Chapter Eleven: The March of Southern Youth!

Side by side we'll wage our fight
Equality for black and white
On the way, everyday, making
way for Socialism. . . .

We'll build a Stronger Party
Hooray! Hooray!
In Dixieland we'll take our stand
To fight like hell for our demands
Hooray! Hooray!
To make a People's Dixie

—“Dixie,” Birmingham CP song, 1938

While the Nazi-Soviet Pact crushed most U.S. Communists’ hopes for a legitimate place in American politics, their comrades in Alabama emerged with renewed strength. The Democratic Front, as defined by the Central Committee, never had a chance in a region where liberals were themselves isolated, ridiculed, and red-baited, and the dream of building a left-wing bloc in the Democratic Party was pure folly in the solid South. The change wedded local leaders to working people once again; they now sought to reclaim the traditions upon which the Birmingham CP had been built almost a decade earlier. And they sought to create new ones. By discarding Popular Front liberalism for something more radical, the Party attracted a new cadre of activists who did more than just populate its dwindling ranks. This eclectic gathering of independent radicals, rebellious youth, Christian Socialists, black nationalists, and budding feminists shaped Birmingham Party politics and fashioned a new culture of opposition derived from militant interracialism, socialist values, and democratic principles.

Of course, on paper at least, Birmingham Party leaders toed the new line handed down by the Central Committee. Turning against their New Deal allies, they resurrected plans for a Farmer-Labor party, placed their own candidates on the 1940 ballot, and advocated a policy of international peace and domestic reform.¹ But Joe Gelders, Rob Hall, and the younger cadre developed their own agenda for Birmingham's reconstituted radical movement. One of their first tasks was to replace the liberal newsmagazine New South with something more appropriate. Late in 1939 Joe Gelders launched a new radical tabloid that appealed directly to Southern industrial workers and farmers. Whereas Communists across the country turned out convoluted theoretical tracts on Leninism, the crisis of capitalism, and the objective reasons for opposing war, Gelders wanted to reach a broad, working-class readership without mentioning Communism. After securing financial assistance from left-wing philanthropist Dan Gillmor, Gelders assembled an able editorial staff consisting of George Londa, a Communist from Newark, New Jersey, who had worked for the Birmingham Age-Herald and the Chattanooga News; Quentin P. Gore, a former labor organizer and experienced newspaperman who had worked for the Montgomery Advertiser, Birmingham Age-Herald, and Chattanooga News; and Alabama-born Sam Hall, a former editor for the Anniston Star and one of the Party's recent recruits. Staffed by three left-leaning veteran journalists and a handful of rank-and-file Communists responsible for circulation, the first issue of the Birmingham Southern News Almanac appeared on January 25, 1940.²

The Southern News Almanac never revealed its relationship to the CP, devoting most of its columns to the Southern labor movement, antiwar activity, civil rights issues, and police brutality in the Birmingham area. In the spirit of the old Southern Worker it revived workers’ correspondence, though its editors were not nearly as selective or sectarian with what they chose to print. One early issue even published a lengthy letter by a Georgia woman praising the Klan for protecting women in her community from domestic violence. Moreover, Gelders's new tabloid sharply contravened national Party dictates and carried religious columns promoting a Southern brand of the social gospel. Two Communist ministers, the Reverend Fred E. Maxey from Leeds, Alabama, and Georgia-born preacher Don West, contributed regular columns to the Southern News Almanac that explained war, racism, poverty, and capitalism in biblical terms. Calling his column “The Awakening Church,” Don West hoped other religious institutions would follow his lead and take a more activist stance. “[The Church] must become a fearless prophetic voice with the audacity to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord—the building of the Kingdom of Heaven on this earth, and now!” Fred Maxey's “Pulpit in Print” frequently echoed West's charges that the church had failed to live up to its historic role as advocate for the poor. Southern ministers, Maxey wrote, “have held out the promises of golden streets and large mansions in heaven as a reward for poverty and wretchedness down here.” Thus through the pages of the Southern News Almanac, Maxey and West attempted to fuse Christianity and Marxism. In keeping with the writings and teachings of theologians Reinhold Niebuhr, Claude Williams, and several other proponents of the social gospel, Maxey and West regarded Jesus’ mission as inherently radical. The teachings of Christ constituted a revolutionary text for social change, a blueprint for transforming earth into heaven. But to realize God's will required action: “Oppressors, who draw their sustenance from the masses have had to be pulled down, and as the autocrats have come tumbling down the people rose.”³

While the radical implications of their sermons undoubtedly frightened many people, their attempts to articulate the Party's antiwar position was sometimes incongruous with the overall message, leaving many readers suspicious. In one of West's columns he condemned Britain for volunteering to send troops to Finland but never once mentioned the USSR's presence there. Maxey went so far as to reject any aid to the Finnish people: “We need not try to soothe our conscience by shedding tears over the starving in Europe. Neither can we make amends to man or God by sending money to feed the hungry over there, as worthy as this cause may be.” Although many readers agreed with the basic contention that war in Europe would not solve America's social ills, such statements doubtlessly undermined Maxey's and West's credibility.⁴

Though still hindered by Soviet foreign policy and besieged by the Dies Committee, the Birmingham CP made considerable progress in the year following the Nazi-Soviet Pact. In the 1940 presidential election, for example, Earl Browder and James Ford polled an impressive 509 votes in Alabama (Socialist Norman Thomas received only 100 votes). The Party's resurgence, however, cannot really be measured numerically; rather, the broader Communist-led radical movement experienced a sudden, definite surge of energy. Through two notable organizations, the LYS and SNYC, an idealistic group of black and white, largely well educated young people injected new life into the radical movement. Indeed, SNYC and the LYS, neither of which maintained an open relationship with the Party, literally became the radical movement in Birmingham.

The LYS was an outgrowth of the Council of Young Southerners, an auxiliary of the SCHW founded in December 1938. Under the leadership of Birmingham attorney Helen Fuller and Arkansas activist Howard Lee, the council was conceived as an interracial, regionwide organization that would develop its own youth-oriented, New Deal agenda under the SCHW's tutelage. Its original program—a far cry from its future radicalism—proposed a federal youth administration combining the National Youth Administration and the CCC, vocational programs for urban and rural youth, and long-term, low-interest federal loans for young Southern farmers.⁵

Only two Communists, Howard Lee of Arkansas and Ed Strong of Virginia (also the only black) served on the five-member executive board, and both kept their political affiliations to themselves. Nevertheless, the growing anti-Communist sentiment within the SCHW spilled into CYS affairs. In June 1939, Frank Graham made several queries into the Communists’ role in the CYS, to which Howard Lee vehemently denied any CP connection whatsoever. William McKee, himself very much opposed to Communism, seconded Lee's response, calling the CYS “New Deal through and through.” Though several prominent SCHW members expressed reservations about Lee's politics, the CYS generally remained impervious to the red-baiting that had threatened its parent organization, in part because it maintained a separate, autonomous existence. The Southern Conference acted as sponsor on paper, but the CYS raised its own funds and opened its own national office in Nashville during the summer of 1939. Free to set its own agenda without SCHW interference, the CYS drifted further to the left. By the end of the year Howard Lee resigned his post as executive secretary to devote more time to the SCHW, leaving the reins to Malcolm Cotton Dobbs, a Communist minister who had joined the staff in early August. Nicknamed “Tex” for his native state, the twenty-three-year-old activist had already earned a Bachelor of Divinity degree from St. Lawrence University, studied at Union Theological Seminary, and worked for the Student Christian Movement. About six months after Dobbs's appointment, CYS headquarters were moved from Nashville to Birmingham, the organization's name was changed from Council to League of Young Southerners, and it affiliated with the American Youth Congress.⁶

League of Young Southerners. Top row, left to right: unidentified, Mike Ross, unidentified, James Dombrowski; bottom row, left to right: unidentified, Junius Scales, Malcolm “Tex” Dobbs, James E. Jackson, (courtesy Marge Frantz)

These changes reflect a deliberate shift in strategy and an infusion of new leadership, both of which point to the growing influence of the CP. Without the broad support needed to turn the council into a regionwide, interracial umbrella movement, the Young Southerners diverged from its parent organization and developed a more activist-oriented, community-based program. Once in Birmingham, the LYS directed most of its energies to anti-poll-tax organizing, police brutality cases, civil liberties violations, and educational and cultural work. The league's Birmingham membership, for the most part newly recruited Southern white Communists, shared much in common with Southern liberals but believed direct action should take precedence over mere discussion. One of the league's early local leaders, an energetic Birmingham woman who became Malcolm Dobbs's bride in 1940, epitomized this new spirit of activism. A Communist since her days at Phillips High School where she had been recruited by Marge Gelders, Pauline Dobbs continued her studies at Birmingham-Southern College while she worked for the LYS and, much later, for the Alabama Committee for Human Welfare. Together, “Tex” and “Polly” Dobbs maintained high visibility as civil rights and labor activists throughout the 1940s. Another young white couple active in LYS affairs were Ordway and Mary Southard. The New York-born Ordway, the elder of the two, concerned himself mainly with Party work while Mary, a native of Alabama, devoted most of her time to youth activities in 1940–41, working for the LYS and serving as regional YCL director. Sidney Rittenberg, who was only nineteen when he took over Malcolm Dobbs's position as LYS executive secretary in 1941, joined the Communist Party as a student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The offspring of a prominent Southern Jewish family, Rittenberg was an intellectual at heart, having become a Marxist “by way of an academic course in Hegel's philosophy.”⁷

Not surprisingly, a leading light among young Birmingham radicals was a product of the Gelders household. Born in 1922, Marge Gelders was already a veteran of the Left by the time the LYS moved to Birmingham in 1940; she joined the YCL in 1935 during her family's brief residence in New York. A brilliant student at Phillips High School in Birmingham, she graduated in 1938 and, at sixteen, continued her intellectual and political endeavors at Radcliffe College in Massachusetts. During her two-year stay she worked with the League of Women Voters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and organized a delegation of Southern youth to attend the American Youth Congress in Wisconsin. Returning to Birmingham in 1940, she became active in the LYS and the SCHW and in 1941 married another young Communist, civil rights lawyer Laurent Frantz.⁸

The league settled into Birmingham with high hopes, most of which were never realized. A radical movement raised in an increasingly repressive atmosphere, it never developed into a mass movement, drawing at most a couple dozen dedicated members. Nor did it attract the kind of interracial following it had hoped for at its founding meeting in 1938. Instead, the LYS accepted a supportive role, acting in concert with the Party and with SNYC—another radical youth organization that, just a few months earlier, had established headquarters in Birmingham.

SNYC's origins can be traced back to the National Negro Congress in 1936. Its primary progenitors were NNC national youth chairman Ed Strong and James Ashford, a noted black YCL organizer in Harlem. While the Arkansas-born Ashford persuaded the youth council to focus on the South, much of the early planning can be credited to Strong. A Communist since the early 1930s, Strong was the son of a Baptist minister born in Texarkana, Texas, and raised in Flint, Michigan. He attended the YMCA College in Chicago and became a youth leader at Mount Olivet Baptist Church—intending all along to follow in his father's footsteps. But by the time he became active in the left-wing First International Negro Youth Conference in Chicago in 1933, he had drifted toward the Communist Party and abandoned his quest to become a man of the cloth. Instead, he pursued a graduate degree in political science at Howard University and devoted his life to activism.⁹

Strong's plans for a Southern conference of black youth, scheduled to take place in November 1936, were postponed when he had to leave for Geneva that summer to attend the World Youth Congress. The task of organizing such a conference was then passed to James E. Jackson, Jr., a young pharmacy student pursuing an M.S. degree at Howard University. A native of Richmond, Virginia, born in 1914 “into a cultured family in comfortable circumstances,” Jackson had become a rebel at a very young age. He fought racism and segregation in the Boy Scouts, joined the Communist Party at sixteen, and as a student organized Virginia Union University's first Marxist club. With the help of Detroit labor organizer Christopher Columbus Alston, a dynamic black auto worker barely in his twenties, Jackson spent the summer planning the first Southern Negro Youth Congress. Meanwhile, Henry Winston, a twenty-five-year-old black Mississippi-born Communist who had been in the YCL since 1930, was sent on a Southern speaking tour in order to publicize the coming conference. By the time Winston headed South, SNYC organizers had decided to hold the inaugural, two-day conference in Richmond, Virginia, on February 13–14, 1937, to coincide with Frederick Douglass's birthday.¹⁰

Over five hundred delegates representing thirteen states and an array of social, political, civic, religious, and fraternal organizations attended the Richmond meeting. Following two days of speeches and forums covering a range of issues, including voting rights, recreation, education, health, and fascism, the gathering elected to become a permanent organization and chose Richmond as its national headquarters. Though several Communists were elected to key positions in SNYC, its advisory committee consisted of distinguished individuals in the fields of politics and education, including Mary McLeod Bethune, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, sociologist Charles Johnson, and Atlanta University president Rufus Clement. The delegates who volunteered to remain in Richmond to set up an office did not sit idle. Under the leadership of James Jackson and Chris Alston, SNYC activists organized some five thousand tobacco workers under the auspices of the Tobacco Stemmers and Laborers Industrial Union. A successful SNYC-led sit-down strike in Richmond's British American Tobacco Company resulted in wage increases ranging from 20 to 33 percent.¹¹

SNYC's second annual conference in Chattanooga the following year attracted nearly four hundred delegates, including international representatives from Ethiopia, India, and China. Once again the forum topics varied, ranging from marriage and home life to the CIO organizing drive, but the basic theme was the right to citizenship. Under the slogan “Freedom, Equality, Opportunity,” the conference focused on disfranchisement, promised to wage an anti-poll-tax campaign, and supported interracial unity under the banner of the Democratic Front. Before the Chattanooga meeting came to a close, delegates Hosea Hudson, Henry 0. Mayfield, and Birmingham World managing editor H. D. Coke persuaded the conferees to meet in Birmingham the following year.¹²

The decision to hold SNYC's 1939 conference in the Magic City could not have been more timely. By the time SNYC executive secretary Ed Strong arrived in Birmingham to set up temporary headquarters, the Right to Vote Club was well underway, the CIO in Jefferson County had initiated voter registration drives, and the SCHW had just held its inaugural meeting. Strong not only participated in the SCHW conference but helped launch the CYS in December 1938. He was especially buoyed by the local support he received for SNYC's third annual conference, scheduled for the end of April. Organized labor, traditional black leadership, youth, and adults alike greeted SNYC with open arms and offered crucial support. Several prominent black leaders served on the arrangements committee, including NAACP secretary Charles McPherson, businessman A. G. Gaston, Bishop B. G. Shaw, Oscar Adams, and conservative editor Robert Durr. The only Communist other than Strong to appear on the committee's letterhead was veteran Birmingham activist Cornelia Foreman.¹³

The Birmingham meeting was the largest to date, attracting 650 delegates from across the region, most of whom represented the host state. Delegations from local high schools and Alabama's black colleges were joined by rural and working-class youth, labor organizers, teachers, social workers, and sympathetic whites. The common themes of citizenship and equal opportunity were repeated throughout the proceedings, but special emphasis was placed on black culture. The first day began with four Birmingham choral groups performing “songs of the Negro people, the traditional spirituals, and worksongs, and arrangements of contemporary Negro composers.” The works of gifted black visual artists were displayed in a SNYC-sponsored art exhibit; the Dillard University Players Guild performed three one-act plays by black playwright Randolph Edmonds; and to top it all off, philosopher and literary critic Alain Locke addressed the gathering on the importance of cultural heritage.¹⁴

Local delegates and leaders came away from the conference feeling as Ed Strong did when he first arrived in Birmingham—that the city was ripe for a revolution of black youth. In the eyes of most Youth Congress leaders, Birmingham was indeed, as one delegate put it, “the cradle of a reviving faith in the Negro people's destiny in the South.” And given the dearth of existing black youth organizations in Alabama, SNYC must have been looked upon as a savior. Between 1938 and 1939, the only active NAACP youth councils could be found at Talladega College and in Mobile, and these chapters were surprisingly small. Before SNYC, many young blacks turned to Communist-led organizations such as the Right to Vote Club or the Workers Alliance. As sociologist Charles S. Johnson noted in his study of segregation patterns in Birmingham in the late 1930s, young blacks seemed prone “to utilize the willingness of the radical white groups who are there to lend aid in the fight for equal rights.”¹⁵

Thus few were surprised when SNYC officers moved their headquarters to Birmingham, a decision reinforced by newly elected national leaders. Delegates elected Herman Long, a native of Birmingham and teacher at Miles Memorial College, to serve as chairman; Ed Strong, who now made Birmingham his permanent residence, was reelected executive secretary; and Thelma Dale was the top choice for vice-chairperson. Although Dale was then studying sociology at Howard University, her uncle was one of Alabama's leading educators, Tuskegee Institute president Frederick D. Patterson.¹⁶

The Youth Congress set up its Birmingham office only a few months before the LYS arrived from Nashville. That both SNYC and the LYS established headquarters in Birmingham almost simultaneously was not entirely coincidence; Southern Party leaders strongly encouraged the move. In the aftermath of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the collapse of the Democratic Front, Birmingham seemed to be the Party's last hope in the South, at least from the purview of 1940. It was the one Southern city that had everything: a hardy industrial labor movement, a potential black civil rights movement, and a small but increasingly radical intelligentsia. At the heart of all three potential sources of opposition were young people. Most SNYC and LYS activists shared a common democratic socialist vision, espoused a militant interracialism, and pledged full support for the CIO organizing campaign and a civil rights agenda. And those who quietly maintained Communist Party membership shared even deeper political and cultural ties to the international movement to create a new world.

Yet there were very stark differences between SNYC and LYS activists, especially in regard to their respective backgrounds and motives. White radicals, drawn primarily from privileged surroundings, joined the LYS or the Party in order to challenge their own racial and class status, to buck the system that promoted and maintained inequality. Most were idealists and iconoclasts in the purest sense of the word. Others, such as Marge Gelders, could be characterized as an early crop of “red diaper babies.” In this category one might include Gerald Harris, Jr., the son of radical organizer and AFU president Gerald Harris, Sr. At seventeen the younger Harris was a leader in the LYS, became active in the American Youth Congress, and consequently joined the CP.¹⁷

On the other hand, the denial of opportunities and the paradox of racism in a democratic society motivated most SNYC activists. Black urban youth, in particular, entered the late 1930s with rising expectations fueled by the New Deal's rhetoric of equal opportunity and a slightly better chance to pursue higher education. Some Birmingham blacks optimistically turned to New Deal agencies such as the National Youth Administration, which claimed to offer training programs, recreational facilities, and an array of opportunities for struggling young people. But few blacks even saw the inside of a youth administration office, and those who did participate were placed in menial or domestic labor programs. In 1937, 147 of 200 women in Alabama's youth administration domestic training program were black, while only 38 black women of 401 participants were enrolled in the clerical program. It is probably not a coincidence, then, that a sharp rise in black juvenile delinquency in Birmingham occurred in the mid- to late 1930s.¹⁸

Once SNYC opened a Birmingham office, a number of talented individuals, many of whom were well-educated young women, were quick to volunteer their skills. Ethel Lee Goodman, who eventually became the director of SNYC's rural committees, had been somewhat of a restless spirit since her high school days in East Birmingham. As early as 1937 she complained to national NAACP youth director Juanita Jackson that “the work of the Jr NAACP here is not what it should be,” and Goodman expressed plans to revitalize Birmingham's defunct youth councils. “I have contacted a number of leading negro boys and girls and they are very anxious to help promote the growth of the organization here in the south.” Nothing came of her plan, however, and so she turned to other activities, such as organizing WPA workers in the Workers Alliance. Less than six months later Goodman not only joined the CP but was a delegate to the Party Builders’ Congress in New York in February 1938.¹⁹

Sallye Davis, a recent graduate of Miles Memorial College, was another vital link in SNYC's chain of black female leaders. Born and raised in Talladega County, Alabama, Davis moved to Birmingham in 1931 to continue her high school education, and in 1935 she won a scholarship to Miles College. She first found out about SNYC during Ed Strong's visit to campus and soon became close friends with SNYC chairman Herman Long and his wife Henrietta. Although Davis's teaching obligations limited her participation in SNYC during its first year in Birmingham, by the early 1940s she emerged as one of its key local leaders. Though she apparently never joined her many friends in the Communist Party, her daughter Angela Davis was destined to become perhaps the most celebrated African-American in CPUSA history and a veritable icon in black communities across the nation.²⁰

Ink drawing of Ethel Lee Goodman, part of a series depicting delegates to the Party Builders’ Congress of March 1938 (Daily Worker)

SNYC's most important and visible female leaders in 1940 were newcomers to Alabama. Ed Strong's wife and comrade, Augusta Jackson, was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, a generation removed from her parents’ home state of Georgia. A precocious student, Jackson graduated from Brooklyn College with honors and later earned an M.A. degree from Atlanta University. Shortly after joining her husband in Birmingham some time in 1939, Jackson plunged into organizational work, contributing articles to the Crisis, actively promoting congress events, eventually editing SNYC's newspaper, and all the while teaching at Miles College.²¹

Esther Cooper joined the staff during the summer of 1940 to serve as office director and administrative secretary. Born in Arlington, Virginia, in 1917, Cooper was the daughter of a school teacher (also a leading voice in the local NAACP) and a U.S. Army officer with an impeccable record of military service. Educated in Washington, D.C., public schools, she enrolled in Oberlin College in 1934. By her sophomore year, Cooper had been drawn to several political organizations, including the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the American Students Union. She attended a few YCL gatherings where she spent most of her time engaged in debate, defending pacifism over the Party's current brand of antifascist politics. But the Spanish Civil War, to a large degree, changed all that: soon she became an avid supporter of the republic's battle against Franco.

Graduating in 1938, Cooper continued her studies at Fisk—at the behest of distinguished social scientist Charles S. Johnson—to pursue an M.A. degree in sociology. There she met a small coterie of Communist professors, mostly white, who brought her into their inner circle. One in particular invited her into “a little ‘Anne Frank’-type room at the back of his house where he lifted up the curtains and it was just full of books by Marx, Lenin, [and] the Communist International.” As her relationship with radical faculty grew, so did her interest in Communism: before leaving Fisk she joined the Communist Party. Meanwhile, she remained active in student politics, joining the Student Christian Association and attending SNYC's historic Birmingham conference in 1939. By the time Cooper graduated in 1940, she was highly regarded for her scholarly as well as political endeavors. Her master's thesis on domestic workers and unions captured the attention of renowned sociologist Robert Park, who offered her a scholarship to pursue a Ph.D. under his direction at the University of Chicago. At the same time, Ed Strong and James Jackson asked her to run the new Birmingham office. Choosing the latter, Cooper moved to Birmingham in July 1940 and bid farewell to a promising academic career. Her reasons for accepting SNYC's offer were primarily political, but there were personal considerations as well. James Jackson, whom she had met at Fisk while he was conducting research for Gunnar Myrdal's study of African-Americans, had moved to Birmingham as SNYC's educational director. Although both Jackson and Cooper were romantically involved with other people when they met, the two corresponded, fell in love, and consequently married in 1941—six days after May Day.²²

In the rural areas, even more than in Birmingham itself, women seemed to be at the center of SNYC activities. When Ethel Lee Goodman assumed leadership of SNYC's Alabama Rural Committees in December 1940, she tapped a tradition of women's collective organization that had once thrived in the SCU. It was no coincidence, therefore, that the Tallapoosa County Youth Council was the largest rural committee and that its local leader, Dadeville resident Mary Jane Gray, was related to SCU pioneers Ralph, Tommy, and Eula Gray. By April 1941, Goodman had organized five rural councils in Tallapoosa and Elmore counties, many of which were led by young women. Indeed, rural committee members devoted most of their time to quilting and soliciting used books and magazines to stock local schools, the latter reflecting black women's concern for improving the lives of their children—a concern that had driven many women to join the SCU. The quilting project, conceived as a fund raiser, was also an age-old social activity crucial to building and maintaining women's community networks.²³

Because women figured prominently in SNYC as well as the LYS, their concerns and grievances carried over into the Birmingham CP. This younger female cadre were far more sensitive to sexism and, for the first time in the Birmingham Party's history, raised the “Woman Question” directly and unambiguously. Men were charged with male chauvinism for making blatantly sexist remarks, pursuing extramarital affairs (“womanizing” as it was called), denying women responsible positions, and most commonly, for not involving their wives in political work. Some women occasionally used circumstances not directly related to women's oppression to subtly raise issue with sexism in American (specifically Southern) society. In an appeal for funds following the arrest of local activists, Marge Gelders added, “I, too, was arrested but ‘Southern chivalry’ caused our local Gestapo to set me free while the others were thrown in jail cells.” Partly in response to women's grievances, black and white women in the early 1940s held many more leadership positions, not just in the Party but in SNYC and the LYS as well. Nonetheless, the younger radicals’ antisexist campaign was in many ways far in advance of its time and thus faced indomitable opposition from male activists who strongly believed political struggle was a man's job. Moreover, many working-class wives of activists looked upon female Communists and SNYC leaders with suspicion, particularly since most were not only well educated and articulate but young and very attractive. “When I would call their house,” Esther Cooper Jackson remembers, “I would always invite both the husband and wife to a meeting. But many of the women had been kept so backward that they [thought] I must have been in it because I was interested in their husbands.” Indeed, some outsiders, such as NAACP leader W. C. Patton, believed the Party “hired some good looking girls to work for them” as part of a larger plot to charm black male leaders into supporting their agenda. He adds, “They could sell you if you listened to their talk.”²⁴

While equally vocal in their opposition to intra-Party sexism, black women in leadership positions directed most of their attention to racism, as did almost everyone else in the movement, mainly because the problems of police brutality, disfranchisement, and discrimination were so overwhelming. It should also be noted, however, that some black Communist couples, particularly Ed Strong and Augusta Jackson, and Esther Cooper and James Jackson, strove to eradicate sexism in their personal and political lives. Both Ed and James pushed their wives into the realm of public speaking and away from mimeograph machines, and at home they shared the duties of housework and child rearing. And to the chagrin of their more traditional comrades, Esther Cooper and Augusta Jackson retained their maiden names for several years after marriage. The men's behavior, Esther Cooper Jackson remembers, was largely motivated by Marxism. “They actually thought [that] to be a good Communist you struggled on the woman question.”²⁵

Together, SNYC and the LYS enveloped Birmingham Party life with a unique “movement culture” that shared much in common with the civil rights movement two decades later. Despite racial, class, and cultural differences, leaders of both organizations consciously strove to live by their own vision of a multiracial, socialist society. Certainly segregation continued to be a fact of life, but young Communists managed to develop “close, comradely working relations between blacks and whites.” “We were hemmed in and hung up by the segregation system,” recalls Marge Frantz, “but we did have social relations on an individual level, and they were very close.” Indeed, both SNYC and LYS members risked arrest and possible beatings in order to meet together in a social setting. A popular spot was a small coffee shop located in the Negro Masonic Temple. And while social ostracism was usually the price young whites paid, the loss of friends was, to a large degree, compensated for by the movement's subculture and the interracial community of activists with whom they interacted and, in many cases, whom they loved dearly.²⁶

The presence of SNYC's educated, highly respected cadre of black leaders sensitized the Birmingham CP to incidents of intra-Party racism that many Southern-born black Communists generally ignored. “There were complaints from time to time,” Laurent Frantz recalls of this period. “Sometimes there was the feeling that we weren't doing as much as we could [for blacks].” This new sensitivity even led to a few trial-like sessions at which some white Communists admitted to “unconscious white chauvinism.” Nevertheless, even the more militant black Party leaders showed greater tolerance for intra-Party racism in the South than they would have in the North. “Our standards on that score were lower because there was more realism,” James Jackson recalls. “[Blacks] understood what the traffic would bear within reason. They didn't expect miracles from white Communists.”²⁷

Blacks involved in SNYC—Communists and non-Communists alike—articulated through culture a complex radical consciousness that simultaneously advocated interracial unity and black nationalism. SNYC's founders not only recognized a unique black cultural heritage but set upon the task of promoting “a conscious art, rooted in the lives, the struggles, and aspirations of the vast numbers of our race.” In addition to sponsoring art exhibits and musical performances by black artists, congress leaders placed special emphasis on theater as a means of reaching large numbers of people with their message. Pernell Collins, SNYC's director of culture, and playwright Thomas Richardson helped found the People's Theater in Richmond and New Orleans. Although a full-scale People's Theater never developed in Birmingham, SNYC activists there directed and performed several plays and skits dealing with the poll tax, democracy, strike breaking, black history, and Southern black working-class life in general. Since most Birmingham theaters forbade black productions or were too expensive to rent, most performances were held in churches, community centers, and local mining camps. The Youth Congress also brought theater to rural Alabama in the form of the Caravan Puppeteers, a traveling puppet show launched during the summer of 1940 that performed short but potent skits dealing with suffrage, racial equality, citizenship, and the sharecropping system.²⁸

Like the Liberator and Southern Worker before it, SNYC's short-lived monthly, Cavalcade: The March of Southern Negro Youth became a forum for creative expression. Founded early in 1941 under the editorship of Augusta Jackson, Cavalcade offered local and national news, political commentary, cultural criticism, and poetry. Because Cavalcade published a wide range of authors, from accomplished poets to young activists who dabbled in verse, much of the work is uneven in quality. Nonetheless, these poems provide a small window into the complex consciousness of SNYC members, reflecting not only the writers’ thoughts on democracy and racism but the editors’ choice of political messages.²⁹

The central theme of all political verse in Cavalcade was America's inability to live up to its democratic creed. A poem titled “God Bless the Negro Race” by Esther Mae Howard and James Bolden, two working-class youth living in the small mining town of Belle Ellen, Alabama, could not have been more explicit in its claim that democracy was a God-given right. Composed of simple, somewhat clichéd phrases, Howard and Bolden's poem could have been used as SNYC's credo:

God Bless the Negro Race
With all the honor due
Give us a just opportunity
To share in this democratic liberty.

God Bless the Negro race
With the right to vote.
“All men are created equal.”
All men have a load to tote.

God Bless the Negro Race
Like other races we know.
We are tired of being barred from
freedom
Help us fight our foe!³⁰

Waring Cuney was perhaps SNYC's most prolific and popular literary figure, though hardly the neophyte one might associate with a youth-oriented movement. An established poet and musician, a graduate of Lincoln University, and an original Caravan Puppeteer, Cuney was entering his forties when Cavalcade was launched. Like his friend and fellow Lincoln man Langston Hughes, Cuney displayed a deep affection for the blues. His “Organize Blues” spoke directly to the life and toils of Birmingham's industrial labor force:

Tell you one thing
Will make you mad . . .
When the company store
Says your credit's bad.

Going to the meeting
Hear what I say . . .
Poor folks got to
Organize the blues away.³¹

Many of Cuney's Cavalcade pieces carried a strong antiwar message. “Uncle Sam Says,” another Hughes-style blues, suggests the futility of fighting a war for democracy when the U.S. had yet to live up to its ideals—a common theme in black antiwar resistance since the American Revolution. Nonetheless, the nationalist implications of this poem are balanced by an allusion to interracial unity and class struggle:

Aeroplanes fly across
Land and sea,
Everybody flies them
But a black man like me.

Uncle Sam says,
Your place is on the ground.
When I fly my aeroplanes
Don't want no Negroes around. . . .

Uncle Sam says
Two camps for black and white.
But when trouble starts
We'll all be in the same big fight. . . .³²

Likewise, the work of New Orleans poet and SNYC activist Eugene B. Williams embodied both blues form and antiwar content. In “Drafted Blues,” Williams speaks through the voice of a black woman who has lost her fiance to military conscription. While the poem's central figure “got to be a soldier, fight for / democracy,” the irony is that he could not make a decent enough living in his own democratic country to marry the woman he left behind.³³

Like Cuney, Eugene Williams appears to have taken his inspiration from Langston Hughes. His “New Songs from Dixie,” published in 1941, is reminiscent of Hughes's “A New Song,” published nearly a decade earlier:

Deep in the heart of Dixie,
New songs are in the air—
Not songs of supplication,
Not songs of dark despair,
But songs of We Want Justice
For white and black alike,
With melodies unending
Until that note we strike.³⁴

Certainly Hughes's early focus on class struggle and social revolution is absent from “New Songs from Dixie,” but the single theme that runs through both Williams's and Cuney's work is the unfulfilled promise of democracy. Moreover, lines such as “For white and black alike” stand in sharp contrast to the various stanza's that articulate growing racial militancy among black youth during the war. The subtext of Williams's racial politics is much clearer in his moving poem titled “The Christening,” in which he implies that racism constitutes the ultimate contradiction in American democracy. The words are those of a black minister who, while christening a black boy named “John Charles Tenth Man Thomas,” reveals to the child the harsh realities of life in the U.S.:

When you are old enough to walk
and talk,
Be sure you “stay in your own
back yard,”
For your nut-brown skin and
kinky hair
Are poison in the sights of Nine
Tenth Men.
And when you've grown old
enough to go to school
To learn to read and write and
understand
The doctrines of democracy,
Let not your desires for the select
fruits of the tree

Of liberty lead you into places
where
Those fruits are divided among
the Nine Tenths
People of this glorious land.
Amen!³⁵

In order to change the world, SNYC activists maintained, the struggle must be interracial in composition and militant in character—a striking dictum for a black organization in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Cavalcade editor Augusta Jackson made this point crystal clear in a long poem entitled “The People to Lincoln, Douglass”:

Up from the people,
Poor white and black, slave alike,
Horny-handed from the frontier
and farm . . .

Fred Douglass, in Maryland, you
endured the cut of the slavers’
lash ‘till blood flowed
But Abe, you felt it, too, up there
in Illinois. . . .

Ironically, Jackson's allusions to the similarities between poor whites and blacks, as well as to the forms of oppression unique to the black experience, hearken back to the CP in the early 1930s. The entire poem subtly suggests a future, interracial, working-class movement that would incorporate some form of black self-determination. In other words, Jackson reiterates an old political vision (which in both cases ignores women) without using the Party's characteristic convoluted language:

We are free now—all the people
of America—black and white
and Indians
Free from slavery—yes,
Free from land, too,
And bread, and power to rule ourselves,
Free from happiness and leisure.

Abe Lincoln clench your fists once
more, straighten your back,
and take the hand of Fred
Douglass, the ex-slave,

And turn to the people—
We are ready, again, Abe Lincoln.
We, the people will drive out the
slavemaster. . . .³⁶

The literary expressions of SNYC activists and supporters, therefore, advocated a politics of inclusion and self-determination—a vision of interracial democracy combined with black militancy, economic fairness without explicit references to socialism, and an uncompromising antisegregationist discourse inextricably linked to a celebration of the African-American heritage. Yet these cultural forms and the unique social life that developed within SNYC and the LYS did not develop in a vacuum. On the contrary, the evolution of a youth-based, radical movement culture was shaped by their political experiences in the Magic City. The period between 1940 and 1941 might even be seen as a preface to the explosive civil rights battles that erupted in the streets of Birmingham twenty-two years later.

Youth Congress officers had barely settled into their new headquarters at the Negro Masonic Temple when, in April 1940, they had to rush off to New Orleans for the Fourth All-Southern Negro Youth Conference. The New Orleans meeting fell short of capturing the feeling of unity and nonsectarianism characteristic of earlier gatherings, mainly because the issue of Communist participation became a central subject of debate for the first time in SNYC's history. As with the SCHW and other contemporary liberal movements, the Dies Committee and the Nazi-Soviet Pact began to take their toll on the Youth Congress's internal political life. SNYC's adult advisors, in particular, tried to pass resolutions restricting Communist participation, and some even called for the expulsion of suspected Party members. Although most rank-and-file delegates defended the right of all youth, regardless of their political affiliations, to join SNYC, the ensuing debate and rising anti-Communist sentiment did lead to a small exodus of members and advisors.³⁷

More significantly, the New Orleans conference adopted a regional strategy for a mass voter registration and anti-poll-tax drive. Although the right to vote had been one of its slogans since 1937, SNYC's program of action outlined that spring set members in motion, especially in Birmingham where the new political landscape was ideal for such a campaign. The LYS had just arrived and was anxious to begin its own anti-poll-tax work; the Alabama CIO had stepped up voter registration activities; and the CP's longstanding foe, the NAACP, had launched a community-based suffrage campaign in Birmingham earlier that year. The NAACP's support for an antilynching bill, decent housing, integration in the armed forces, and higher wages for black workers, as well as the right to vote, made its program uncomfortably similar to SNYC's and the Communist Party's. Indeed, the Birmingham NAACP had developed such a radical reputation that it began to lose some of its black middle-class membership. Early in 1940, national NAACP representative Frederick Morrow reported that the Birmingham branch had “disintegrated pretty badly,” to the point where it had to rebuild again “cold from scratch.” “It does take courage,” Morrow explained to Walter White, “even here in Birmingham, and a great deal more in the little towns in the country. With the anti-lynching bill hot at the moment, a man who parades around town with a button on his lapel has got guts.”³⁸

Following the decisions of the New Orleans meeting, SNYC set out that summer to build a mass suffrage campaign, essentially taking up where the (now defunct) Right to Vote Club had left off. In June 1940, SNYC launched its campaign with a mass Right to Vote rally at Birmingham's Sixth Avenue Baptist Church. The audience of several hundred, most of whom were black, listened to speeches by local NAACP leaders, CIO organizers, educators, and SNYC activists suggesting ways to proceed. The congress's basic demands included the elimination of the poll tax, of white primaries, and of various literacy requirements, and complete protection from physical violence and other forms of intimidation blacks had to endure at polling booths.³⁹

Over the next few weeks a series of smaller community meetings were held in Bessemer, Ensley, and Pratt City to mobilize support for SNYC and publicize the Geyer anti-poll-tax bill. Ed Strong and James Jackson resumed the Right to Vote Club's educational function by instituting workshops designed to prepare black residents for the vagaries of registration. Workshop participants learned precisely what their rights were with respect to the poll tax, property qualifications, and voter registration for veterans. Congress organizers also tried to reach workers in the TCI-owned mines, but company police posed a formidable barrier. At the Hamilton Slope mine, for example, police arrested James Jackson and Esther Cooper for distributing anti-poll-tax literature to miners.⁴⁰

To highlight the summer campaign, the SNYC Right to Vote Committee held an election day demonstration on November 5. In pouring rain dozens of black youth and a handful of white LYS members marched through downtown Birmingham with placards that read: “Vote the American Way, Vote to Unchain the Ballot”; “Let Us Vote, We are Americans Too”; and “Poll Tax Denies Democracy.” Hundreds of “Abolish the Poll Tax” buttons were distributed and SNYC literature littered the area. The determined marchers, a large number of whom were female, reminded a few onlookers of that fateful day in 1926 when Indiana Little led nearly one thousand black women to the Jefferson County courthouse steps to demand the right to vote. One passerby, an elderly woman, took special pride in the march though she did not participate. “We won't win the right to vote by sitting behind closed doors talking about it,” she remarked. “These young people will bring a new day.”⁴¹

In March 1941, in an effort to re-create what a “new day” might look like, SNYC and the LYS organized the first Alabama Youth Legislature. About 150 delegates assembled in Ensley's CIO Hall to draft and adopt mock bills that would “answer the needs of Alabama's Negro citizens, her poverty stricken youth in the cities and on the farm; her jobless school graduates; her voteless hundreds of thousands.” The Alabama Youth Legislature hoped to set an example for the official state legislature by passing an array of labor, antiwar, civil liberties, and voting rights bills, and by reallocating imaginary defense funds to benefit the poor.⁴²

Two months later, SNYC, the SCHW, and the LYS declared May 11–17 “Abolish the Poll Tax Week,” and planned nearly a full month of demonstrations, forums, and related programs to mobilize support for the Geyer anti-poll-tax bill. To coincide with the week's activities, the Communist Party held a conference in Birmingham on youth work in the South, attracting CP organizers from across the region. The events culminated in a joint Anti-Poll Tax and Right to Vote Conference sponsored by several organizations, including SNYC, the LYS, the SCHW, the Birmingham CIO Industrial Council, the AFU, the Birmingham World, and the black Elks and Masons. Assembling in Birmingham's First Congregational Church, the conferees listened to Joe Gelders, Ed Strong, Esther Cooper, William Mitch, the Reverend Fred Maxey, Laurent Frantz, and Mine Mill organizer Reid Robinson discuss, among other things, the role poll taxes play in disfranchising poor white and black voters in the South.⁴³

Like the Communist-led Right to Vote Club, SNYC's anti-poll-tax drive drew opposition from a variety of black organizations, including the Birmingham Negro Teachers’ Association and the Alabama State Teachers’ Association. But the campaign won far more friends than enemies, achieving a level of popular support from Birmingham's black community that had been beyond the reach of the Right to Vote Club. Along with the LYS, the SCHW, and several Birmingham Communists, SNYC helped create the Jefferson County Committee Against the Poll Tax, which waged a protracted local campaign during World War II. Indeed, until its demise in 1949, the Youth Congress directed most of its resources to winning the ballot for black people in the South.⁴⁴

The LYS and SNYC continued the civil liberties work started by the SCPR, which had ceased to exist after Joe Gelders assumed leadership of SCHW's civil rights committee. Young Birmingham radicals really had no choice. As the Dies Committee hearings and anti-Soviet sentiment fanned the flames of America's little Red Scare, the LYS and the CP, in particular, became prime targets of a renewed antiradical crusade. Throughout the spring and summer of 1940 the Birmingham police department's newly appointed “chief of un-American detail,” Ollie E Osborne, liberally invoked section 4902 of the criminal code to arrest suspected radicals. The ordinance authorized police to arrest without warrant “any person found under suspicious circumstances who fails to give a satisfactory account of himself” and to detain suspects for up to seventy-two hours without charge, thus allowing ample time to interrogate or intimidate radicals without having to file formal charges. In April 1940 Laurent Frantz was arrested and held incommunicado for forty-eight hours under section 4902. That Frantz was served a summons to testify before the Dies Committee in Washington, D.C., during his two-day detention was no coincidence. A few weeks later, police raided the Communist-run Modern Bookshop and arrested Mary Southard (now the proprietor after Jane Speed wed Communist César Andreu Iglesias and moved to Puerto Rico) and two customers who had been perusing the shelves. The customers were eventually released, but Southard was detained for several hours under section 4902 without being charged. By mid-summer Osborne's unit had stepped up its activities considerably. Several suspected Communists were caught in the un-American detail's dragnet, including AFU vice-president Gerald Harris, Sr., who was arrested and detained for nine hours without charge.⁴⁵

It was 1934 all over again. The LYS and Joe Gelders, then secretary of the civil rights committee of the SCHW, campaigned for the repeal of section 4902 and distributed mimeographed handbills denouncing the recent arrests. Over the backdrop of an artist's rendering of Eugene “Bull” Connor holding a long red whip in his right hand, the handbill described the repressive atmosphere and vowed to challenge the ordinance's constitutionality in court. Law enforcement officials’ liberal use of section 4902 was likened to fascism: “This is the kind of power that Hitler's secret police has in Germany.” For distributing this “inflammatory” leaflet, Birmingham police arrested Malcolm Dobbs and Joe and Marge Gelders. Upon their release, Dobbs and Joe Gelders appeared before a regular meeting of the Birmingham City Commission and continued to compare the Birmingham ordinance with current practices in Nazi Germany. The repeal of section 4902, they argued, was mandatory for the preservation of democracy. In an impassioned address, the Reverend Dobbs announced it was “time for us to devote a real part of our attention to rooting out the enemies of democracy in our midst—to root them out and to remove the unconstitutional and undemocratic laws which permit them to jail people as Hitler jails the defenders of democracy in Nazi Germany.”⁴⁶

Their pleas before the city commission fell upon deaf ears, however. As Joe Gelders put it, “The atmosphere of the meeting could hardly be exaggerated. There was a genuine lynch spirit.” Gelders and the LYS then tried to fight the ordinance in court; but in every case police released the suspect before habeas corpus proceedings could be filed, and since the detainees could not be prosecuted on the basis of section 4902 alone, it was impossible to test the ordinance in a court of law. But more importantly, the Communists and the LYS fought alone. Birmingham liberals were either silent or completely in agreement with the use of police power to arrest and detain radicals. Indeed, while Birmingham radicals fought in vain to repeal section 4902, an Alabama statute was adopted that same year that outlawed any “flag, insignia, emblem or device” of any organization or nation “antagonistic to the constitution and laws of the United States, or to those of the State of Alabama.”⁴⁷

SNYC also found itself in the thick of civil liberties issues. It was looked upon by ordinary blacks as an alternative NAACP, a legal defense organization in the same tradition as the old ILD. Complaints of police brutality, illegal arrests, and assorted episodes of courtroom injustice were frequently brought to SNYC's Birmingham office or passed on to local organizers in the vicinity. Although SNYC lacked the financial resources needed to take legal recourse, in most instances it attempted to bring local and national attention to these cases through petitions, demonstrations, and publicity campaigns—much like the ILD several years earlier. Their first major Alabama case involved Nora Wilson, a teenage black domestic worker from Elmore County who was serving time in Wetumpka Women's Prison for using abusive language to a white woman. The conflict began when the white woman, a Mrs. Woodburn, accused her employee Adrienne Wilson—Nora's eleven-year-old sister—of stealing six ears of corn. In defense of her sister, Nora engaged Woodburn in a heated argument and later that day was arrested. Without benefit of counsel, Wilson was indicted by a grand jury on August 23, 1940, for assault with intent to murder.

A few days before the grand jury hearing, Nora's mother described the incident to the Caravan Puppeteers following a performance in Elmore County; they in turn contacted SNYC's Birmingham office. Following an investigation by field representative Arthur Price, Jr., SNYC launched a mass campaign to free Nora Wilson that fall, and with some assistance from the LYS, secured an attorney to work for her defense. The governor's office and the offices of several Elmore County public officials received telegrams and petitions from across the country demanding Wilson's release. The campaign even prompted blacks in her hometown to form the Mill-brook, Alabama, Youth Council, which devoted most of its time and resources to her case. Consequently, Wilson was released less than a year later, all charges against her dismissed. The precedent set by the Scottsboro case played no small part in the Youth Congress's victory, for as one Wetumpka prison supervisor admitted, “This is a nigger case and we don't like publicity on these things.” He was sure to ask if SNYC had “any connection with the Scottsboro case—this case gave us a lot of bad publicity.”⁴⁸

Closer to home, many black Birmingham residents asked SNYC to investigate police brutality cases in the greater Birmingham area, an age-old issue in the black community that had been revived by the murder of black Fairfield resident O'Dee Henderson early in 1941. Arrested merely for arguing with a white man, Henderson was found handcuffed in a Fairfield jail cell the next morning, his lifeless body beaten and riddled with bullets. The SNYC office issued a statement demanding a full investigation and the immediate prosecution of the officers involved. Within weeks of Henderson's murder a young black metal worker named John Jackson died at the hands of Fairfield police. It all began one May evening when officers Hubert Alexander and Ed Taylor responded to a local grocer's complaint that a line of black moviegoers waiting to enter a neighborhood theater blocked his store's entrance. In the line was John Jackson who, after exchanging harsh words with the two officers, was arrested, handcuffed, and forced into the backseat of their patrol car. By the time Alexander and Taylor had completed the four-block journey to the Fairfield police station, Jackson was dead.⁴⁹

Outraged by these two incidents, SNYC and the LYS demanded a full and impartial investigation of the Fairfield police department, and the NAACP, largely through the efforts of attorney Arthur Shores, unsuccessfully tried to file charges against Jackson's arresting officers. The district attorney, the city commission, and practically the entire Birmingham police force not only sided with the two officers but explained the rising tide of police shootings and beatings as acts of self-defense.⁵⁰

Less than two weeks after Jackson's death, yet another episode of police brutality was brought to light. The case of twenty-three-year-old Foster Powers attracted considerable attention because it occurred during Abolish the Poll Tax Week and indirectly involved Joe Gelders. Gelders happened to be in the neighborhood when he noticed officers beating Powers, who was handcuffed and confined to the backseat of a police vehicle. Unable to intervene in Powers's behalf, Gelders began collecting the names and addresses of witnesses. North Carolina Communist Junius Scales, a delegate who had accompanied Gelders to the Party's conference on youth, recalls the incident vividly: “Gelders, resembling a white-haired avenging angel, called to me, ‘Get witnesses. Names, addresses, phone numbers!’ I stepped into the crowd and was mobbed by Negroes offering the desired information.” When police reinforcements arrived, Gelders was whisked off to jail for failing to assist an officer, and Powers was arrested for assault and disturbing the peace. (An LYS investigation later revealed that Powers, an epileptic, had had a seizure in a local movie theater and a misguided manager called the police rather than an ambulance.) Within two hours, leaflets were distributed throughout the black community protesting Powers's beating and Gelders's arrest. Two weeks later SNYC, the LYS, and the Communist Party formed the Jefferson County Committee Against Police Brutality.⁵¹

By the summer of 1941, the CP had made considerable progress toward reestablishing a radical movement in Birmingham. The youth-oriented organizations Communists begat as well as those they influenced built a movement that focused on civil rights, full citizenship for African-Americans and poor whites, domestic and international peace, industrial unionism, and the preservation and improvement of American democracy as a whole. Furthermore, the people who made up this movement constructed a culture and a social world that tried to reproduce, in microcosm, the kind of interracial democracy they advocated in speeches and handbills. The situation in Birmingham was far from idyllic; police repression and red-scare politics still dominated the local scene. But radicals were finally beginning to rebuild bridges that had been singed—not completely burned—during the Popular Front.

News from across the Atlantic, however, shattered the momentary peace and pushed Birmingham's radical collective into the rough waters of international politics once again. On the morning of June 22, 1941, Communists learned that German troops had invaded the world's only socialist country. Once past the initial shock, Party members across the globe dropped antiwar slogans and joined the campaign to defend the Soviet Union. In Birmingham, SNYC, the LYS, the AFU, and local Communists led the charge, insisting that all democracy-loving people support the “people's war against Hitlerism.” Unlike the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which took quite a bit of explaining, intervention was far more consistent with the Party's earlier antifascist politics. And yet the turnabout caused even further divisions between Communists and organized labor in Birmingham. When the Southern News Almanac published editorials by Sam Hall and AFU president Gerald Harris, Sr., supporting the war effort, local CIO leaders attacked the newspaper for “following the Communist party line.” The CIO's own state organ took the position that the Southern News Almanac “should receive no support whatever from any CIO member.”⁵²

SNYC and LYS activists threw themselves into the anti-Hitler campaign with unrestrained enthusiasm. When Malcolm Dobbs left his post as LYS executive secretary for the armed services, Communist Sidney Rittenberg assumed the vacancy during the summer of 1941 and immediately organized a series of programs dedicated to stopping “the Brown Plague of Nazism.” Its newly created Youth V for Victory Committee put on several Smash Hitler programs throughout Birmingham, and its army welfare committees in the mines and mills worked hard to build support for the war effort. Likewise, SNYC sold Smash Hitler buttons, raised money for defense bonds, sponsored the Birmingham Citizens Army Welfare Committee, SNYC Victory Mobilization Day, and a host of related organizations and programs devoted to mobilizing the black community behind the war.⁵³

Yet world conflict neither overshadowed nor undermined local efforts to fight racism in Birmingham. On the contrary, the anti-Hitler campaign strengthened the resolve of local radicals, especially SNYC activists, to completely overhaul democracy in the South. Nazi Germany became the standard by which Southern society would be judged. In his Southern News Almanac column, “Let Liberty Live,” James E. Jackson published an exegesis aimed at both Germany and the South entitled “Don't Play Hitler's Game.” Written in the form of a two-act play, the first scene opens with Adolph Hitler “clapping his hands in glee” as he examines photographs of black lynch victims in the South. In act two the war ends, Jim Crow has been abolished throughout the land, and “KKK Kleagles board trains under heavy guard on way to Leavenworth prison to join the German agents.” Jackson's column, along with SNYC's slogan, “Freedom's Children to Arms,” anticipated the Double V campaign national black leaders launched after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. Indeed, in September 1941, SNYC's national council announced plans “to rally the Negro youth of the South for the defeat of Hitler abroad and K-K-K-ism at home.”⁵⁴

Few progressive labor leaders, liberals, or African-Americans in Alabama could argue with Jackson's logic, especially after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December. The Party and its allied organizations found themselves siding with old enemies on both domestic and international affairs. As individuals, Birmingham radicals finally had an opportunity to make friends in the local world of liberal politics, but to do so required a complete shedding, or rather a covering up, of their Red attire. Because Communism was still a dirty word in Alabama, the Birmingham CP had no where else to go but back into the shadows of SNYC, the CIO, the LYS, the SCHW, and even the NAACP. And yet the Alabama Communist Party did not die in 1941. Instead it quietly influenced liberal, labor, and civil rights organizations through the work of individual activists whose politics were largely independent of national CPUSA policy. Thus, in a twisted sort of way, the Birmingham CP had come full circle: it was an “invisible army” once again.