No mo’ KU-KLUX-KLAN with
their burnin’ crosses.
No mo’ chain-gangs, we's no
dogs no’ ho'ses.
The NAACP, God no’ Moses
Can stop us blackies fightin’ the
bosses . . .
Negroes ain’ black—but RED!
Teacher Lenin done said
Brothers all oppressed an’ po’
Ain't it so? Sho!
—“No Mo’, No Mo’” (CP song, ca. 1930s)
In 1930, a columnist for the Daily Worker predicted that the Communist Party in the South would be composed of young whites “who are not so weighed down by the prejudices of their parents.” But historical reality, as we have seen thus far, had little in common with this writer's vision of rebellious white youth leading the hitherto sleeping black masses in the march to self-determination. Indeed, the prevalence of blacks in the CP earned it the epithet “nigger party” throughout the South. These uninitiated men and women were not intellectuals sympathetic to left-wing movements, nor were they frustrated labor organizers weary of the pace of change. With the possible exception of Montgomery Party leader John Beans, Alabama's black cadre of unskilled and semiskilled industrial workers, sharecroppers, domestics, and housewives had rural roots and no previous experience with radical movements. Accustomed to recruiting working people knowledgeable and sympathetic to left-wing causes, district organizer Tom Johnson noted with surprise that Alabama's black cadre were “not old sympathizers of the party who have been on the fringe of the movement for some time and have absorbed some of our theory and philosophy.”1
Ironically, what had presumably frustrated Johnson and other leading Communists ensured the Party's growth and survival in Alabama. Because the movement was built from scratch by people without a Euro-American left-wing tradition, Alabama's black cadre interpreted Communism through the lenses of their own cultural world and the international movement of which they were now a part. Far from being a slumbering mass waiting for Communist direction, black working people entered the movement with a rich culture of opposition that sometimes contradicted, sometimes reinforced the Left's vision of class struggle. The Party offered more than a vehicle for social contestation; it offered a framework for understanding the roots of poverty and racism, linked local struggles to world politics, challenged not only the hegemonic ideology of white supremacy but the petit bourgeois racial politics of the black middle class, and created an atmosphere in which ordinary people could analyze, discuss, and criticize the society in which they lived.
The meshing of an African-American culture of opposition and a Stalinist version of Marxism-Leninism during the radical Third Period will be the subject of this chapter. We will first explore how a Marxist pedagogy in Birmingham and rural Alabama altered black working people's self-definition and preexisting worldview. Then, turning to the traditions of resistance blacks brought to the Party, we will explore how these various modes of opposition affected collective and individual action and dialectically fused with Left culture. Finally, we will discuss the complexities and ambiguities of black radical opposition by examining conflict within the black community between Communists, clergy, and black middle-class spokespersons. By exploring intraracial conflicts we can gain an even deeper understanding of the social, cultural, and ideological nature of this perplexing movement.2
During a brief tour of Birmingham at the Communist Party's invitation, radical playwright John Howard Lawson heard an “older” comrade explain to a young recruit the importance of patience, humility, and study: “There ain't one of us here was born a Communist; we learned it and it ain't easy to learn.” The unidentified activist who caught Lawson's attention summed up a critical (and often overlooked) component of Communist political culture. From the outset Communist organizers created educational structures to turn ordinary workers into Marxists. In May 1930, district organizer Tom Johnson held classes for new Party members in Birmingham and Chattanooga, and by October the district committee boasted of its first two-week Party training school in the South. These training schools were never permanent, however, partly because of the Party's underground character and scant resources. More importantly, these imported educational structures were ill-suited to teaching theory to a largely illiterate and semiliterate membership. Frustrated to the point of abandoning the project, Tom Johnson described the new recruits as “raw green workers with a much lower educational standard than northern workers.”3
Nevertheless, illiterate activists found creative ways to overcome their inability to read and write, which included having Party material read to them. The Party formed study groups that read works in pamphlet form, ranging from James Allen's Negro Liberation and Lenin's What Is to Be Done to Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto. By mid-1934, the Bessemer section of the Party designated one half-hour of each meeting for study—fifteen minutes of reading aloud and fifteen minutes devoted to discussion. Local leaders made literate members responsible for tutoring their illiterate comrades by establishing partners who met on a regular basis and read Communist tabloids together. Publications such as the Southern Worker, the Daily Worker, Working Woman, the Labor Defender, the Young Worker, and the Liberator were also important sources of information for black Communists. Rank-and-file activists not only tended to have little formal education, but few blacks even owned radios. In 1930 only 3 percent of Birmingham's black community, or 795 families, owned a radio, compared with 40 percent of the white community.4
Circulation of Party publications in real numbers was never great, but their readership was much more extensive than subscriptions and individual sales could ever indicate. Because few people could spare money to purchase Communist newspapers regularly, “a single copy would often serve an entire block, to be passed from hand to hand or read aloud to a group.” Moreover, in light of vigilante repression and seditious literature ordinances, possession of radical material could have easily led to arrest or physical intimidation. It was common for Party organizers in the black belt to hide a stack of papers in a hollow tree to be picked up later. As one member of the SCU executive committee explained in 1933, “It is not easy for us to get the Daily Worker, but we sneak it in our cabins. One copy goes from one man to his neighbor. We hide it anywhere we think it is safe.”5
Unlike the local labor press, or even the mainstream black press, Communist publications carried articles describing the struggles in Africa and the Caribbean. The Liberator had special significance for black Alabamians because, much like the Garveyite Negro World, it was devoted to racial issues. Hosea Hudson was especially fond of the Liberator because it “always was carrying something about the liberation of black people, something about Africa, something about the South. . . . We would read this paper and this would give us great courage.”6
The Party's version of Marxist education taught poor blacks to connect their own lives to struggles throughout the world, and the Party's economic theories provided explanations for a number of phenomena, including the roots of poverty, wealth, and racism. But blacks also found within these study groups a source of pride, for after all, many were now receiving what white society had too often denied them—an education. John Garner, a semiliterate coal miner who gave up sharecropping in Bullock County for the Birmingham mines, recalled that one of the main reasons for joining the Party and remaining a Communist for so long was the education it gave him. (His membership lasted over half a century.) Black Communists fortunate enough to study at the “Workers School” in New York, or in some cases at the Lenin School in Moscow, found the experience tantamount to obtaining a diploma of sorts and returned to Alabama proudly exhibiting their newly acquired knowledge. In 1934, Hosea Hudson—who was illiterate at the time—along with two other Communists “rode the rails” to New York in the dead of winter to attend a ten-week course at the Workers School. Hudson returned a changed man: “I felt like I'm somebody. . . . I'm talking about political economy, about the society itself, how it automatically would breed war and fascism. I'm discussing about the danger of imperialist war.” Seeing himself as a learned individual deserving of the respect “better class Negroes” received, Hudson often shared his knowledge with non-Party people, using as his forum the customary social habitat of black males: “I'd be discussing socialism in the barber shop. . . . We'd start the conversation off, then we'd talk about socialism, and how the workers conditions would be improved under socialism. . . . They'd sit down there and wouldn't no one ask no questions, wouldn't interrupt what I'm saying. They wanted to see what I had to tell.”7
When Party work required traveling to another state or country, the trip itself was an educational experience. Cornelia Foreman, Archie Mosley, Mack Coad, Henry O. Mayfield, and Al Murphy were among the black Alabamians who traveled to Moscow in the 1930s. Murphy, who was a delegate to the Seventh World Congress in Moscow in 1935, experienced a sense of freedom that was unheard of in the South. During his visit he fell in love with and married a white Soviet woman, but knowing American racism as he did, Murphy could not return to the United States with her. Leaving the woman he loved behind, Murphy opted not to return South, choosing instead to continue Party work in Brooklyn, New York, until he was assigned to Missouri in 1937. Capitola Tasker and her husband Charles, poor sharecroppers from Montgomery County, both traveled a great deal on behalf of the SCU and the Communist Party. Charles Tasker was a delegate to the Chicago Farm Conference held in November 1933, and in the following year, Capitola Tasker was sent to Paris, France, to address the Women's International Congress against War and Fascism on the SCU's behalf. This international gathering of women made a tremendous impact on Capitola Tasker. “It was heaven on earth,” she told the delegates, “to see all those women who speak different languages all voting in harmony for the same thing!”8
The alternative education not only gave the young, rebellious constituency of the YCL a sense of pride, it also further underscored the contradictions between what they were being told in the classroom and what they experienced daily. As one YCL organizer in Birmingham explained to the Young Worker, “In school they teach us a lot of bunk about what a wonderful country this is, and that everyone gets an equal chance.” In the rural areas YCL study groups were very popular because they served as surrogate schools for those unable to attend public schools. The role that these youth-led, makeshift classes played cannot be overestimated in a region where black children attended school on an average of three months of the year and annual educational expenditures for black schools averaged $3.99 per child compared with $38.11 per white child.9 Under the leadership of Eula Gray, by 1934 seven units of the YCL were formed in Alabama's black belt and Tallapoosa County, and about one hundred Camp Hill students had planned to affiliate with the Communist-led NSL. Gray estimated that young men and women constituted at least one-third of the SCU's total membership. Nevertheless, Party literature was hard to come by and nearly impossible to purchase in a region where most rural families could not even afford basic necessities. YCL members occasionally made requests for material through letters to the Communist press or simply begged for any redundant pamphlets comrades passing through might have in their possession.10
Pedagogy directed toward black youth did not stop at study groups; sometimes it was sustained by rural families. Although several scholars have argued that Southern black mothers raised their children to be submissive in order to ensure their survival in a violent, racist world, many young activists who were mothers themselves rejected this tradition and, in fact, raised their children to be young Communists.11 Throughout the black belt and Tallapoosa County, the children of Communists and some SCU activists belonged to the Young Pioneers, a national Communist children's auxiliary whose slogan was “Smash the Boy Scouts.” When they could obtain copies, these children read the Young Pioneer (the organization's regular organ) and were undoubtedly drawn to Michael Quirt's black history cartoons depicting the lives of Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and Toussaint L'Ouverture. “Matt Owen,” Quirt's popular cartoon strip that had appeared regularly in the Young Worker, must have made a tremendous impression on Pioneers as well as YCL activists; part of the serialized epic depicted a black youth educating two naive white boys about the class struggle while they were all incarcerated in a local jail.12
Although it is impossible to measure the Party's impact on these children, during the mid-1930s local authorities in counties with a substantial SCU following feared the growing “impudence” of black youth, and local Agricultural Extension officers went so far as to adopt measures to “deradicalize” children whose parents were suspected union members. At the height of the 1935 cotton pickers’ strike, Lee County extension agents built up their 4-H clubs among blacks and distributed a song book entitled “Games and Songs for Old and Young” that included an illuminating parody of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”:
FIGHT LYNCH TERROR!
“Fight Lynch Terror!” (Young Worker, 1930)
Hoe, Hoe, Hoe your row
Steadily every day
Merrily, merrily, cheerily, cheerily,
Half our work is play. . . .
SMASH THE BARRIERS!
Sing, sing, sing your songs
Happily each day
Clearly, clearly, sweetly, sweetly,
Sing your songs today.13
“Smash the Barriers!” (Young Worker, 1930)
Communist education, whether through reading or oral transmission, introduced poor rural and urban blacks to international politics and, in turn, placed their own local, seemingly insignificant struggles within a world context. The history of the October Revolution, for example, was among John Garner's first lessons in the history of his movement: “Stalin and Lenin and Molotov, and all those party leaders, they taught folks how to pitch the capitalists off their back and they armed ‘em to go to World War I, then they turned the guns on the bosses, that brought about the revolution.” When German Communist leader Ernst Thaelmann was incarcerated under Hitler, Communists and SCU members in Tallapoosa County made it their own struggle, distributing hundreds of leaflets throughout the rural eastern piedmont attacking Nazism and pledging support for the German Communist Party. Eula Gray also organized a mass rally outside of Dadeville to protest Thaelmann's imprisonment. By 1934, when antiwar slogans became ever more prominent in the Party's national program, rank-and-file Communists throughout the state held mass antiwar meetings and produced antiwar literature describing events in Europe. The August 1 antiwar picnic held in Dadeville, attended by over 250 people, provides a remarkable example of rural black Communists’ ability to combine local and international traditions. Following a friendly baseball game and a “mouth harp” contest, the group joined together in altered versions of “We Shall Not Be Moved” and “Solidarity” whose lyrics described the militancy and determination of the SCU. As they devoured plates of fried chicken, collard greens, and other culinary contributions, these women, children, and men listened to, among other things, a young Lee County woman speak on “Why I Like the YCL,” a report on the Young Pioneers, and a speech on the “woman question” by a leading female SCU leader. They then closed the gathering with renditions of “Arise You Workers” and “The Internationale.”14
The emergence of a counter-hegemonic ideology within Party circles owes much to Marxist pedagogy, but black Communists were not blank sheets when they entered the movement. Instead, they were born and reared in communities with a rich culture of opposition—a culture that enveloped and transformed the Party into a movement more reflective of African-American radical traditions than anything else. Thus, black Communists retained significant cultural influences that resonated through the Leninist wrappings, determining the everyday character of grass-roots activity and, indeed, providing historical legitimacy for the Party's very existence in Alabama.
Even before many black working people jumped headlong into Party work, their evaluation of the movement from afar was often rooted in what George Lipsitz calls a “collective memory.”15 We have seen so far how common folk and literary traditions of the Civil War and Reconstruction effectively deterred poor white participation in the Communist Party. Wedded to dominant racial and sexual mores, white Alabamians responded emotionally—often violently—to Communist activity and even read into basic struggles for social justice a threat to the edifice of Southern civilization. Southern blacks maintained their own informal, oral networks through which the community transmitted its vision of the past and present—a vision hidden or masked from the white world and oppositional to the core. The anti-Communist propaganda that proved particularly effective among white Alabamians actually augmented the Communists’ appeal in the black communities. Hidden away in Southern black communities was a folk belief that the Yankees would return to wage another civil war in the South and complete the Reconstruction. When the Communists arrived on the scene, veteran Party activist Hosea Hudson recalls, “the Negro began to look. Something's gonna happen now. Man, them folks in the North, them folks in New York, in Russia. We thought we was looking to have a war in the South. And when the organizers of the Party came in there representing what these organizations what the Negro been reading about in the paper . . . this is what brought the Negroes into the organization. . . . They thought the North was coming back and they was going to have another war.”16 Angelo Herndon's attraction to Communists also contained echoes of the past. “Conditions were so bad,” he later wrote, “that many people believed that the only way they could ever get better was to start a new war. ... I very naively was under the impression that the Unemployed Council was calling all Negro and white workers to a new war.” The idea that the Party's appearance marked the first skirmishes in a new civil war was reiterated in a novel by Myra Page, a Party member who spent considerable time with Alabama militants. As one of her characters put it, in the black belt “a long, bitter scrap's brewin’. Us Communists, white n’ colored, gotta organize n’ lead it. . . . The first Civil War didn't free them, but this one will.”17
What distinguished this “new war” from the Civil War and Reconstruction was its international dimension. For many black radicals the Russians were the “new Yankees,” Stalin was the “new Lincoln,” and the Soviet Union was a “new Ethiopia” stretching forth her arms in defense of black folk. Southern propaganda depicting Communists as “Soviet agents” worked to the Party's advantage in black working-class communities. The idea of Soviet and/or Northern radical support provided a degree of psychological confidence for African-Americans hoping to wage the long-awaited revolution in the South. With the collapse of biracial unionism and the failure of black middle-class organizations to create a viable alternative, most poor blacks had little confidence in their ability to initiate and sustain a movement without outside assistance. Outnumbered and outgunned, thousands chose migration over militant organization, which many saw as potentially suicidal. A black woman from Orrville, Alabama, provides a telling example; in a letter to the Daily Worker she wrote, “We need some help in pushing this movement here. We will keep all your orders secret. Tell us what we must do. Let me hear from you folks up there.”18
Faced with the centrality of Russia in popular notions of Communism, black radicals (unconsciously) constructed a folklore that mythologized the Soviet Union. John Garner was convinced that Soviet agents organized the Party in Alabama. “The Soviet Union had agents,” he remembered, “that was educating people about the Communist Party. . . . Them agents was all through here.” Likewise, Lemon Johnson, local leader of the Share Croppers’ Union in Hope Hull, Alabama, felt that Russian support was essential to the union's success, partly because he believed that all the leaflets, handbills, and newspapers he distributed were printed in Russia. Johnson was not alone in his assessment. When a black sharecropper heard about the Daily Worker and the activities of the Communists, he searched in vain for a copy of the newspaper. Unsuccessful, “he hit upon the idea of writing to the Soviet Union for the address of the ‘Daily.’ ”19
The assurance of outside support, even if imagined, and the physical presence of collective organization, engendered a sense of power that lent itself to isolated acts of counteraggression or self-defense. The Communists’ presence in Alabama served precisely this function, emboldening individual members who might otherwise have retreated from confrontation. Late in 1934, for example, eight robed Klansmen broke into the home of North Birmingham Communist Steve Simmons and administered a near-fatal beating. When his assailants later discovered—ironically by reading the Daily Worker—that he had survived the beating, they paid him another visit. But this time he had barred the doors and windows, and he used his shotgun to disperse the crowd, injuring one member of the mob. A third raid led by two off-duty Birmingham police officers also met Simmons's buckshot. An embarrassed police department complied with the ILD's demand to remove the two officers and finally provided limited protection for the Simmons household. Similarly, when black Communist Saul Davis was kidnapped from his Bessemer home, stripped bare, and whipped for several hours, he defiantly returned to Bessemer to work on behalf of the ILD, even before his wounds had completely healed. Such actions should not be interpreted simply as individual acts of heroism or recklessness. Instead, they represented a broader change in attitude, a growing comfort in the strength of collective action and outside support. Although vigilantes slowed Communist efforts, successful resistance to their attacks neutralized their efficacy because, like lynching, vigilante violence depends ultimately on the overall impression it makes on the community.20
For the most part, however, black radicals resorted to violent confrontation only when there were no other avenues available. Indeed, Communists went to great lengths to avoid violence and open conflict. Like their enslaved ancestors of the antebellum South, black Alabama Communists understood the terrain of struggle and relied primarily on evasive, cunning forms of resistance.21 These evasive tactics stood in stark contrast to Communist theoreticians’ image of class struggle and the Left literati's constructions of working-class heroism. Poems and short stories in Left periodicals painted a portrait of radical puritans whose unfolding consciousness leapt dramatically from complete docility to revolutionary martyrdom.22
But proletarian realism hardly depicted African-American realities in the Deep South. Organizers had to rely on their cunning and wit simply to survive, and that often meant wearing a mask of deception. When black Communist Harry Haywood arrived in Birmingham, he was told to “cut out that fast walking with your head up in the air—or these crackers'll spot you. Get that slouch in your walk. Look scared, as if you are about to run.” Although these instructions were offered partly in jest, Haywood recognized “a grain of truth in these remarks.” Sometimes Communists used deception to avoid arrest and its potentially violent sequel. Following the Birmingham May Day battle of 1933, for example, one of the arrestees, ILD organizer and Communist Otis DeBardeleben, practiced the “art of dissimulation” to prevent an almost guaranteed jail sentence. Switching his demeanor from militant to “Sambo,” DeBardeleben convinced the judge that he had been “misled into attending the meeting” because when he read the leaflet inviting all workers, he assumed “it was something like this forestry thing,” and therefore he “went there thinking he could get a job.” While Communists Jane Speed and Ned Goodwin spent time in jail, DeBardeleben was only required to pay a twenty-five-dollar fine and was free to continue his work for the ILD.23
Much like the trickster characters in African-American folklore, many black Alabama Communists expressed great pride in their ability to outsmart the bosses, as revealed by the ingenious ways activists distributed leaflets in direct violation of seditious literature ordinances and constant police surveillance. In Birmingham, black women posing as laundresses picked up bundles of leaflets, stencils, and paper from the homes of white Communists and smuggled the materials out in baskets of laundry. The leaflets were then distributed throughout the city but were concentrated mainly in Birmingham's various black communities. John Garner recalls with pride and amusement his ability to distribute Party material without police molestation: “I'd pass by, stick ‘em in your door (LAUGHS). Or you'd throw it at your gate. You go into the store to trade, while trading, I'd have a bundle, I'd leave a bundle on the counter there. . . . They didn't never catch me putting out nothing. I had a way to sneak ‘em out.” ILD activist Dobbie Sanders had his own method of spreading the printed word: “I would stick em in my lunch bucket, untie the strings and let the wind blow the leaflets all over the yard. I'd just keep steppin like nothin ever happened.” When leaflets would not suffice, Birmingham radicals left their mark in other ways. While visiting Birmingham in 1934, Myra Page came across the letters “ILD” carved into what was once the wet, fresh concrete of a new sidewalk.24
In the rural areas, handbills announcing strikes or simply popularizing the SCU were not only distributed to other sharecroppers but targeted at the landlords as well. “All these big white folks,” Lemon Johnson recalled, “we'd throw them at they door, put them in the mail box ... be making our demands.” These mimeographed sheets were in lieu of demonstrations, allowing the union to confront the landlords from an apparent position of strength while protecting the anonymity of its members. Landlords and police referred to SCU leaflets as “night mail” because they appeared so frequently and yet could not be traced to anyone. A letter to the Young Worker described how a group of sharecroppers fooled an infuriated gathering of landlords and overseers who had “paraded the countryside to find the ones who were distributing the leaflets.” To avoid capture, the sharecroppers “hid in the bushes until the parade had passed and then got back on the job of putting out their leaflets.” In fact, many rural organizers (in the trickster tradition) saw themselves as more intelligent than the powerful landlords, whom they felt could easily be manipulated as long as the SCU's activities remained sub rosa. Describing conditions in Lowndes County, Communist Saul Davis warned his comrades of the increasing constraints on organizers due to the fact that “the bosses is not so dum now since they ben woke up by the stool pigeons.”25
Any observer witnessing the interaction between a landlord and a sharecropper, or an employer/foreman and a worker, particularly if the subordinate individual is black, might easily dismiss the latter as docile. Yet, routine compliance on the part of subordinate groups is a logical mask donned for the purposes of survival and does not necessarily represent the actual thinking of the oppressed. As political scientist James C. Scott has ably suggested, such dialogue represents only a “partial transcript.” It is within the realm of thought, Scott argues, and not in open behavior, that oppressed classes would more likely express their opposition, simply because the former is less dangerous.26 Understandably, while Alabama Communists were exhorted by their Northern comrades to engage in outrageous acts of rebellion, few found comfort or consolation in martyrdom. (The Left literati often failed to understand that black Alabamians’ very identification with the Party was itself an act of resistance.) Hoping to avoid direct confrontation, the Alabama cadre adeptly used resolutions, petitions, publications, and meetings to express the individual and collective “transcripts” that lay hidden from public view. Anonymous leaflets, resolutions, postcards, and letters to landlords and government officials, like the handbill distributed by the Birmingham ILD advising police and Klansmen to “keep their filthy paws off our brothers!” or the unsigned Communist Party resolution submitted to Governor Bibb Graves warning “to start a Revelushon up on ya Bosses,” expressed thoughts that only a fearless few articulated in the presence of their opponents.27
Communist tabloids that published “workers’ correspondence” offer another, more personalized view of radical consciousness. The Party's broad range of publications provided black Alabamians with a national forum to voice their collective and individual grievances, to lash out against their oppressors, and to articulate their own vision of an alternative world. Complaints from SCU members, which usually began with “I am writing a protest against my landlord,” described in detail sharecroppers’ daily treatment and closed by naming the landlord in question for the purpose of mobilizing readers from across the country to send postcards and letters of protest. The anonymity of the letters freed rural blacks, more commonly young men, to use an angrier, more profane voice than they would have used openly in their own communities, especially in confrontations with landlords or other white authority figures. In an apocalyptic description of revolutionary change, one Dadeville Communist not only adopted strong language but also expressed a desire to use the same voice to the “bosses” face. “The damn bosses and CWA heads don't give a cuss about a sharecropper. ... I hope to see the day, when we all get together and fight, so we workers will be strong enough to take the land, have plenty of bread and clothing and all. Let the damn bosses know what we really mean.” A Lee County YCL worker simply concluded a letter to the Young Worker with “To hell with the bosses.”28
Workers’ correspondence represented only a portion, albeit a large one, of the most lucid letters received. Communist editors probably selected the more dramatic missives that reiterated the Communists’ vision of revolutionary change or paralleled the Party's perception of working-class life. Thus, most published letters focused on the drudgery of work and poverty, the militancy of the rank-and-file, or provided factual accounts of local events. Yet, when used carefully, workers’ correspondence offers an unparalleled source for understanding the complexity of oppositional consciousness. For example, some of the letters from black sharecroppers reveal a great deal about the nature of “hegemony” in the rural South and underscore the fact that opposition arises as much from within the prevailing ideological order as from outside it.29 Several poor black tenants, for example, admonished their landlords for shunning responsibilities as plantation patriarchs while spending great sums of money on superfluous personal consumption. “You can go to [the landlord],” one young sharecropper wrote, “and asking [sic] him for something and he will tell a flat footed lie and say he ain't got money and then go buy himself a fine car.” But few published letters attacked the landlords because of their failure to fulfill their paternal obligations. Only a revolution, wrote one Tallapoosa organizer, could “break their rotten system down” and truly improve conditions in Alabama. What he had imagined was a new world in which there was neither poverty nor deference; a world where everyone lived like a boss. “We must fight to weaken their tight grip and then we can eat and wear as the ruling class does. It's bad the way we have to go up and ask, and knowing that it is there we must organize into stronger masses and demand the bosses to give us what we want.”30
Among the more commonly published letters were hyperbolic declarations of devotion to the movement, which Communist editors too often took literally. Communists and SCU organizers submitted rhetorical statements pledging to fight fearlessly until death, placing themselves symbolically in the tradition of martyrdom. “The bosses say they are going to starve us Negroes to death,” wrote a young Dadeville woman, “but if I starve I will surely starve in the Union.” A black man, also from Dadeville, boasted of his three-year membership in the SCU and proclaimed his intention “to remain until death, fighting for the Negro rights. . . . The bosses have set out to starve us to death, but we are set to break their rotten system down by organizing into one solid union.” The writer not only echoed the theme of starvation and death that reappears in most of the letters, but pledged a collective rather than individual commitment. Similarly, a black Tallapoosa woman committed her community to support the SCU and the Party, despite the possible consequences. “Even if we are naked, hungry, and denied by the boss, we are going to stand up and fight for our rights!”31
Expressions of oppositional thought also manifested themselves in music. In the abandoned houses and isolated churches of rural Alabama, leaders of the SCU sustained a tradition of singing before and after gatherings, a practice adopted from the rural church services after which they patterned their meetings. In addition to standards such as “The Internationale” and “Solidarity Forever,” rural blacks in and around the Party transformed popular spirituals into political songs with new messages. “We Shall Not Be Moved” and the ever popular “Give Me That Old Time Religion” were stock musical forms used to create new Party songs. In the latter, the verse was changed to “Give Me That Old Communist Spirit,” and Party members closed out each stanza with “It was good enough for Lenin, and it's good enough for me.” In the black belt especially, Ralph Gray frequently replaced Lenin in the final line.32 The same melody was also the basis for “The Scottsboro Song”:
The Scottsboro verdict,
The Scottsboro verdict,
The Scottsboro verdict,
Is not good enuf for me.
Its good for big fat bosses,
For workers double-crossers,
For low down slaves and hosses.
But it ain't good enuf for me. . . .33
The custom of singing protest songs at Party functions or Communist-led demonstrations was surprisingly uncommon in Birmingham during the Third Period and was not adopted until the Popular Front. This is ironic when one considers Birmingham's rich tradition of labor songs and the extent to which black industrial workers—including Communists—were involved in the regional gospel quartet circuit, not to mention the contributions of Southern radical songwriters Ella May Wiggins, Florence Reece, and “Aunt” Molly Jackson.34 But the underground nature of the Party and the repressive terrain in which it operated—from alleys to armed mining camps—impeded the practice of singing even the mildest of Party songs. Nevertheless, Birmingham radicals did manage on occasion to express their attachment to the movement and their vision of the coming world through music. A black woman ILD activist turned “My Mother's Got a Stone That Was Hewn Out of the Mountain” into “We Got a Stone,” which was eventually designated the official ILD song in the South. The chorus was changed to “Come a-rollin’ through Dixie / Come a-rollin’ through Dixie / A-tearin’ down the Kingdom of the boss,” and the verses referred to the militant example of the ILD and the role of workers in the class struggle.35
The music of Southern working people entered Party culture in ways that have usually gone unnoticed. Most of the early songs published in the Southern Worker were personal expressions of exploitation and resistance that provided an outlet comparable to workers’ correspondence. One of the earliest editions of the Southern Worker received a piece entitled “Autumn Blues” describing the vicissitudes of Southern rural life:
The ‘baccer ain't a sellin’
The corn is dryin’ up,
There ain't a bit of tellin’
Where the army worms will sup.
The weevil eats the cotton,
The beetle eats the beans,
Do you think it's any wonder,
There's nothing in my jeans?36
The Southern Worker published “The Bedspread Blues” by an anonymous woman whose lyrics expressed the burden of her own double day as a wife and a worker and emphasized the centrality of her role in the survival of the family:
Work from early morning
Until ten at night;
All the dishes dirty;
Kitchen in a sight;
Landlord comes a-knocking
Says he wants his rent,
All that I can tell him
Haven't got a cent.
I've got the blues;
I've got the blues,
the tufted bedspread blues.
Got a good old husband
Working on relief,
Gets his ninety cents a week,
And a can of beef;
Haven't time to worry,
Got no time to lose,
Got to make a living
Spite the bedspread
blues. . . .37
Secular songs such as these certainly caught the attention of left-wing musicologists, who generally preferred “Negro workaday” songs over spirituals.38 But in spite of the political penchants of radical cultural theorists, black Alabama radicals drew their songs, and much more, from the spiritual world of the community. Many leading Communists failed to understand that most of their black working-class comrades shared with the non-Communist community a grass-roots understanding of exploitation and oppression based more on scripture than anything else. Forged in yesterday's slave quarters, this prophetic interpretation of Christianity had informed black resistance for nearly three centuries. Yet, as Gayraud Wilmore points out, by the early 1920s the black church was no longer at the center of black resistance. The period after World War I witnessed a “deradicalization” of the black church as well as a simultaneous secularization of black radicalism.39 Nevertheless, a radical interpretation of Christianity continued to thrive outside of the organized church. Ironically, this radical, prophetic tradition of Christianity was a major factor in drawing blacks into the Communist Party and its mass organizations.
References to God and the Bible appeared rather frequently in letters from Alabama's black radicals. “Your movement is the best that I ever heard of,” wrote a black woman from Orrville, Alabama. “God bless you for opening up the eyes of the Negro race. I pray that your leaders will push the fight. ... I am praying the good Lord will put your program over.” Nearly all black rank-and-file Party members attended church regularly, and in Montgomery black Communists initiated the ironic (and short-lived) practice of opening their meetings with a prayer.40 The Bible was as much a guide to class struggle as Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto; rank-and-file black Communists and supporters usually saw nothing contradictory in combining religion and politics. Communist “agents” told Alabamians, John Garner remembers, the same thing that “Jesus Christ himself told us”: that “our burden was gonna be heavy like this.” Angelo Herndon initially interpreted the struggle in biblical terms. While at an unemployed meeting, he was reminded of a phrase popular among black folks: “And the day shall come when the bottom rail shall be on top and the top rail on the bottom. The Ethiopians will stretch forth their arms and find their place under the sun.”41
The mass meetings and oratory describing the possibilities of a future without masters or slaves may have also paralleled the church experience. “The conversion of the masses to Communism is an emotional conversion,” wrote a black Baltimore minister in 1933. “They are shouting happy over what Communism has done for them, and praising God for what they expect it to do. . . .” Herndon's description of his “conversion” to the Party's philosophy reinforces these observations. At the conclusion of a Birmingham unemployed meeting, he was reminded of the time “when my Uncle Jeremiah preached his first sermon. . . . The emotional motivation in both cases was identical, but what a difference in their nature and in their aim!”42
Unlike their counterparts in the urban North, Southern CP leaders rarely challenged the rank-and-file's religious beliefs. Birmingham Communists occasionally debated God's existence, but Party literature produced locally virtually never attacked religion. On the contrary, organizers in the South sometimes appropriated religious imagery and language, as in Nat Ross's declaration that the Communists “can and will destroy this hell and build a heaven for the Southern working people right here in Dixie.” The Blast, a Party shop paper in the steel mills, carried “a biting cartoon of one hated foreman, a speed-up demon caricatured with horns, tail and pitchfork.”43 Nevertheless, although religion constituted a rich source of oppositional culture, the higher echelons of Communist leadership during the Third Period made no attempt to fuse Marxism and Christianity.
The Communist movement in Alabama resonated with the cultures and traditions of black working people, yet at the same time it offered something fundamentally different. It proposed a new direction, a new kind of politics that required the self-activity of people usually dismissed as inarticulate. For this reason, as we have already glimpsed in Chapter 4, Communists bumped heads with the African-American community's self-appointed spokespersons—the “better class Negroes.”
Alabama's black elite epitomized the ethos and work ethic of Booker T. Washington and his National Negro Business League. Thrift, hard work, accommodation, racial solidarity, patience, and the development of black business were the essential building blocks for uplifting the Negro, not open agitation for political rights or social equality. Birmingham black business magnate Rev. W. R. Pettiford once told a group of fellow businessmen, “The establishment of banks . . . and other businesses among us gives promise of a variety of occupations for our people, thus stimulating them to proper preparation.” The Magic City was especially well suited for such a strategy, according to Birmingham Reporter editor Oscar Adams, simply because “there are more Negroes to eat, wear clothes, carry on business, work, spend money, get sick, die; in general, create more opportunities for better economic life.”44 Despite racist zoning laws and other debilitating practices, some black businesses did quite well, particularly before the stock market crash. In 1929, Birmingham's black-owned retail stores grossed over $600,000 in sales, although eight years later this annual figure had dropped to only $193,000, accumulated at an operating cost of $75,000. These individual successes notwithstanding, black establishments were quite small and offered few employment opportunities. In 1937, Birmingham's 132 black businesses, most of which were food related, employed only eighty-nine people.45
During the depression, the black elite's economic decline was exacerbated by their political powerlessness, exposed partly by the utter failure of Oscar Adams's Benevolent and Legal Aid Association and the local NAACP's impotence during the initial stages of the Scottsboro and Willie Peterson cases. Whereas in the urban North, the traditional black petite bourgeoisie faced challenges from radical black nationalists as well as leftists,46 the Birmingham “old guard” had only to contend with the Communists and each other. Although the conflict between Communists and Birmingham's traditional black leadership laid bare intraracial class distinctions, the black elite did not recognize Communist Party membership as a reflection of working-class politics and instead characterized it as an emotional response on the part of the ignorant and uninformed. Alabama's black Communists, according to Oscar Adams, were merely “irresponsible suckers who are biting at this propaganda either because of ignorance of the results or wanton desire for criminal adventure.” Birmingham NAACP secretary Charles McPherson simply dismissed the ILD as an illegitimate movement comprised of a “large number of our own non-reading classes” that will never become a real force because “intelligent and informed people can not be swept off their feet by the propoganda [sic] of a questionable organization.”47 What McPherson, Adams, and other traditional black leaders failed to admit, however, was that the organizational activity of their tiny inner circle excluded the opinions of the “non-reading classes.” They assumed the mantle of spokesmen for black working people because they felt the masses were incapable of speaking for themselves. Their perception of this relationship changed when poor blacks joined a movement that articulated working-class grievances, treated them with dignity, and provided a relatively autonomous vehicle through which to engage in social contestation more or less on their own terms.
The Party's ideological assault on Southern society affected the black elite in other ways as well. 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. “This radical organization,” an NAACP petition declared, “in its’ march of destruction of the Social Order, Knows no COLOR LINE, and wherever it finds it possible, it breeds upon the grievances of a discontent [sic] people.” The NAACP's statement may have been largely tactical, but it is interesting to note what its leaders chose to emphasize in their attack on the Communists. The Birmingham-based Southern Afro-American Industrial Brotherhood, an organization devoted to supporting black businesses and keeping blacks out of the labor movement, also criticized the Party for its stand on social equality. Its president, the Reverend P. Colfax Rameau, warned that God drew “the line of demarcation of the races, and in doing so, He made the Aryan Race the leaders of Christian, industrial, commercial, economic, social and political life.” To protect his benighted people from Communism, Rameau hoped to drive all white radicals from the state of Alabama.48
It is difficult to determine precisely how much of black middle-class anti-Communism stemmed from a true patriotic impulse and how much was just political posturing. In depression Alabama all ambitious black businessmen and professionals realized that supporting the Communists could lead to a truncated career. Robert Durr, a preacher from Mississippi who moved to Birmingham in 1931, learned this lesson very early. Having first worked as a reporter for the Birmingham World, he was drawn to the ILD by the Scottsboro case and the work of the SCU in Tallapoosa County, and he even developed a reputation as “a very vocal radical.” But when TCI offered Durr capital to launch an antiunion black newspaper, the Weekly Review, the “radical” phase of his life came to an abrupt end. Durr wrote in one of his first editorials, “Communism is not the way out for the Negro. . . . The best whites and blacks are striving to and can do more to help the Negro of the South upward and onward in any walk of life than ten billion Stalins.” In an interview granted five years after he wrote these words, the former radical offered an epigrammatic explanation of his politics: “By all means keep in with the man who hires and pays you.”49
Yet, however daunting the white power structure might have seemed in the segregated South, the “better class of Negroes” still depended upon black constituents and consumers. And when the Communists and other groups were able to organize successful boycotts of black enterprises, the dictum of keeping “with the man” did not always make good business sense. To take one example, when word got out that the Welch Brothers, a prominent black funeral home in Birmingham, had agreed to bury Clifford James and Milo Bentley, victims of the Reeltown shoot-out in 1932, they were “visited by some of their good white friends and had been advised not to bother with them bodies.” The ILD then turned to a smaller, more modest black-owned funeral home in North Birmingham run by undertaker Hickman Jordan. Since Jordan had no direct links to the white business establishment he could afford to ignore the threats from police and Birmingham's leading white citizens. The result was a boost for Jordan's business and a blow to the Welch Brothers. “After Jordan buried those bodies,” Hosea Hudson remembered, “then the people all see. It allowed a lot of people to know that Welch and them backed off. A whole lot of their members quit their burial policies and joined Jordan's policies. Welch Brothers wanted to try to sue Jordan for taking their members away from them.” Nevertheless, the undertaker's business acumen—interpreted, of course, as an act of defiance—did have its price: throughout the 1940s Jordan's funeral parlor became a prime target for FBI surveillance and harassment.50
Within the African-American community, the petite bourgeoisie's base of support and their moral authority were derived from their reputation as honest, dedicated, hard-working advocates for the race—a collective image of self shaped by the black press that they themselves controlled. Black Communists undermined traditional black leaders by openly challenging their political decisions, questioning their loyalty to the poor, or simply deprecating their character. The Party's critique of the black petite bourgeoisie often resulted in unrestrained intraracial class conflict. In November 1934, for example, ILD activists waged a community campaign against A. W. Wood, the black principal of Ensley Council School, whom they accused of conscripting his eighth graders to act as spies for TCI, allowing police officers to beat uncooperative children, and using the threat of dismissal to force female teachers to have sex with him. The campaign mobilized dozens of black Ensley parents in support of a school boycott, which only came to an end when the board of education and local police intervened and punished boycotters for truancy. Black Communist Pete Turney was arrested for issuing the leaflet describing Wood's activities, charged with libel and violating the Downs literature ordinance, and received a two-year prison sentence. Wood, however, kept his job but lost much of the respect he had once enjoyed from the community.51
Local clergymen received the brunt of Party criticism directed at black traditional leadership. This may seem ironic given the subtle religious undertones of local Party culture, but the Communists’ early assault on black ministers had less to do with theology than with the political shortcomings of clerical leadership. While Southern Worker columns accused prominent ministers such as Dr. J. H. Eason of Jackson Street Baptist Church and Bishop Socrates O'Neal of stealing funds from their congregations, Communists, for the most part, limited their criticisms to the direction black religious leaders offered. Early in 1931, the Reverend John W. Goodgame of Sixth Avenue Baptist Church was ridiculed for telling “Negro workers to wait for pie in the sky when you die, when they complain of unemployment, starvation wages and Jim Crowism.” Weeks later, a black YCL member published a diatribe entitled “The Red and the Reverend,” which used a Socratic-style dialogue to contrast the Party's militant program with the patient, presumably conciliatory methods of black clergymen. Commenting on a sermon delivered by the pastor of St. James Church, in which he had extolled Booker T. Washington's philosophy of black labor allying with white capital, a black YCL activist sarcastically agreed with part of his message. “He is right about the workers having nothing in their pockets because the bosses and all bull-faced fakers like him keep the workers’ pockets clean, telling them to put a dollar in church and the Lord will give them two.”52
The Party's impugning remarks contained some truth. Birmingham's black men of the cloth were notorious for using the pulpit to dissuade black workers from joining the labor movement, and some received healthy subsidies from corporate interests to do so. TCI and other companies built and maintained segregated churches for their employees and only hired pastors willing to disparage organized labor from the pulpit.53 Thus, the recollections of Birmingham steel worker and ILD activist Dobbie Sanders probably reflect the sentiments of a considerable segment of Alabama's black working class: “Man, them preachers is a mess. Most of em ain't no good. Brainwashing, that's what they all about. They should have been race leaders, but instead they are race hold-backers. . . . These preachers go around here charging people to keep them looking back.”54
If the Party's critique of the black petite bourgeoisie influenced the thinking of black working people, it is because it reinforced an underlying resentment and class antagonism that had been mitigated by centuries of racism. Deeds, not words, exposed the failure of middle-class leadership, illumined the possibilities of radical politics, and contributed to black workers’ confidence in their ability to create and sustain a movement of their own making. Victories were few and far between, but there were victories—in the relief offices, in the mines and factories, in the countryside, in the courts, and in the streets. Even when nothing tangible resulted from these activities, Communists rattled the power structure, confirmed the effectiveness of collective action, and displayed an ability to bypass traditional leadership while engaged in social contestation. Moreover, through their own participation many black working people came to realize that a class-based, interracial politics—in which participants operated on a relatively equal plane and put basic rights for African-Americans at the center of their program—was possible (though still improbable) in the Deep South.
This realization posed a significant threat to the dominant racialist (and racist) way of thinking. Whereas in other parts of the country cries of paternalism punctuated interracial discourse within Party circles, in Alabama, Northern white Communists generally treated poor blacks with dignity and respect. Although elements of white paternalism were clearly evident, race relations within the Party were still radically different when one considers the daily indignities blacks experienced in the South. “We were called ‘comrades,’” Angelo Herndon wrote, “without condescension or patronage. Better yet, we were treated like equals and brothers.” The interracialism of the Party “confounded and elated” Al Murphy. His first Communist meeting left him stunned: “This was the first time I had ever sat in a gathering among Black and white persons in a Black man's home.” In Hosea Hudson's view, Northern white Communists gave poor black folks a sense of dignity that even the black middle-class denied them: “In order to get anywhere you had to be part of the ‘better class.’ This low class of people was the ones the police was killing what nobody saying nothing about. Outcasts! When the Party come out, these people were somebody. You took these people and made leaders out of them.”55
As local leaders, blacks were encouraged to criticize their white comrades, a practice unheard of in any other Southern organization of its time. The freedom and power black Communists enjoyed within the district committee and at other organizational levels frustrated Southern-born whites unaccustomed to assertive, “smart niggers.” The case of white Birmingham Communist Fred Keith provides us with an instructive example. When three Birmingham Party members were invited to the Soviet Union in 1932 to study at the Lenin School, Keith wanted desperately to go, but Hosea Hudson's criticisms of his work among the white unemployed convinced other members of the district committee to reject his request. After three blacks were chosen over Keith, he turned informant and complained to authorities about the favoritism blacks allegedly received in the Party. Keith certainly exaggerated his case, but beneath his commentary lay a modicum of truth. Occasionally the fear of being accused of “white chauvinism” actually dulled the impact of criticism directed at blacks, and in a few rare moments black Communists deftly milked these fears in order to avoid censure. During the 1934 strike wave, white Communist Clyde Johnson and a black comrade, Joe Howard, were asked to organize several Birmingham metal shops, but once the work began Howard suddenly became scarce. When Johnson raised this problem with the district committee, he was reprimanded for allowing “white chauvinism” to get the best of him while Joe Howard, who had promptly joined in the condemnation, completely escaped criticism.56 Rare as they might be, these kinds of episodes illustrate a certain hypersensitivity to racism among white radicals and a willingness on the part of some blacks to manipulate these underlying attitudes for their own benefit or protection. Hence, even intra-Party relationships that appeared to have been intimate were often mediated by a variety of masks.
A closer look at the apparent divisions between black Communists and the black middle-class also reveals complex relationships hidden from public dialogue. Intraracial class conflict was never clear-cut, and both sides exhibited ambivalence toward each other's ideas. Black Communists sometimes expressed aspirations that were more reflective of a bourgeois ethos and values than socialist ideology. John Garner devoted as much time to learning the tailoring trade as he did to organizing mine workers, for in his words, “I didn't intend to be a worker all my days.” In fact, he looked to the Party to win his freedom so that he could fulfill his dream “to build a business of my own and then serve people.” Garner's dream, resembling in some ways the early yearnings of Al Murphy, Hosea Hudson, Angelo Herndon, and probably others whose backgrounds are still a mystery, may seem contradictory but is not surprising given the social character of Birmingham's black male cadre. They rose from respected, upwardly mobile, working-class families; the Party merely constituted an alternative stepping stone toward respectability within the confines of their world. Though they were belittled and attacked by the black elite, many held respectable positions in their lodge or church. Both Henry O. Mayfield and Hosea Hudson were well known in their communities for singing in gospel quartets. Hudson attained the position of junior deacon of New Bethel Baptist Church, and his good friend and comrade John Beidel rose to full deacon during the Popular Front. True to their moral values, this core of black male leaders tried to abstain from drink, vehemently opposed “womanizing,” and felt free to intervene in their comrades’ marital problems in order to keep families together.57
On the other side of the spectrum, secret monetary donations were regularly forthcoming from black professionals who never publicly expressed support for the Party but privately declared, “I'm with you.” One of the most devoted black middle-class supporters, a Birmingham dentist known amiably as “Doc Collins,” not only contributed money on occasion but allowed Al Murphy to use his address to receive correspondence from SCU members. It is quite possible that tacit support for the Party and its auxiliaries reflects a more complex political practice at work among members of the black middle class: like the radicals they publicly condemned, they too could have been playing the role of trickster. A confidential survey of attitudes toward Communism conducted in 1932 reveals a greater ambivalence on the part of the Southern black elite than is evident in contemporary politics and journalism. When asked if “Communism is a menace to American ideals and institutions,” less than half of the Southern black businessmen and professionals surveyed said yes. And when confronted with the statement, “Democracy in this country is a capitalistic dictatorship,” 75 percent of the Southern respondents felt the assertion was quite accurate. The surveyor concluded from the data that Southern black professionals and businessmen were more radical than their Northern counterparts.58 Nonetheless, if the survey represented the Birmingham black elite accurately, then their actions certainly did not reflect their attitudes.
Black religious leaders were perhaps the most divided with respect to the Communists, partly because they came from different class backgrounds and because their vocation brought them face to face with poor people. Although ministers developed a reputation for engaging in antiunion activity, a few modest preachers who had no pastoral obligations devoted time and energy to the labor movement, and some even became staunch Communist supporters.59 Aside from these jackleg preachers, a few black pastors actively supported the Party, notably the Reverend George W. Reed of Forty-Fifth Street Baptist Church. An unusual voice among conservative black clergymen, Reed directed most of his efforts to helping the poor and building the labor movement. He remained an unswerving critic of the traditional black elite, compared other preachers to common thieves, and was known to use “a Bible text each evening to defend the trade union movement.” But there were few George W. Reeds, and most black church leaders proved formidable opponents of the Party. Indeed, even mild-mannered reform politics repelled the more prominent clergymen. Fearing reprisals from hostile whites or Southern philanthropists, segments of the ministerial community avoided association with organizations as tame as the NAACP during the early 1930s.60
While disparaging remarks and aspersions were exchanged between the pulpit and the Party press, most black Communists ignored commentary on both sides and continued to attend services regularly. But once the Scottsboro campaign gained prominence, local Communists began to see the church as a potential forum for reaching a broader audience and a source of financial support. The Birmingham cadre looked to the black church in defiance of Central Committee directives not to have any dealings with “‘friendly’ Negro preachers.” The Party's new vocal presence in church affairs, complicated by the volatile atmosphere surrounding the case, divided congregations and led to heightened conflict between Communists and clergy. When Hosea Hudson invited black Birmingham Communist David James to speak at New Bethel Baptist Church in East Birmingham, James met strong opposition from the pastor, the deacons, and most of the congregation. James, who was not a member of the church, gained few adherents with his militant tone and constant references to the Communist Party, which many felt was inappropriate in the house of the Lord.61
By far the most dramatic confrontation occurred at Bethel Baptist Church, located in the predominantly black suburb of Collegeville. Although several Communists were Bethel members during the early 1930s, its pastor, the Reverend M. Sears, was among the leading anti-Communists in the Birmingham area and coauthor of the CIC's damning 1931 report, “Radical Activities in Alabama.” Tensions between Communists and Sears erupted in the spring of 1933, with the arrest and beating of a Greenwood Red Cross relief worker, Randolph “Doc” Carter. Following a heated argument, the project foreman—a white man—drew a pistol and shot at Carter, who managed to escape unharmed while fellow workers subdued their boss. Sears, who knew Carter, lured him out of hiding and turned him over to the police, who beat him badly while in jail. The arrest and beating of Carter incensed the black communities of Collegeville and Greenwood. Local CP leaders held Sears responsible, distributing a leaflet characterizing him as a “preacher for the lord, spy for the police, and framer-up of workers.” A Communist-led committee marched to the Bethel Church to confront the reverend, but as soon as they entered the church, Sears whipped out a shotgun he had hidden behind the pulpit, nearly causing a riot as people madly rushed out of the church. In the aftermath, several people were arrested and Sears was fined for drawing a gun on unarmed citizens.62
The incident at Bethel Baptist Church was in some ways emblematic of intraracial class conflict in Birmingham during the early 1930s. Although class antagonism within the black community predated the Party's presence, in the past it had remained largely ambiguous, a grudging resentment combined with respect and admiration. Examples of praise for the black middle class abound in newspapers, magazines, books, and speeches given in public forums, but critical opinions held by black working people have usually been limited to a hidden transcript found mainly in slums, bars, shacks, barber shops, jokes, songs, toasts, and other spaces or forms of black working-class expression. The appearance of the Communist Party and its auxiliaries brought part of that hidden transcript out in the open. Yet, because racism prevailed, the kind of counter-hegemonic ideology Party purists had hoped for never took hold among black Communists, whose actions were informed by a culture of opposition with deep roots in history and community. They became Communists out of their concern for black people and thus had much in common with the black elite whose leadership they challenged. The Communist Party was such a unique vehicle for black working-class opposition because it encouraged interracial unity without completely compromising racial politics. Irrespective of Comintern directives or official pronouncements, the Alabama CP was resilient enough to conform to black cultural traditions but taut enough to remain Marxist at the core.