holding a series of demonstrations to draw attention to the plight of the jobless. In preparation for a rally in Capitol Park in September, local Communists issued a leaflet that spoke directly to Birmingham's growing number of homeless. “White and colored workers are being evicted from their homes and thrown out on the streets to shift for themselves. Gas and water is [sic] being cut off because the unemployed workers can not pay their bills.” Although police arrested organizers Angelo Herndon and Tom Johnson on the day of the rally, a large and restive crowd of blacks gathered and remained in Capitol Park until police turned them away.20
A few weeks later, the Metal Workers Industrial League planned a mass meeting of unemployed steel workers in Ensley to demand immediate relief, an end to evictions, free light and heat for the city's jobless, and to reaffirm their support for a Communist-sponsored social insurance bill that proposed minimum cash assistance of twenty-five dollars per week to all unemployed workers. Under the slogan “Organize and Fight! Don't Starve,” the league drew an estimated twenty-five hundred steel workers, but the meeting was postponed after its principal speaker, Harry Jackson, was detained by police. One of the more dramatic instances of mass confrontation occurred on December 16, 1930. Joe Burton, an eighteen-year-old black YCL activist, led a spontaneous demonstration of workers who had congregated at a bridge construction site seeking work. Burton persuaded the crowd—which had grown to nearly five thousand according to Party sources—to storm the lobby of the Hotel Morris and demand jobs or immediate relief, but police intervened and dispersed the gathering.21
The vast majority of Birmingham poor probably thought the Communists were fighting a lost cause. The political and financial power of the city's corporate interests seemed unassailable to most people, and the militance with which the Communists challenged authority might have appeared suicidal. The depression certainly devastated most working families, but economic need alone did not drive large numbers of unemployed into the arms of the Communist Party. Sons and daughters of the land, many black workers had lived through winters as sharecroppers with few resources available and had learned dozens of creative methods of survival. In addition to performing odd jobs in exchange for food, obtaining grocery store throwaways, selling roasted peanuts on the streets, and hauling and selling firewood, coal was appropriated from the mines and railroads and sold or used as fuel. Empty homes were occasionally torn apart by the poor desperately in need of fuel. Individuals who might not have benefited directly from the stolen wood took advantage of the vacancies by obtaining free rent in exchange for “protecting” some landlord's private property.22
Urban cultivation was the most common survival strategy, as both a source of additional food as well as cash income. During the depression, one Birmingham woman recalls, “everybody had chickens, hogs, and a garden.” Urban gardens proliferated rapidly during the depression: in Jefferson County the number of farms increased 94 percent between 1930 and 1935, yet the average size per farm decreased from 53.4 acres to 30.6 acres. Jobless and underemployed workers invested in various forms of livestock, from milk cows to pigs, and plots of land were cultivated, ranging in size from small vegetable gardens to thirty- or forty-acre farms. Cultivation generally took place on company property in the coal and ore mines as well as in the industrial suburbs and back alleys. A 1934 study of Birmingham's working-class communities located 7,595 pigs and 1,996 cows within the city limits, the vast majority belonging to black families.23 These methods of survival kept some families off the relief rolls, but for most unemployed or workers whose hours had been cut back substantially, welfare was also a necessary supplement. TCI's elaborate welfare system, established just before the outbreak of World War I, was extremely limited. Workers paid all health care expenses through monthly fees levied on their paychecks, and although TCI provided unemployed relief, such assistance had to be paid back. Employees unable to pay rent on company-owned homes were not automatically evicted; the accumulated rent payments were deferred to a later date, and heat, electricity, and water were cut off immediately.24
In an effort to curtail unemployment, the city commission proposed a $500,000 bond issue early in 1931 to create employment opportunities through public works projects. The twelve hundred jobs it created, however, paid only twenty-five cents an hour for three eight-hour days. The city's relief program, in the eyes of one black worker, was worse than slavery: “In slavery times, I am told, the master would put good shirts and overalls on you and today we can't even eat on $6 a week.” The Communists assailed the plan as a scheme to cut wages that would result in a bureaucratic haven for graft and corruption. In its place, the Party called for a government relief program that would provide the unemployed with a weekly minimum of ten dollars cash relief, free coal, carfare, and a minimum of twenty dollars per week for city relief jobs, and would protect the jobless from evictions and utilities shutoffs.25
Municipal and county governments’ inadequate resources left the Red Cross to bear the brunt of Birmingham's relief needs. Its monthly expenditures increased from $6,000 in 1929 to $180,000 by July 1933, and the number of cases rose from 450 in 1929 to 20,914 in 1933. The Red Cross's case load was supposed to have been transferred back to city and county governments in 1930, but the city could not afford the burden and county officials refused the undertaking. The paltry $1,000 monthly subsidy offered by the city did little to relieve the Red Cross's burden.26
Birmingham's unemployed found little beneficence working for the Red Cross, whose public improvement projects involved demolishing abandoned buildings, rebuilding rural schools, draining lowland areas, and gardening. In a letter to the Daily Worker, a black Birmingham worker complained that the “Red Cross boss stands with a pistol over us while we work, like we are prisoners working out a term.” These conditions were compounded by the fact that the Red Cross's relief payments were among the lowest in the country. To make matters worse, by August 1932 the Birmingham Red Cross had stopped providing cash relief altogether, offering only food, fuel, and medication.27
Throughout the spring and summer of 1931, the Party and the unemployed councils held a series of demonstrations against the Red Cross in North Birmingham, calling for a complete boycott of the Birmingham Community Chest. The unemployed councils also sent a communication to the governor and the state legislature criticizing the Red Cross's efforts as inadequate and demanding that the issue of unemployment relief “take precedence over all questions before the legislature.” The councils’ leaders requested, among other things, free utilities for all unemployed and underemployed workers, provisions for opening all schools and free lunch for school children, and the right to vote without restrictions and irrespective of race.28
Having little faith in petitions and boycotts, Communists organized neighborhood relief committees to present their demands to the Birmingham welfare board and to deal with members’ specific grievances on an individual basis. These committees also fought evictions and foreclosures, but unlike militants in New York or Chicago, they tried to avoid confrontations with authorities by adopting more evasive tactics, ranging from flooding landlords with postcards and letters to simple reasoning. Representatives of the unemployed councils often dissuaded landlords from evicting their tenants by describing the potential devastation that could occur once an abandoned house became a free-for-all for firewood. When a family's electricity was shut off for nonpayment, activists from the unemployed council frequently used heavy-gauge copper wires as “jumpers” to appropriate electricity from public outlets or other homes. Council members also found ways to reactivate water mains after they had been turned off, though the process was more complicated than pilfering electricity. And in at least one instance, a group of black women used verbal threats to stop a city employee from turning off one family's water supplies.29
Women frequently assumed leadership in the neighborhood relief committees, usually because the economic downturn directly impinged upon their designated roles as mothers, housewives, and workers. Black female domestics experienced layoffs, speedups (employers used the threat of competition to extract more work over less time), and wage cuts because of overall cutbacks in the use of paid household labor and the increasing utilization of labor-saving devices. Without the benefit of sick pay, vacations, or regular hours, some women toiled in white kitchens for as low as $1.50 to $2.00 per week. Wages were so low during the 1930s that many women earned just enough to pay their rent and lived day-to-day on the food they “toted” from their employers kitchens.30 According to the 1930 Census, approximately 82 percent of, or 16,000, black female wage earners were engaged in domestic services, and in 1935 at least 8,000 black female domestic workers had registered with the Alabama Employment Service.31
The lack of domestic work was compounded by the dearth of employment opportunities for women. Dominated by the steel, iron ore, and coal mining industries of the Birmingham-Bessemer industrial complex, most other avenues for employment were closed to black and white working women. Because most black working-class families relied on two incomes, women usually combined wage labor and housework. As conditions worsened, the burden of providing for their families increasingly fell upon the shoulders of women, especially black single mothers in the city. With few job opportunities and the burden of child rearing, women were more dependent than men on various forms of private and public relief. Moreover, some husbands chose to leave so that their families might receive more relief, because of domestic conflict, or in some cases, because they were simply tired of the responsibility.32
The neighborhood relief committees became the key organizations for attracting black women to the CP. Helen Longs, a cleaning woman in a furniture store and a mother, joined the Party because of its opposition to the Red Cross. Estelle Milner, a young black school teacher in Birmingham, became a Communist through her work with the urban and rural poor. In addition to organizing sharecroppers in Tallapoosa County, she led a group of Birmingham women who fought for reforms in public health care. This cadre of women radicals, which included other leaders such as Cornelia Foreman, Alice Mosley, and an elderly bookkeeper named Addie Adkins, won the admiration of their neighbors and comrades. Communist organizer and novelist Myra Page described this group of black Birmingham women, who fought to “get them women outa their kitchens,” in a series of short stories published in the Communist newspaper, Working Woman.33 The struggle for welfare and other forms of relief also attracted a tiny group of working-class white women to the unemployed councils and subsequently into the ranks of the CP. Alabama-born Communist Mary Leonard succeeded in bringing together a group of five white women, under the auspices of the unemployed councils, that confronted officials at the city's welfare board and won several demands, including food, clothing, and medical attention for the families of several unemployed whites.34
Food and supplies were not the only issues in the women's fight against the Red Cross and city welfare. Birmingham relief applicants resented the social workers’ harsh, condescending manner, and many demanded to be accorded dignity and respect.35 Perhaps the worst aspect of relief was dealing with investigators who visited homes unannounced to determine whether an applicant was truly in need. Red Cross and city welfare officials occasionally required applicants to sell personal belongings considered superfluous, such as radios, watches, clothes, or new furniture. Possession of too much food or a large garden could result in an immediate cancellation of assistance. One Birmingham resident remembers the demeaning practice in which investigators would “Look in your sugar. Look in your trunk. In your wheel barrow. All the way through the house. . . . See if you had anything hid.” Welfare agents often enlisted the help of residents willing to spy on their neighbors in exchange for a larger grocery order or a few more pounds of coal.36
But hiding groceries, livestock, and personal items from relief authorities was necessary for survival. Black Party leaders, most of whom were on the relief rolls themselves, understood the importance of this tactic in the black community. Communist-led “vigilance committees” were created to visit suspected “stool pigeons” and strongly advised them to cease their activities. If this tactic failed, Hosea Hudson recalls, “we start to bombard them with postcards.” This practice characterized most radical opposition in Birmingham. Dramatic marches popularized the struggle for relief and no doubt applied some pressure on welfare authorities to provide meaningful assistance to the poor, but more individualized forms of resistance, or “oppositional practices,” proved to be effective weapons of the weak in everyday life. Local Communists sustained this individualized tradition in a collective setting by defending the community's right to hide food and personal items—they confronted not the welfare agent but the collaborator.37
The Party's fight against inadequate relief measures and expanding unemployment brought a few hundred workers into its ever-widening circle, but there were other critical areas for rank-and-file involvement that had nothing to do with obtaining food. The Communist-led ILD attracted national attention for its defense of nine young black men accused of raping two white women near Paint Rock, Alabama, in March 1931. The campaign to free the “Scottsboro Boys” boosted Party popularity in Birmingham's black communities almost overnight. About the same time, Communists began organizing a union of black sharecroppers and poor farmers in the eastern piedmont counties of rural Alabama. The union's involvement in a gun battle with police in Tallapoosa County contributed immensely to the Alabama Party's national reputation. As these activities became front page news, ordinary black workers skeptical of white radical promises began to take a second look at the Communist Party, the ILD, and the neighborhood relief committees.38
The Scottsboro campaign and the unemployed movement attracted precisely the kind of local leaders that were needed to strengthen the Party's ties with the black community. Al Murphy, who proved to be an exceptionally adept organizer, joined the CP and the YCL in 1930. Born in 1908 to poor sharecropping parents in McRae, Georgia, Murphy was raised for the most part by his grandparents after his father died, although his mother continued to support him on meager earnings from domestic work and cotton picking. He grew up in a strongly religious and race conscious household; his grandfather, an African Methodist Episcopal minister, had been a presiding elder under Bishop Henry McNeil Turner, a nationally prominent advocate of black emigration to Africa, and his grandmother also became “a self-made Methodist minister.” As a teenager he moved in with his aunt and uncle in Tuscaloosa and made his living digging ditches, picking cotton, unloading coal, and working in a pipe foundry handling dangerous, corrosive chemicals. In 1923 Murphy moved to Birmingham only to find more back-breaking labor and low wages. This life did not squash his longterm aspirations, however. He enrolled in night school to continue his education (which had come to an abrupt halt in the fourth grade) so that he could pursue a career as a public speaker and carve a niche for himself in the limited area of Negro politics. When the depression hit Birmingham, he recalled, “I had to stop night school and join workers on the bread lines.” Then one autumn Sunday morning in 1930 he noticed a leaflet which read: “Stop Lynching—Full Rights for the Negro People—Down With Imperialist War!” Shortly thereafter, Frank Williams, his friend and recent Communist recruit, escorted Murphy to a local unemployed meeting that so impressed him he joined that night. Murphy subsequently immersed himself in Party work, attending Marxist education classes regularly and recruiting black steel workers at the Stockham plant in Birmingham on behalf of the TUUL.39
Al Murphy, photographed in 1977 (courtesy Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Among those Murphy recruited from the Stockham plant was Hosea Hudson, a fellow iron worker born in Wilkes County, Georgia, in 1898 whose early life resembled Murphy's in many ways. Hudson, too, grew up in an extended family consisting of his mother, brother, and grandmother in rural Georgia. After his mother remarried in 1913 and left the family, fifteen-year-old Hosea took up sharecropping to support his remaining family members. He married in 1917 and continued sharecropping nearly debt free until the boll weevil wiped out his crop in 1921. Failing to secure steady employment in Atlanta in 1923, Hudson and his family moved to Birmingham where he found work as an iron molder at the Stockham foundry. Like Murphy and Angelo Herndon, Hudson had no trade union experience before the 1930s but possessed a strong personal intolerance for racial injustice. And also like Murphy, Hudson was the ideological product of elders who lived through the revolutionary times of Reconstruction: “I always did resent injustice and the way they used to treat Negroes,” he recalls. “My grandmother used to talk about these things. She was very militant herself, you know.” Hudson tried to organize fellow employees independently in the late 1920s, but when members could not agree on the organization's purpose and direction, he abandoned the idea. After having ignored the CP in Birmingham for over a year, Hudson's interest in Communism was suddenly piqued by the Scottsboro case. Sympathetic to the defendants and the efforts of the ILD, Hudson enthusiastically accepted Murphy's cautious invitation to explore what the Party had to offer, and at a meeting in September 1931, he and everyone else in attendance opted to join the Communist Party.40 Through the efforts of individuals such as Hudson and Murphy, the circle widened to include Andy Brown, Joe Howard, Saul Davis, John and David James, Mack Coad, Henry O. Mayfield, John Beidel, and other stalwarts who later became respected Party organizers and labor leaders. All of these individuals had Southern rural roots, limited education, and were unskilled or semiskilled laborers in Birmingham's coal and steel industry. They were all very active in their respective churches and some, particularly Hudson, Beidel, and Mayfield, participated in local gospel quartets.41
The higher echelons of Party leadership also underwent significant changes during this period. In 1931, district organizer Tom Johnson left Alabama for health reasons, and Harry Jackson stepped in to take his place. Based mainly in Chattanooga, Jackson spent much of his time traveling from place to place overseeing local Party work. But early in 1932, District 17 was reconstructed under the leadership of Nat Ross and Ted Wellman. Unlike Johnson and Jackson, Ross and Wellman were intellectuals in the formal sense of the word. The New York-born Wellman, who adopted the name “Sid Benson” during his tenure in Birmingham, was remembered by a sympathetic Alabamian professor for his “Marxian interpretation of a Haydn symphony.” Born of Russian Jewish background and a graduate of Columbia University, Nat Ross had briefly attended Harvard Law School and initiated work toward a doctorate at Columbia before joining the Party in 1929. After working as an organizer in southern Illinois for a while, he was sent to Birmingham.42 A rigid theoretician, Ross restructured the Party according to Leninist principles of organization—unbending discipline and regular meetings were the order of the day.
Hosea Hudson, photographed in 1986 (photograph by author)
Unlike the black women who rose to crucial middle-level leadership positions, white women Communists for the most part were relegated to mimeograph machines and occasional public speaking. Soon after joining the Communist Party in Chicago, Alice Burke followed her husband Donald Burke to Birmingham where he had been appointed regional secretary of the ILD. Arriving in the spring of 1932, she was described as a local Party leader in press reports, but in reality she had no role in the district committee and was practically excluded from decision making. “I was just a wife,” she recalls, “and I went where the husband was assigned to. . . . I had no role at all, except as a rank and file ‘Jimmy Higgins’ worker.” Nevertheless, she made tremendous sacrifices for the Party that were hardly acknowledged. For instance, although Burke was arrested along with Wirt Taylor in November 1932 and served eight weeks in a Birmingham jail, she was not mentioned in Communist press reports that detail Taylor's heroic struggle for freedom. But perhaps her biggest sacrifice occurred when she had to send her newborn daughter to California for three years to live with her sister because of the dangers Birmingham Communists faced daily.43
White women rarely challenged their designated roles within the Party during the early 1930s, but there were some who ignored conventions, both within Communist circles and society as a whole, and in some ways exhibited an incipient feminist consciousness. Two leading Southern-born female iconoclasts in the Party, Mary Leonard and Jane Speed, ironically were products of two different social worlds. Mary Leonard, born and raised of working-class background and the widow of a local druggist, carved out her own leadership position through her powerful speaking ability and by building a small base of support among poor white housewives. The heavyset and outspoken Leonard, whose confrontational and cavalier attitude toward police and government officials often made her comrades nervous, was also remembered for her unconventional private life. “I don't think she was married,” Alice Burke recalled, “but she'd date other people. I would say she was too forward.”44 Jane Speed, on the other hand, described in the Daily Worker as “a handsome auburn haired girl with an appearance so demure you'd never guess the militant struggles in which she has taken part,” was known to be far more discreet privately and less threatening to her male comrades. She was immediately accepted within leadership circles because “she had the presentation of an educated person,” an important attribute in a Marxist organization comprised largely of illiterate and semiliterate working people. Born to a very wealthy Southern family, Jane and her mother, Mary Martin Craik Speed (known affectionately as “Dolly”), became active in left-wing circles while Jane was a student in Vienna, Austria, in the late 1920s. After returning to Alabama in 1931, the twenty-one-year-old nouveau radical devoted her energy to the American CP, organizing black and white unemployed in the streets of Birmingham and daily challenging her designation as a “Southern belle.”45
In light of the anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and discrimination many European immigrants experienced upon their arrival in Birmingham, Communists might have expected substantial support from the city's Italian, Jewish, Greek, and Slavic populations. During the 1920s Italians and Jews were victims of Klan attacks, and some Bulgarian and Greek coal miners earned less than blacks during the early part of the century. Moreover, the Russian Jewish emigres who brought to America (particularly New York) radical traditions incubated by the 1905 revolution were conspicuously silent in Birmingham. While discrimination and ghettoization sometimes contributed to ethnic radicalization in other urban areas, Birmingham was unique in that these ethnic groups had greater opportunities for upward social mobility. Italians, for instance, moved into family-owned groceries with relative ease, tapping a black working-class consumer market anxious to escape company commissaries. By the 1930s Italians operated some three hundred grocery stores in the Birmingham area. Jews, too, climbed the economic ladder rather swiftly, although they were denied access to the mainstream bourgeoisie's social institutions and thus remained sort of a pariah middle class. Equally important is the fact that racist and anti-Communist propaganda hindered potential Jewish support because their well-being and continued upward mobility often depended on their willingness to distance themselves from blacks, and the anti-Semitic overtones of Southern red-baiting forced the Jewish community to reject radicalism in any form as an act of self-preservation.46
The few Southern whites who entered the Communist rank-and-file during this period, if for only a fleeting moment, were usually unemployed industrial workers from the Birmingham district and coal miners and poor farmers from northern Alabama who had a tradition of voting Republican, Populist, and Socialist. In fact, about one-fifth of the Communist vote in 1932 came from northern counties. Many of these supporters, especially the poor upcountry farmers, had little tolerance for African-Americans and exhibited a kind of populist, class-oriented view of their problems. Their opposition to the planter class and the “Big Mules,” combined with the crises created by the depression, momentarily outweighed their racism.47 In fact, several white recruits were reportedly former KKK members. These Klansmen gone Red, along with other Southern whites who exhibited racial prejudice, grudgingly conceded that blacks had to be organized in order to improve their own conditions. As a white Birmingham steel worker succinctly put it at a Party unit meeting in 1931, “We got to get together and organize the niggahs and whites into one strong general union.”48
The Party's primary focus on African-Americans, for the most part, alienated native white sympathizers. A former member of the Socialist party who joined the Communists in 1930 argued that if the Party concentrated exclusively on whites, “they would carry the whole South” in the elections. This was not just a tactical suggestion, however. After the proletarian revolution, he explained, black people “would have to be disciplined for 50 years, since the Negro has just emerged from serfdom.”49 Needless to say, the author of this letter was summarily expelled.
As an organization militantly antiracist and consciously interracial, the Party initially rejected or expelled whites who exhibited racial prejudice. By 1932, Nat Ross was highly critical of this policy. The most important reason for the Party's failure among whites, Ross argued, was its refusal to “accept in our mass organization white workers who still had traces of race prejudice.” Ross believed that joint action between blacks and whites would illustrate to white workers the merits of interracial unity and in the process, “break the prejudice of the Southern white workers.” But the policy was not very successful, for as Clyde Johnson recalled, when Ross and Ted Wellman assigned white Southerners to direct a unit in a black neighborhood, these white organizers were usually ostracized by their friends and neighbors, thus forcing them to choose between the Party and continued social acceptance within their own communities.50
Southern whites were not only expected to change their lives and attitudes practically overnight, but Northern Communists’ condescending and sometimes insensitive attitude toward Southerners probably contributed to their high turnover. At a district committee meeting, for example, Tom Johnson warned those in attendance not to “forget that the workers from the South are backward and we must not be too harsh in our dealings with them.” And more than one local organizer cringed upon reading James Allen's ahistorical passage: “Gone are the days of silence. The weary backs of the southern masses no longer bend meekly. . . . New on the fighting front, they have not yet advanced to the organizational stage of Northern labor.”51
On the other hand, few white Alabamians even entertained the idea of becoming Communists. Anti-Communist propaganda, rooted in popular myths and indisputably couched in the language of race, proved a mighty deterrent to Southern white support for the CP. “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. Headlines appeared in Birmingham's newspapers that read, “Communists Tell Negroes to Force Social Equality throughout the South” or “Negroes Are Urged to Get Social Equality.” Leaders of the Birmingham Trades and Labor Council responded similarly, using the local labor press to wage an all-out war against Communism. The Labor Advocate labeled Communists agitators from Moscow who “openly preach social equality for the Black race. . . . Any man who seeks to disturb the relations between the races is a dangerous character, and should be squelched NOW.”52
The Fish Committee hearings held in 1930 provide a window into the dominant beliefs many white Birmingham residents held with respect to Communism. Everyone who testified at the Birmingham hearing agreed that the quintessential crime perpetrated by the Reds was the stirring up of race antagonisms. Witnesses argued forcefully that the doctrine of Communism was tantamount to social equality and that its perpetrators were all foreign-born Jews exploiting black ignorance. In their quest to prove the conspiratorial nature of the Communist Party in Birmingham, much of the testimony bordered on the absurd. Klansman John G. Murphy claimed Ohio-born Communist Angelo Herndon was “half Chinese and half Negro,” and state investigator Achmed Mundo testified that Frank Burns's real name was “Shan Ti Eng,” a direct descendant of “a man by the name of Eng [who] was one of a group of 21 headed by Leon Trotsky.” Mundo further concurred with others that the Party had planned a violent insurrection in Birmingham and, with their unlimited funds, had purchased the necessary hardware:
The CHAIRMAN: You say the Communist party had shipped tear gas bombs?
Mr. MUNDO: Yes, sir.
The CHAIRMAN: What makes you believe that?
Mr. MUNDO: A shipment was received here by one of the express companies, about the last of August, and it was labeled “Tear-gas bombs,” and came from one of the dealers in obsolete Government supplies in Washington.53
The popular perception of Communists as “foreigners” and “nigger lovers” whose sole purpose was to wage a race war in the South created a huge barrier between these Northern white idealists and Alabama's white working-class communities. No matter how many white Southerners agreed with the Party's program, the Reds were still outsiders who had no roots among white Alabamians. Herein lies a strange irony: The Central Committee dispatched white Communists from the North to organize working people in a highly segregated environment, but because the movement attracted overwhelming numbers of black working people, it was virtually impossible to develop and sustain close contacts with their constituency. Southern whites, with whom they could more easily meet because they shared the same social space and faced fewer legal hurdles, rejected and even attacked the Communist Party. Members of Birmingham's white cadre were essentially social pariahs in the white community, yet social and legal sanctions hampered personal relations with their black comrades. Thus two separate parties were formed—a large, broad-based organization of Southern blacks and a tiny cadre of Northern whites, supported by a few local people—which met together occasionally in secret hideaways or in streets and parks during open demonstrations.
As the harsh winter of 1931–32 gave way to spring, it became increasingly clear that the Party's future was directly tied to black working people, particularly the unemployed. In May, Hosea Hudson, Joe Howard, and Andy Brown led a mass march of some 200 dissatisfied black relief workers who had been forced by local social workers to perform laborious road work in exchange for relief. Between 125 and 150 showed up for the three-mile march, but toward the end their numbers began to dwindle and only about 50 marchers arrived on the steps of city hall. An elected committee of 6, headed by black YCL leader Joe Burton, was intercepted by police when they tried to meet with city commissioner Jimmie Jones. The crowd eventually dispersed after Burton was knocked down by several officers and guns were drawn on the crowd. Bloodied and staggering, Burton declared the Communists would return, next time with larger numbers.54
Several months later, local Communists made good on Burton's promise. The November 7 demonstration was the largest Communist-led demonstration in Alabama's history, attracting an overwhelmingly black crowd of five to seven thousand. As people gathered outside the Jefferson County courthouse, Wirt Taylor, a white Birmingham-born Communist, and Alice Burke were carted away by police. The arrests failed to dampen the enthusiasm of the growing crowd, which was dominated by a vocal group of black women carrying baskets, bags, and the belief that food would be distributed to the protesters. Mary Leonard led an interracial delegation to meet with Jimmie Jones and present the unemployed councils’ demands for food and cash relief and unrestricted voting rights for all citizens. Jones, who was surrounded by police officers, ignored the delegation's demands and merely questioned Leonard as to whether or not she believed in social equality. When she replied that blacks were “just as good as you and I,” Jones asked the group to leave, and the police began to disperse the crowd outside.55
Three weeks later crowds once again gathered in front of the courthouse steps to demonstrate against starvation and unemployment. Under the auspices of the National Committee of Unemployed Councils, “several thousand Negro and white workers,” according to Party sources, attended a meeting to greet “column 6” of the National Hunger Marchers who had left from New Orleans en route to the national demonstration in Washington, D.C. Following a brief outbreak of violence between police and demonstrators, keynote speaker Alice Mosley, a young black Communist organizer from the industrial suburb of Greenwood, was arrested along with two unidentified black men who were in the audience.56
These mass demonstrations also coincided with the Party's election campaign. For the first time in their history the Communists were able to register with Jefferson County and state registrars and have their candidates officially placed on the ballot. In addition to campaigning on behalf of the Party's presidential candidates, William Z. Foster and his running mate, James Ford, the Birmingham cadre put up their own congressional candidates. The two Communist candidates were Lee Parsons, a black worker who ran for Birmingham's Ninth Congressional District seat, and Andrew Forsman, a veteran white radical who made a bid for the Senate. A pioneer organizer for the Knights of Labor, Forsman had run for senator a decade earlier on the Socialist ticket and for a brief moment had served as the president of the Mobile Trades Council. While Parsons's candidacy was probably looked upon with great interest by the mass of disfranchised blacks, the Party's vice-presidential candidate, James Ford, probably had even greater appeal since he was also a native of Alabama and a former steel worker who had earned a degree from Fisk University.57
Obtaining votes, however, was clearly not the objective of the campaign. Voting, one leaflet explained, would not lead to workers’ empowerment; that could only come through the direct seizure of factories, mines, and warehouses and self-determination for African-Americans in the black belt. Calling for working-class unity across racial lines, the Party's campaign focused mainly on the plight of Southern blacks, who were “treated just like dogs by the bosses.” While the platform demanded self-determination in the black belt, the central thrust was black-white unity: “It is clear there is only one way out of hunger and death and that is to break down the walls of segregation, Jim-Crowism and lynching by a united front of all poor people, white and colored, against the bosses and landlords, for bread and freedom.”58
In October Birmingham's radicals hosted a Communist campaign meeting to be addressed by none other than William Z. Foster. Some leading white citizens regarded Foster's appearance as an indication that Birmingham was becoming a target for a Communist takeover. City commissioner Jimmie Jones tried to comfort one concerned citizen who feared the consequences of Foster's presence by assuring that if the Communist leader “makes any remarks that are in violation of the law, he will be arrested while in Birmingham.” The Klan sent Foster a chilling warning in the form of a brief telegram stating, “YOUR PRESENCE IN BIRMINGHAM ALABAMA SUNDAY OCTOBER 9TH IS NOT WANTED. SEND NIGGER FORD.”59
By the time the telegram arrived, however, Foster had already postponed his campaign tour because of illness. Clarence Hathaway, then the editor of the Daily Worker and secretary of the National Communist Election Campaign Committee, continued Foster's whirlwind tour of the South, speaking in Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, Kentucky, and Florida. Scheduled to address a Birmingham meeting on October 9, Hathaway was detained by the police in New Orleans the night before and never appeared. Unaware of Hathaway's arrest, the meeting went on as planned, drawing some twelve hundred people to the Lyric Theater, a popular local black theater in North Birmingham. There were a few sympathetic whites in the audience, but the majority were hecklers attempting to disrupt the meeting. Despite Hathaway's failure to appear, the meeting went rather smoothly after Fred Keith mounted the podium and gave an impromptu speech about the election campaign, the unemployed movement, and the Scottsboro case. The meeting ended abruptly, however, after a group of Klansmen in the audience set off a smoke bomb in the hall.60
When the votes were counted the Foster-Ford ticket polled a surprising 726 votes—a significant number considering that its main constituency (black workers) were disfranchised. Most of the votes, however, were from counties where the Share Croppers’ Union was active and from northern Alabama, where the Party was slowly building a following among poor white farmers. Jefferson County only polled 33 Communist votes in the presidential race, although Lee Parsons culled 133 votes from Birmingham's electorate in his bid for Congress.61
Once the electoral campaign ended, the devastating winter of 1932–33 created a new set of problems. The relief rolls grew tremendously, and by 1933, twenty-six thousand blacks—nearly 27 percent of Birmingham's total black population—were receiving welfare.62 Stepping up its fight for relief in and around Birmingham, the Party planned a mass unemployed demonstration on May 1 in recognition of International Workingmen's Day. Focusing on the failure of municipal and private relief efforts, the Party not only demanded more meaningful assistance but vowed to “stop the insults of the Red Cross when we go for our relief checks.” There was a sense of irony in their final plea for full freedom of speech and assembly since the city commission decided to revoke their parade permit at the last minute. The illegality of the gathering and police warnings did not deter the nearly three thousand people who showed up at Ingram Park. The demonstrators were met by police officers, White Legionnaires, and Klansmen who forced them out of the park and onto the sidewalk. Jane Speed, who had been standing amidst a sea of black women, stepped up on the bumper of a car and began to address the crowd before police quickly arrested her. As she was whisked away in a patrol car, Speed dramatically screamed to the cordon of black participants, “Fellow workers, this is the way they do us.” What began as a shoving match with police deteriorated to an all-out street fight. Police officers on the scene attacked the crowd with pistols drawn, but they were ordered not to use them. When one officer shoved his gun into the body of a black woman, she shouted, “Shoot me and you shoot a thousand more.” At a Party meeting the very next day, a group of black women excitedly inquired as to the time and place of the next demonstration “because they wanted to whip them a cop.”63
The May Day battle was not the Communists’ last confrontation with police in the streets of Birmingham, but over the next few months the Party's priorities began to shift from helping the jobless to organizing the unorganized. With the enactment of the FERA in May 1933 (which meant a congressional appropriation of over nine million dollars for emergency relief for Alabama) and the creation of the CWA that same winter, thousands were lifted from the relief rolls. But more importantly, because the NIRA facilitated the reorganization of the labor movement, Birmingham Communists turned increasingly to their original goal of organizing industrial workers.64
The unemployed campaign was the key to the Party's growth and consolidation in Birmingham; by the end of 1933, the Party's dues-paying membership in Birmingham rose to nearly five hundred, and its mass organizations encompassed possibly twice that number.65 The relief campaign was crucial to the formation of a local cadre, serving especially to increase the number of black female members, who often proved more militant than their male comrades. Furthermore, the various tactics developed in the relief campaign, from open confrontation to hidden forms of resistance, would later prove invaluable to local Communists continuing their work in the mines, mills, and plantations of the black belt.