We have no freedom of which the land Boasts [sic] about for the W.P.A. workers are [like] Slaves. . . . Man if that is freedom then give me prison where I will get plenty to eat, if some change is not made there will be mob violence here in a week or 10 days for the men are joining orders that are suppose to help them and you know it is communist at work among the Negros [sic] and it is going to cause trouble.
—Birmingham WPA foreman to President Roosevelt, 1935
In spite of all their efforts to present a respectable image and to nurture friendly relations with Southern liberals and organized labor, Alabama Communists could not ignore the rising tide of workers’ dissent that was sweeping the federal government's newest relief agency, the Works Progress Administration. Activated in 1935 to provide emergency work relief through public works, the WPA in Alabama was launched with very little direction or planning. Jobs varied from bridge building and road work to cotton picking and gardening, for which workers received wages well below union rates and sometimes even below prevailing nonunion wages. Monthly wages for unskilled WPA workers ranged from thirty dollars per month in Birmingham to nineteen dollars per month in rural Alabama. The rural-urban differential allowed local WPA administrators to pay a Birmingham worker the city's prevailing rate and then send him or her out to the rural areas at a lower wage. In many cases, reassignment from the countryside to the city did not result in a proper wage adjustment, thus forcing many workers, especially blacks, to toil on Birmingham WPA projects for a minuscule nineteen dollars per month.1
The combination of low wages and poor working conditions bred a militant relief workers’ movement reminiscent of the 1934 strike wave. Several spontaneous uprisings on WPA projects rekindled the militant spirit of the early 1930s and literally swept Alabama Communists into the fray, giving birth to what was perhaps their most incongruous campaign during the Popular Front. Montgomery Party members organized a mass demonstration of WPA workers in August of 1935 to protest the prevailing wage rates and demand a minimum of forty cents per hour, though police intervention brought the gathering to an abrupt close. In Birmingham, a handful of Communists assisted a predominantly white group of WPA workers who had not received wages in three weeks. The group marched on the local relief headquarters, bolted through the door, and threatened to use violence if they did not receive at least a grocery order. By the time police arrived, approximately fifty demonstrators had broken into the government surplus store and “selected what food they could carry.”2
By the summer's end, WPA workers in Jefferson and Walker counties were showing signs of mounting frustration over low wages and intolerable working conditions. One frightened WPA foreman in Birmingham warned that his workers resented “working for almost nothing” and had reached a point where “they will kill at the drop of a hat and they will get us foremen first for they think we are to blame.” In September a series of proposed wage cuts prompted thirty-five hundred WPA workers in Walker County to walk off their jobs in disgust. Led by Clayton Norris, district president of the International Hod Carriers, Building and Common Laborers Union of America, the strike was not recognized by either WPA administrators or the ASFL. Indeed, two months earlier, officers of the ASFL had signed an agreement with state relief administrator Thad Holt designating all strikes on WPA projects as antigovernment and therefore illegal. And the Hod Carriers’ reputation for militancy only solidified WPA administrators’ denunciation of the strike. In the words of one WPA official, the union “has always been a difficult one.”3
During the strike, WPA officials refused to talk to Norris, choosing instead to negotiate with ASFL spokesman V. C. Finch, whose strategy was to persuade strikers to return to work at the original pay scale. The striking WPA workers held a mass meeting at the Walker County courthouse under Norris's leadership and demanded an hourly minimum wage of thirty cents, free transportation to and from the projects, regular paydays at two-week intervals, and payment for commuting time. With little support and no strike fund, the strikers began to break ranks after three weeks, and when police arrested Norris—a convicted felon—for parole violation, the strike came to an abrupt end. But it was not all for naught: WPA administrators rescinded the proposed wage reductions, reduced hours from 160 to 116 per month, and increased wages, ranging from fifteen to twenty-seven cents per hour, for some returning workers.4
Within a matter of months, discontent had shifted from Walker to Jefferson County. On March 24, 1936, WPA officials announced that all Jefferson County workers on “non-fixed cost” projects were to be reduced to half-time with corresponding reductions in pay, and at least eight thousand workers would be suspended without pay. A committee from the district council of the Hod Carriers, composed of district officers W. J. O'Neal, John Steele, and black Communist labor organizer Ebb Cox, tried to negotiate a settlement with WPA administrator Ray Crow; but when their efforts failed, they elected to strike. On April 15, 1936, about twelve hundred WPA workers in Birmingham and Bessemer left their jobs, and two days later another one thousand relief workers in Jefferson and Shelby counties joined the strike. Their principal demands included a reversal of the suspension order, a 10 percent wage increase, and the removal of Ray Crow, whom WPA workers felt expressed antilabor attitudes.5
Since the walkout technically constituted a “strike against the government,” TCI police, armed foremen, and the local sheriff aggressively sought to restore law and order. One of the most violent confrontations occurred at a WPA-sponsored women's sewing project, where Communists Belle Logan and Kenneth Bridenthal had organized pickets of black women strikers. Police and gangs of white men toting ax handles arrived on the scene and beat several black women senseless. “The men in charge of the project,” reported Belle Logan, “had a Government truck driven up onto the sidewalk into the midst of the women, and the [WPA] guards came over with sticks and clubs and began to beat the colored women, seriously injuring three of them.” The repression hastened the strike's end, which occurred within a few days. When it was all over, the county administrator agreed to withdraw the curtailment order but refused to raise wages.6
Less than a month after the strike, the state WPA administration laid off, without warning, five thousand workers, twenty-two hundred in Jefferson County alone, and reduced monthly cash relief allowances from $4.89 to a paltry $1.59. By the summer of 1936, wages and working conditions had deteriorated to such an extent that skilled white workers in Birmingham were being paid unskilled wages. In Walker County, WPA officials paid unskilled laborers a mere $22.00 per month for 116 hours of work. Black women, many of whom had been transferred from sewing projects to more physically exacting assignments, had registered numerous complaints with federal authorities. A black woman on a WPA beautification project near Bessemer who, along with other black women, had to dig trenches, remove rocks, and repair roads irrespective of the weather, probably summed up the feelings of her fellow workers when she wrote, “We are colored women and [are] treat [sic] worse than stock.”7
Just when Alabama's relief workers seemed most in need of unionization, the Hod Carriers’ increasingly conservative leadership had begun to withdraw from the WPA altogether. By the end of 1936, it had even adopted the ASFL's policy of opposing strikes on WPA projects. Shocked and disappointed by the Hod Carriers’ retreat, Alabama Party leaders nevertheless remained silent in their criticisms so as not to undermine chances for a Communist-labor alliance. Rather than challenge ASFL leadership or attempt to radicalize the Hod Carriers at the rank-and-file level, Communists continued to organize relief workers independently. In December, WPA laborers in Fairfield, under Communist leadership, won the right to free transportation to and from work by threatening to strike. A few months later, Communist organizer Kenneth Bridenthal founded a Birmingham chapter of the Amalgamated Association of State and United States Government Relief Workers of North America. Beyond a few mass meetings, however, the short-lived relief workers’ union was essentially a paper organization.8
The Party's growing national prominence within the Workers Alliance of America, a largely Socialist-led unemployed and relief workers’ movement, offered Birmingham Communists fresh opportunities for reorganizing WPA workers. At the alliance's founding convention in 1935, many of its rank-and-file members wholeheartedly supported the Popular Front and elected several Communists to leadership posts, and within a year the alliance merged with the CP-led unemployed councils.9 These dramatic changes in leadership and outlook, however, were slow to reach Alabama. When Birmingham's almost exclusively white Local 1 of the Workers Alliance received a charter in 1936, it was both organizationally weak and politically conservative. Aside from writing grievance letters to WPA officials, the Birmingham Workers Alliance had virtually no public presence before 1937.10
In the spring of 1937, the national executive board of the Workers Alliance sent John Donavan, a Communist and former New Dealer from Washington, D.C., to reorganize the Birmingham local. After some prodding by Donavan, Henry O. Mayfield and Hosea Hudson agreed one summer night to attend an alliance meeting in Fairfield, Alabama. If Donavan had intended to stir things up a bit by sending black radicals into the conservative white Workers Alliance, then his plan worked quite well. Unaccustomed to the presence of assertive black men, the chairman of the Fairfield local led a bewildered, disgusted group of white workers out of the meeting hall and out of the organization. About two months later, a progressive, interracial slate of candidates was elected to fill the recently vacated offices of Birmingham Local 1. James D. Howell was elected president, Hosea Hudson was chosen to serve as vice-president, and a black woman, Edwina Collins, assumed the duties of recording secretary. Because its meetings were integrated and it strongly supported the anti-poll-tax movement and encouraged black workers to register to vote, the alliance immediately earned a reputation as a “Communist” organization. Even AFL leaders, most of whom dismissed the Workers Alliance as a Communist front, directed most of their criticisms at its racial policies. On at least one occasion, anti-Communist trade union activists violently disrupted a Birmingham alliance meeting in 1938.11
The Communist-led unemployed councils of the early 1930s survived red-baiting from all corners, in large part because the Party's role in those days was never hidden. But because the CP veiled its connections to the Workers Alliance as part of its Popular Front strategy, accusations of Communist “domination” generated disunity and distrust within the union, particularly since the alliance opened its doors to white-collar professionals. These white-collar workers tended to be more sensitive to the incessant red-scare tactics than were unemployed industrial workers. Because racial equality and Communism were seen as two sides of the same coin, many whites left the alliance on the pretext that its racial practices alone proved it was a Communist front. Less than a year after Birmingham Communists became active in the Workers Alliance, white flight began to take its toll: in 1938 blacks comprised 60 percent of Local l.12
Yet, despite the losses in white membership, the pervasive red-baiting, and the internal dissension, the Jefferson County Workers Alliance momentarily flowered in both size and prominence. At a huge Workers Alliance rally in July 1938, at which forty-five hundred people crowded around the Jefferson County courthouse steps, national president David Lasser shared the podium with Alabama congressman Luther Patrick and labor leader William Mitch. With a peak membership of about four thousand, by 1938 twenty-seven locals had been formed under the jurisdiction of the Jefferson County council of the Workers Alliance. James Howell, former president of Local 1, was elected president of the county council, and Hudson was the members’ choice for vice-president. The position of recording secretary was filled by Ethel Lee Goodman, a young black woman from East Birmingham and recent Party recruit.13
Seeking to turn the alliance into more of an activist movement, the new county leadership adopted many of the strategies and tactics used by the unemployed councils during the early 1930s. Local alliance organizers confronted the Department of Water and Power when individual workers faced utilities shutoffs, created committees to settle problems with relief officials, and tried to deal directly with local WPA authorities regarding working conditions, wages, and pay schedules.14 But because the Party's support for the New Deal had been consolidated, especially during 1938, Communist leadership now discouraged wildcat strikes and walkouts on WPA projects. Moreover, the Workers Alliance at the national level developed a narrower approach to activism than the Party had originally conceived, evolving into essentially a “trade union for the WPA workers.” Such an approach proved largely ineffective because, as a government relief agency, the WPA did not depend on profits and a continuous flow of labor for its survival. Alliance members were still subject to the whims and caprices of local administrators. As one Bessemer woman put it, local authorities continued to “resort to all sorts of excuse and [pretexts] for denying relief or for dropping Negroes from the reliefs rolls.”15
Black women had the most difficulty maintaining WPA jobs. The demand for household domestic labor had grown precipitously by 1938—in part a sign of economic recovery. WPA administrators responded to the growing need for domestic workers by removing hundreds of black women from the work relief rolls. Although officials believed household labor offered sufficient opportunities for unemployed women, most black women resented their removal from the WPA rolls and bitterly resisted domestic work. While relief work was no picnic for black women, the choice between federal relief work and toiling ten hours or more as a domestic was easy to make: in 1939, over 60 percent of Birmingham's domestic workers earned less than $200 per year. After having been laid off from a WPA sewing project, one black Mobile woman implored President Roosevelt to have her assigned to some other project since “they do not pay a living wage in the home.” A Montgomery woman in similar circumstances resolved to return to the relief rolls or obtain a better job rather than resume housekeeping for another white family. “I am hungry,” she informed the president, “and I have walked the streets until I am barefooted trying to get me some work.” Appealing to Eleanor Roosevelt for assistance after having been fired from a WPA project in Bessemer, one black woman concluded simply that “here in Bessemer the conditions of us Negro females is the most pitful [sic] of anywhere in America.”16
A decision by the national administration of the WPA practically put an end to the Workers Alliance. In the spring of 1939, all WPA workers who had been on the program for at least eighteen continuous months were suspended and asked to reapply within thirty days. The Alabama WPA administration could not have reprocessed the majority of suspended workers within the thirty-day grace period, and thus the Workers Alliance lost its organizational base within a few weeks. Five months after the suspension, the Jefferson County Workers Alliance was reduced to less than one thousand members.17
With the Workers Alliance already on its last leg, the resurgence of anti-Communism spurred by the Dies Committee hearings only hastened the impending outcome. In 1939, as soon as the alliance appeared on the Dies Committee's list of “Communist front” organizations, the WPA mandated that relief workers sign allegiance cards prohibiting membership “in any organization that advocates the overthrow of the Government of the United States by force or violence.” In Gadsden, Alabama, the Communist issue prompted the formation of the Gadsden United WPA Workers, which denounced the alliance as a Communist front. In Jefferson County, anti-Communism and racial conservatism on the part of white members split the alliance in half. James D. Howell still held the presidency in 1940, but he moved out of Birmingham and concentrated his efforts on white-collar and skilled workers exclusively. Hosea Hudson and Ethel Lee Goodman tried to hold the Birmingham group together, which by this time consisted entirely of black workers. By the winter of 1939–40, only the Negro Masonic Temple allowed alliance members access to a meeting hall. In Hudson's words, this “hand full of Negros [sic]” were “the last to leave the sinking ship in a state of confushion.” The collapse of the Workers Alliance in Alabama was soon followed by its dissolution nationally in 1941.18
The brief history of the Workers Alliance reveals some of the limitations of Popular Front politics in the Deep South. Communists nationwide were already placed in the ironic position of having to fight for improvements within the WPA while simultaneously trying to build an alliance with the WPA's creators.19 But as discontented Alabama relief workers grew increasingly militant, it became exceedingly difficult to resolve these two contradictory tendencies. Indeed, in an era when the Communist Party's moderate turn had alienated black workers and the CIO had begun to embody the radical traditions of the early 1930s, the Workers Alliance might have augmented the Party's dwindling membership rolls. Like the unemployed councils several years later, it might have even provided the foundation for rebuilding the Communist Party in black working-class communities.
But times, and politics, had changed. The Workers Alliance only slightly resembled the predominantly black, underground, neighborhood-based unemployed movement of the early 1930s. It opened its doors to all WPA employees, including white-collar professionals who had no interest in the fight for racial justice and equality and even less tolerance for Communists. Although radicals exercised considerable influence in the Jefferson County Workers Alliance, the Party eventually adopted a somewhat accommodating political posture—much like its position with respect to the CIO. For the most part, Party leaders elected to limit alliance politics to “bread and butter” issues, cater to the needs of white-collar workers, and subordinate the Party's identity—all to ensure harmonious relations with organized labor, Southern liberals, and the middle class. Unfortunately, the long-sought-after alliance proved more elusive than Alabama Party leaders had imagined.