I tried to get the Democratic Party to put in its platform a request to Congress to pass a law calling for the deportation of all communists—and if possible to fix it so the ship taking them to Russia would sink en route.
—Eugene “Bull” Connor, 1949
We had to beat it down so till we got [Martin Luther] King privilege to run the thing. . . . That's why he could work much faster.
—Lemon Johnson, former SCU leader
Alabama's “invisible army” had come a long way since the days when members of neighborhood committees and unemployed councils read Party newspapers, armed themselves with penny postcards and handbills, and occasionally cursed out a resident stoolpigeon. Founded as a tightly disciplined, underground movement composed of poor urban and rural blacks and a handful of white folks too hungry or too idealistic to let race stand in the way of fighting the bosses, the Alabama CP had become, by the 1940s, a kind of loosely organized think tank whose individual members exercised considerable influence in local labor, liberal, and civil rights organizations. They were still invisible, but their invisibility had changed: once able to hide behind innocent grins and starched overalls, in double tenant shotgun houses and rural shacks, in the ore mines, steel mills, and quiet cotton fields, many Communists now “hid” behind desks, podiums, in small offices and union halls, among respectable people. They had become labor organizers, civic spokespersons, and “race” leaders who belonged to SNYC, the Alabama Committee for Human Welfare, the CIO, the AFU, and other related organizations. If there was anything dubious or dishonest about their intentions, it was that they sought to do what they believed Communists should do—build a nonracist, democratic South—but understood the political limitations of identifying themselves as Party members.
Yet these women and men, veterans and neophytes alike, shared something in common with the old Party. They responded to Central Committee and Comintern directives with blind faith, blissful ignorance, and bitter independence—and in the confusion of world war, Alabama Communists frequently showed signs of all three. “I believed it, sure, I believed it! I thought the bosses going to lay down with the workers, the wolves and the lambs going to lay together. I was teaching that, I was preaching that everywhere I went, in the union and everywhere.”1 These are Hosea Hudson's words. As a veteran who had once described the Party as an army of the working class, Hudson's rosy picture of postwar America might seem rather strange. On the other hand, Hudson was expressing a sense of optimism that had gripped much of black America. Now that the U.S. was fighting a war against racism and injustice abroad, African-Americans wondered how racism on home soil could be justified.
But for Communists in the Deep South, especially blacks, skepticism overruled faith and reinforced their independence. Hudson, Henry O. Mayfield (before joining the army), and other black Communists in the CIO knew the war was not a panacea. They continued to fight racism within their respective unions and spoke persistently on the need for rank-and-file control and internal democracy. Although Hudson was elected president of Local 2815, United Steel Workers of America (CIO) in 1942, radicals in the union were beginning to lose their influence. The rapid wartime increase in white union membership, the CIO's conservative turn in the face of Dies Committee pressure, and workers’ racist reaction to Roosevelt's Fair Employment Practices Committee eroded interracial unity within the CIO and further isolated union militants, especially in steel and coal. And the Party's official opposition to the UMWA's 1943 strike certainly did not help matters. Nevertheless, Communists were still influential in Mine Mill, especially Bessemer's District 5, and had begun to establish locals of the National Maritime Union in Mobile. Immediately following the infamous Mobile “race riot” of 1943, during which gangs of white dock workers, fearful of being replaced by black workers, assaulted blacks with crowbars and wrenches, the maritime union attracted hundreds of black longshoremen and dock workers who probably sought physical protection as well as union membership. By the time the union was expelled from the CIO in 1949, its locals in Mobile counted over twenty-five hundred members.2
While most black Communists believed war would inevitably alter Jim Crow in the South, they also understood—better than national Party leadership—that change would not happen by itself. Black Communists in SNYC promoted their own Double V program of action despite the Party's official opposition to the slogan. The Youth Congress fought racial discrimination in the armed forces, expanded its voter registration drive, continued to investigate police brutality cases and civil liberties violations, collected a mountain of data on discrimination for the FEPC hearings in 1943, and even waged a campaign in Birmingham to end segregation on buses. Throughout most of the war SNYC was led by Esther Cooper (who had taken over as executive secretary after Ed Strong, James Jackson, and several other male leaders joined the armed forces) and Louis Burnham, SNYC's organizational secretary who joined the Birmingham staff in 1942 with his wife and co-worker Dorothy Burnham. Louis, a twenty-seven-year-old Communist with a degree in social science from City College of New York and a year of law school behind him, was a thoughtful and articulate leader who viewed the war as an incubator for future civil rights struggles. Influenced as much by Gandhi, Du Bois, and anticolonial resistance as by Marx and Lenin, Burnham suggested on numerous occasions that the European conflict marked a revolutionary moment for people of color throughout the world. He lectured on the Indian Communist Party in the anticolonial movement to local Birmingham activists and in January 1944 proposed forming a black political party under the slogan “Non-Violence and Non-Cooperation.”3
Although the war remained a central component of SNYC's program until 1945, local and regional civil rights issues always took precedence. Under Burnham and Cooper's leadership—both of them were approaching thirty years of age—SNYC began to shed its youth-oriented image and emerged as a more seasoned black civil rights organization. Its closest local ally, the LYS, had folded around 1942 after most of its members either enlisted in the armed services, entered the labor movement, or accepted full-time positions in the SCHW. The Youth Congress, in turn, strengthened its ties with black social and fraternal clubs and mainstream black political organizations, particularly the NAACP. During the war the NAACP proved a welcome ally to SNYC, the CIO, and the SCHW, as well as an increasingly vocal proponent of civil rights. Louis Burnham's hope that SNYC would lead a militant Southern civil rights movement seemed well on its way to becoming a reality by the time the Sixth All-Southern Negro Youth Conference met in Atlanta in December 1944. The seven-year-old movement had attracted several prominent civil rights activists of the past and future, including Charles Gomillion, F. D. Patterson, Percy Sutton, Martin Luther King, Sr., Benjamin Mays, Ralph Abernathy, Modjeska Simkins, and Nannie Burroughs, to name but a few.4
Other left-leaning mass organizations did not fare as well as SNYC during the war. The SCHW in Alabama temporarily folded around 1942, partly because its most active Birmingham leader, Joe Gelders, had joined the U.S. Army as an instructor. And the thorough character bashing it received from the Dies Committee had already weakened the Southern Conference from top to bottom. When the NNC made a last-ditch effort to establish chapters in Alabama, it too failed. Between 1943 and 1944, veteran black Communist Andy Brown (under the pseudonym “Oscar Bryant”) founded several small NNC chapters throughout the state that were called “Work Together Clubs,” largely for security reasons. In an effort to rebuild the Party's rural links, Brown established the majority of Work Together Clubs in Camp Hill, Opelika, and Waverly, and in the black belt cities of Montgomery and Selma. With the exception of the Montgomery club, which waged a lively voter registration campaign in 1944 under the leadership of William Anderson and Communist John Beans, the NNC accomplished very little in Alabama and its locals eventually folded in 1945—a year before the national organization's demise.5
Brown did succeed, however, in reestablishing relations between the Birmingham CP and Communists in Tallapoosa County, but he did so at a moment when the Party had little, if any, public presence and practically no autonomous organizational identity. Late in 1943 Rob Hall, Louis Burnham, Pauline Dobbs, and Hosea Hudson attempted to revive the Party's educational function in Birmingham by forming the Alabama Organization for Political Action, later renamed the “Good Neighbor Club.” Although intended to improve race relations and provide forums to discuss the burning political issues of the day, the Good Neighbor Club attracted only Communists and FBI agents.6
Hence the situation in May 1944, when Earl Browder decided to liquidate the CPUSA, form the Communist Political Association, and adopt what amounted to a procapitalist agenda. The Alabama CP, now led by Ordway Southard, followed Browder's lead and created the APEA in June 1944, although not without a fight. Several veterans opposed the idea from the start, including Communists in Camp Hill and Dadeville who simply bucked Browder's authority and refused to disband the Party. The APEA in Birmingham opened its doors to everyone (including the president of Jackson Foundries!), and its officers consisted of Party and non-Party people alike. Not only were its role and purpose unclear, but it became a hindrance to militants like Hudson, who was frequently asked by APEA members to tone down his criticism of CIO leaders for the sake of unity.7
Meanwhile, only weeks after the Party's liquidation, Pauline Dobbs, Louis Burnham, and thirty political and religious leaders reestablished an Alabama chapter of the SCHW. With Pauline Dobbs as secretary, the Alabama Committee for Human Welfare resumed where the LYS and the NCPR had left off, concentrating primarily on civil liberties and voting rights. One of its first and perhaps most controversial cases involved Recy Taylor, a black woman who was kidnapped and raped by six white men in Abbeville, Alabama, none of whom were prosecuted. The Alabama Committee, SNYC, and the APEA formed the Committee for Equal Justice for Recy Taylor, which provided legal counsel and secured representatives from the National Federation of Constitutional Liberties to investigate the case.8
By the war's end, Birmingham's Communists—with the possible exception of CIO militants—looked to the future with glassy-eyed optimism. In 1945 the APEA successfully expanded its educational function by establishing a “School for Democracy” in Birmingham, which in turn attracted a few more non-Party people. Sam Hall, former editor of the Southern News Almanac and a Communist, was elected chairman of the Alabama Committee for Human Welfare that same year. While not everyone in the SCHW was aware of Hall's political affiliations, his election was nevertheless interpreted by Communists as proof that relations between radicals and liberals were improving. Furthermore, the Party found an ally in Aubrey Williams, a former New Dealer and native son who returned to Alabama in 1945 to edit the Southern Farmer. Williams turned the former Coughlinite paper into a pro-civil rights, prolabor, and anti-Cold War farmers’ publication, which also served as the unofficial organ of the AFU. Although he distrusted the Communists and remained, for the most part, a reluctant collaborator, he provided critical support for virtually every program the Alabama CP and its allied organizations proposed.9
But just as the Alabama cadre began to settle into their respective roles as nonracist liberals, race-conscious trade unionists, and class-conscious race leaders, national and international Communist leadership made a sharp turn to the left. With a little help from French Communist Jacques Duclos, whose 1945 article sharply criticized the dissolution of the CPUSA, Browder and his ideas were kicked out and William Z. Foster assumed leadership of a newly reconstituted Party. The period following Foster's ascension to power and Browder's expulsion in February 1946 was marked by factional disputes, internal debates, name calling, and a wave of expulsions prompted by charges of Trotskyism, Browderism, Negro nationalism, and a host of other Left epithets. As the country moved right, the Party under Foster moved farther left and further into isolation, although Popular Front-style coalition politics lingered through the 1948 Progressive party campaign. On the eve of the greatest red scare in American history, Foster marched his Party directly into the eye of the storm.10
Alabama experienced some of the drama. During the Christmas holidays in 1945, black Party leader Benjamin Davis, Jr., traveled to Birmingham and officially reestablished the Communist Party. Rob Hall, who had just returned from the army, and Ordway Southard were called up to New York to face charges of Browderism. Southard was removed from leadership in 1946 and Hall resumed Party work in Washington, D.C., but neither was expelled. Indeed, there is no evidence that any Alabama Communists were expelled during this period. The local cadre was just too small, and friendships apparently too deep, for national infighting to play itself out in Alabama. Besides, the Birmingham CP was experiencing its own postwar exodus: Ed and Augusta Strong had moved back to New York in 1945; Marge and Laurent Frantz were now in Nashville; Joe Gelders would eventually settle in California; James Jackson and Esther Cooper left for New Orleans in 1946 as open, full-time Communists; and a handful of rank-and-file recruits joined the nameless thousands who believed the urban North offered greater opportunities.11
Surprisingly, the Alabama leadership's wartime agenda escaped with minimal disruption. Aside from the obvious shift from prowar to propeace and antinuclear politics, the Party's 1946 goals for the South continued to focus on voting rights and civil liberties, but with an added emphasis on housing and full employment. Although the demand for self-determination in the black belt was resurrected under Foster, prompting a heated debate among self-styled theoreticians, most Alabama Communists never gave the slogan a second thought.12 Rather, those who remained pursued the largely independent political course set in the early 1940s. Upon his discharge from the army in 1946, Malcolm Dobbs took over his wife's position as secretary of the Alabama Committee for Human Welfare, which allowed Pauline Dobbs to enter Democratic party politics. She ran for state legislature that same year and polled nearly seven thousand votes, almost defeating her opponent in a runoff election. Meanwhile, Malcolm Dobbs directed most of the Alabama committee's resources to registering veterans to vote, fighting antilabor legislation, lobbying against the Boswell amendment (which would have allowed local registrars complete discretion in assessing voter qualification), and abolishing racially determined pay scales for Jefferson County teachers. He also supported Jim Folsom's bid for governor of Alabama in 1946, primarily because of his prolabor stance, opposition to the Boswell amendment, and mild support for voting rights legislation. Folsom's election was, in Malcolm Dobbs's words, “a people's victory.” In short, the Dobbses refused to heed Foster's call for a return to revolutionary practice but were unwilling to break with the CP.13
The peace did not last very long, in part because national and regional Party leaders were not content to let class war bypass the Alabama cadre. Nat Ross, who returned to the region in 1946 as Southern director, sought to restore the Party and recruit militant trade unionists by assuming a more public presence. Sam Hall, who had spent most of 1946 as district organizer for the Carolinas, was sent back to Alabama in 1947 to promote the CP and its policies with greater openness. Hall publicly identified himself as Alabama's leading Communist and ran a series of half- and full-page advertisements in Birmingham newspapers defending the Party's right to exist.14 The policy proved fatal, essentially aggravating an already intolerable political atmosphere. In 1947 the Alabama state legislature passed a series of anti-Communist bills requiring loyalty oaths from public school teachers and making Party membership a misdemeanor. About the same time, HUAC identified the SCHW as one of many “Communist fronts,” sparking a current of internal dissension and suspicion. The war on Communism took a particularly nasty turn within the ranks of the Birmingham CIO. In November 1947 Hosea Hudson and three representatives from the United Office and Professional Workers Union (CIO)—Malcolm Dobbs, Pauline Dobbs, and Florence Castille—were expelled from the Birmingham Industrial Union Council for being Communists. Neither Hudson, the Dobbses, nor Castille—also a SNYC activist—openly admitted CP membership, nor was there sufficient evidence to link them to the Party. Nearly all black CIO members either voted against the action or walked out in disgust, arguing that the expulsions were unconstitutional.15
Postwar red-baiting in the South was accompanied by the rise of pro-segregationist sentiment, stimulated by, among other things, wartime black militancy, interracial competition for jobs and housing, and the Truman administration's support for civil rights. Indeed, the Ku Klux Klan, the League to Maintain White Supremacy, and the Alabama American Legion deftly appropriated Cold War language to legitimize white supremacy before the rest of the world. The racist response to Communism was not limited to white supremacist and conservative groups, however. After taking a strong stand against anti-Communist legislation throughout most of 1947, Southern Labor Review editor A. H. Cather assailed efforts to integrate colleges as “a part of communistic doctrine . . . aimed at America with the intention of provoking revolution.” “To insist that Africans leave their own institutions and attend Aryans,” Cather complained, “would place this nation in the ridiculous position of fighting communism abroad and encouraging it at home.”16
Thus was the political climate when SNYC decided to hold its Eighth All-Southern Negro Youth Congress in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1948. As soon as Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor found out about the intended conference, he began harassing black ministers who had offered their churches as a meeting place. Consequently, all local black clergy withdrew, with the exception of twenty-three-year-old Rev. C. Herbert Oliver, pastor of Alliance Gospel Tabernacle. Throughout the three-day conference, police surrounded the tiny Alliance church and arrested several delegates, including Rev. Oliver, James Dombrowski, National Maritime Union organizer Edward Forrey, and Idaho senator Glen Taylor. Bail drained a huge chunk of SNYC's already dwindling treasury, and to make matters worse, nearly every distinguished member of its advisory board subsequently withdrew fearing association with a “Communist front.” A year later Louis Burnham closed SNYC's Birmingham office and dissolved the organization.17
Birmingham's black middle-class leaders looked on in silence as their wartime allies—black CIO organizers, the SCHW, and SNYC—were being crushed by racist/anti-Communist repression. After a remarkable period of growth and militancy during the war, NAACP leaders thought it best to dissolve all relations with alleged radicals and return to anti-Communist choruses sung in the early 1930s. “We don't believe it would be good political sense for Negroes, a racial minority, to identify themselves with any radical political departures,” wrote NAACP officer and Birmingham World editor Emory O. Jackson in 1948. Nevertheless, NAACP leaders were still red-baited for their stand on civil rights, despite their emphatic anti-Communist rhetoric.18
The Alabama CP made one last effort during Henry Wallace's 1948 presidential campaign. With Louis Burnham as Southern codirector, the Progressive party attracted virtually every radical left in the state. But Gideon's Alabama army turned out to be a tiny lot consisting of Communists, a few Mine Mill and AFU members, some remaining SNYC activists, a handful of Adamsville coal miners, and several interested independents. They met virulent opposition from most Alabamians—including the black middle class—which erupted in violence during Wallace's visit to Gadsden and Birmingham. Nevertheless, Wallace managed to get 1,522 votes, more than any Communist presidential candidate had ever tallied in Alabama.19
Once the elections were over, the Alabama CP entered its coldest winter yet. In 1949 the State Industrial Union Council gladly followed national CIO directives, expelling individuals suspected of Party membership as well as entire unions—most prominently the National Maritime Union and the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. Mine Mill's expulsion revealed, once again, the racial dynamics of organized labor on Red Mountain. A secessionist movement led by whites within Mine Mill pitted black ore miners and white radicals against the predominantly white and largely racist Birmingham locals of the United Steel Workers of America. The steel workers eventually won a federally arbitrated consent election in 1949, but only after resorting to racist and anti-Communist propaganda, KKK-style intimidation, and physical assault.20
Both the Birmingham police and the Ku Klux Klan declared full-scale war on suspected Communists. In 1950 the city council passed an ordinance, authored by Eugene “Bull” Connor, effectively outlawing the Communist Party in Birmingham, and a year later the state enacted the Alabama Communist Control Law requiring all Party members and Communist “front” organizations to register with the Department of Public Safety or face fines up to $10,000 and/or two to ten years in prison. Known Communists were arrested and harassed on a daily basis; their homes became prime targets for cross-burnings. By 1951 the repression and isolation had become too much for the Alabama cadre to handle. The tiny band of fugitives opted to disband the CP, and many of them found it necessary to flee the state altogether.21
With the passage of the state Communist Control Law, the Alabama CP and practically all of its auxiliary organizations ceased to exist. The efficacy of Southern Cold War ideology—anchored in racist reaction, xenophobia, and postwar competition for jobs and housing—and the unmitigated use of legal and extralegal coercion dealt the final blow. Yet, while the role of anti-Communism cannot be overemphasized, it was not the sole reason for the Party's demise. Having lost its mass base during the Popular Front, in part because district leadership dissolved the SCU, shifted from neighborhood-based organizing to coalition politics, and directed most of its energy and resources to building the CIO at the expense of the Party, the CP was not in a position to stave off popular opposition. Although SNYC managed to sustain a large following during the war, it was especially vulnerable to red-baiting after 1947 since most of its supporters were anti-Communist or indifferent. On the other hand, SNYC might have weathered the postwar storm if it had had a more open relationship with the CP, but it would have been considerably smaller and less influential.
The collapse of an organization does not necessarily signify the destruction of a movement or the eradication of traditions of radicalism. Indeed, American Communism itself was born of several radical streams that can be traced to Socialists, Wobblies, and radical European immigrants—streams that were never fused consciously. Likewise, young white Communists arrived in Birmingham seeking to extend this “evolved” form of American Communism throughout the South but were overwhelmed by different streams of oppositional thought and practice rooted in Southern, especially African-American, history and culture. Upon its Euro-American left-wing frame was placed, among other things, a heritage of agrarian radicalism, limited interracial labor militancy, evasive and cunning forms of resistance, prophetic Christian ideology, “race” consciousness, and intraracial class conflict.
Because the Party remained essentially “invisible” and its opponents made a concerted effort to erase or alter its history, the CP's legacy is not always easy to locate in Alabama. Nevertheless, on the eve of the so-called modern civil rights movement a few surviving radicals quietly brought their experience, knowledge, and memories to the organizations of the day. The aging Montgomery Party leader John Beans joined the Montgomery Improvement Association during the bus boycott, and he was joined by several former SNYC activists, many of whom recalled the Citizens Committee for Equal Accommodations on Common Carriers founded by SNYC thirteen years earlier. But becoming part of the new revolution was easier said than done. Civil rights leaders themselves fought nearly as hard as “Bull” Connor to extirpate suspected Communists from the movement. During the early 1950s, for example, Bessemer's most prominent civil rights activist was Mine Mill organizer Asbury Howard—a Progressive party organizer, CIO leader, and avid SNYC supporter who had been close to the CP since the war. As president of the Progressive Voters League and vice-president of the Bessemer NAACP, Howard turned to the CP-led Civil Rights Congress for assistance on several occasions between 1951 and 1953, which did little to improve relations between national NAACP leadership and the Bessemer branch. In fact, Walter White was so fearful of Howard's activities and Mine Mill's supposed Communist links that in 1953 he dispatched NAACP labor relations assistant Herbert Hill to investigate the Bessemer branch's role in the fight between the steel workers’ union and Mine Mill. Hill censured Bessemer branch leadership for having “assisted Communist-controlled unions in opposition to the CIO.”22
Segregated audience in Montgomery awaits Henry Wallace, 1948. Note the rope demarcating separate seating areas, (courtesy Alabama magazine)
Of course, any effort to uncover direct links between the CP and the modern civil rights movement would be futile and might reinforce stereotypes of Communists as conspirators. But to deny any linkages whatsoever ignores a twenty-year legacy of radicalism that had touched thousands of Alabamians. While it is ludicrous to imagine rank-and-file committees or Party cells developing within the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, there have been moments when the old radical traditions invaded and influenced Alabama movement politics in the 1960s. One startling example comes from Lowndes County exactly thirty years after the bloody cotton pickers’ strike of 1935. In 1965 young Stokely Carmichael and a handful of SNCC organizers moved into this black belt county to launch a local voter registration drive and to form an independent political party. The tiny band of nonviolent student activists was somewhat startled when poor farmers of all ages, especially the older folk, came to meetings enthusiastic and fully armed. As one local sharecropper told Carmichael, “You turn the other cheek, and you'll get handed half of what you're sitting on.” And yet the same folks taught their young “leaders” how to don the mask of deference and humility. They evoked images of Lowndes County radicals of thirty years ago, namely CP and SCU leaders Ed Bracey, Jim Press Merriweather, Annie Mae Merriweather, Smith Watkins, Willie Witcher, and a host of others.23
Among the local leaders was an older fellow by the name of Charles Smith, a former member of the SCU and participant in the 1935 strike. Smith, who also devoted several years to CIO organizing on the docks of Mobile, was a movement veteran by the time Carmichael, Courtland Cox, Jonathan Daniels, and others turned his home into SNCC's living and working quarters. Smith provided more than sustenance—he offered leadership. In the face of violence and death threats he was elected president of the Lowndes County Christian Movement and subsequently served four terms as county commissioner.24
How much these young activists knew about the SCU, the Communists, or the 1935 cotton pickers’ strike in Lowndes before their arrival is difficult to determine. (It is ironic, however, that Carmichael was very close to Gene Dennis, Jr., son of the former national CPUSA general secretary, and that he had had extended discussions with Benjamin Davis, Jr., a black Communist since the thirties who was quite familiar with the SCU's history.) The fact is, the events of 1935 comprised part of the collective memory of Lowndes County blacks in 1965. The armed and poor sharecroppers who followed Carmichael's lead brought a lot from their past to the new movement, including what the CP and the SCU had left behind. Some might have been Young Pioneers or YCL members in the early days, others might have listened to elders tell tales of the union's exploits. Most probably looked to SNCC like their foremothers and forefathers looked to the Communists: the Yankees were back again to give deliverance one more try.
Even if the Party's legacy indirectly contributed to the 1960s revolution, it left a mark neither participants nor historians have recognized. Indeed, as civil rights and black power slogans began to fade from memory, the public silence surrounding Alabama's radical past gave way to nostalgia. In the 1970s both Hosea Hudson and Ned Cobb—a participant in the 1932 Reeltown shoot-out—were the subjects of magnificent narratives, and Cobb's story was adapted to the stage in 1989 as a one-man show starring Cleavon Little. More surprisingly, in 1982 the Birmingham City Council awarded Hudson the key to the city for his role in founding the Right to Vote Club forty-four years earlier. By recognizing Hudson's achievements, city officials wished to neither celebrate nor legitimize the movement to which he devoted fifty-seven years of his life. On the contrary, their speeches and accolades merely eulogized an era too distant to haunt them. Birmingham's civic leaders, elected officials, business people, and law enforcement officers were confident that their city's radical past was safely buried in the memories of old folk. But among those applauding Hudson's award were members of the local Paul Robeson Club, activists in the Birmingham branch of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (a descendant of the ILD, the NCDPP, and the NCPR), and organizers from the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice—a direct descendant of the SCHW. Soldiers and architects of today's invisible army, these women and men continued to fight the Klan, investigate civil liberties violations, organize welfare recipients, register voters, fight for improved public education and health care, hold political discussion groups in modest shotgun houses in the black community, and dream of a world where such work would be unnecessary.25
Most young Alabama radicals who had the opportunity to shake Hudson's hand in 1982 probably knew close to nothing about the struggles of fifty and sixty years ago. Like Hudson's comrades in the 1930s, who knew just as little about the Union Leagues and black militias during Reconstruction, the Knights of Labor, the Populists, and the UMWA during the 1890s, the new radicals unwittingly constructed a movement rooted in the past and shaped by the present. When they finally met the old, brown-skinned ex-iron molder, they discovered a living example of a history lost.