Other Hammer and hoe Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Statistics, Trade union, Southern United States, Alabama Communists) HAMMER AND HOE T H E FRED W. M O R R I S O N SERIES IN S O U T H E R N STUDIES HAMMER AND HOE ALABAMA COMMUNISTS DURI

Other Hammer and hoe Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Statistics, Trade union, Southern United States, Alabama Communists) HAMMER AND HOE T H E FRED W. M O R R I S O N SERIES IN S O U T H E R N STUDIES HAMMER AND HOE ALABAMA COMMUNISTS DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION ROBIN D. G. KELLEY THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS . CHAPEL HILL AND LONDON O 1990 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kelley, Robin D. G. Hammer and hoe :Alabama Communists during the Great DepressionI by Robin D. G. Kelley. p. cm.+The Fred W.Morrison series in Southern studies) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8078-1921-2 (alk. paper).-ISBN 0--5 (pbk : alk. paper) I.Communism-Alabama-History-20th Alabama-History-20th I.Title. II.Series. HX9 1.A2K.276 1 '075'09042-dc20 century. 2. Communists- century. 3. Depressions-l 929-Alabama. n memory of Hosea Hudson, griot of Alabama radicalism, I whose assiduous note-taking and impeccable memory made this book possible, and for Diedra Harris-Kelley, whose love, criticism, encouragement, and heroic tolerance for living in poverty made this book a reality .. .. CONTENTS Preface xi Acknowledgments xvii Abbreviations xxi Prologue. Radical Genesis: Birmingham, P A R T 1. T H E U N D E R G R O U N D , ONE An Invisible Army: Jobs, Relief, and the Birth of a Movement 13 TWO In Egyptland: The Share Croppers' Union 34 THREE FOUR FIVE Organize or Starve!: Communists, Labor, and Antiradical Violence 57 In the Heart of the Trouble: Race, Sex, and the ILD 78 Negroes Ain' Black-But Red!: Black Communists and the Culture of Opposition 92 P A R T 11. UP FROM BOLSHEVISM, SIX The Road to Legality: The Popular Front in Birmingham, SEVEN The CIO's in Dixie! EIGHT Old Slaves, New Deal: Communists and the WPA 152 NINE TEN 138 The Popular Front in Rural Alabama The Democratic Front 176 159 viii CONTENTS P A R T Ill. BACK TO T H E TRENCHES, 1939-1 9 4 1 ELEVEN The March of Southern Youth! 195 Epilogue. Fade to Black: The Invisible Army in War, Revolution, and Beyond 220 Notes 233 Bibliography 301 Index 335 .. . 0 0 ILLUSTRATIONS Black convict laborers, Banner Mine, Alabama 6 A1 Murphy 24 Hosea Hudson 26 Sharecropping family, near Eutaw, Alabama 35 Lemon Johnson, SCU secretary of Hope Hull, Alabama, local 45 Company suburb 58 Clyde Johnson 62 "Meat for the Buzzards!" 66 Anti-Communist handbill distributed by the Ku Klux Klan 75 "Fight Lynch Terror!" 97 "Smash the Bamers!" 98 District 17 secretary Robert Fowler Hall 127 Sit-down strike, American Casting Company, Birmingham, 1937 145 Share Croppers' Union membership card 162 Eugene "Bull" Connor, Birmingham city commissioner 187 League of Young Southerners 198 Ethel Lee Goodman 204 Segregated audience in Montgomery awaits Henry Wallace, 1948 229 .. . PREFACE Ain't no foreign country in the world foreign as Alabama to a New Yorker. They know all about England, maybe, France, never met one who knew 'Bama.' -Anonymous black Communist, 1945 A Daily Worker fter spending several years hobnobbing with European, Asian, and Soviet dignitaries of the Third International, correspondent Joseph North made a most unforgettable journey to, of all places, Chambers County, Alabama. Traveling surreptitiously with a black Birmingham Communist as his escort, North reached his destination-the tumbledown shack of a "sharecropper comrade''-in the wee hours of the night. The dark figure who greeted the two men "had read the Worker for years; solid and reliable, he was respected by his folk here, who regarded him as a 'man with answers.' The sharecropper was an elder in the Zion [A.] M.E. Church, who 'trusts God but keeps his powder dry'; reads his Bible every night, can quote from the Book of Daniel and the Book of Job . . . and he's been studying the Stalin book on the nation question."' Although North's visit took place in 1945, on the eve of the Alabama Party's collapse, the "sharecropper comrade" he describes above epitomized the complex, seemingly contradictory radical legacy the Party left behind. Built from scratch by working people without a Euro-American left-wing tradition, the Alabama Communist Party was enveloped by the cultures and ideas of its constituency. Composed largely of poor blacks, most of whom were semiliterate and devoutly religious, the Alabama cadre also drew a small circle of white folks-whose ranks swelled or diminished over time-ranging from ex-Klansmen to former Wobblies, unemployed male industrial workers to iconoclastic youth, restless housewives to renegade IiberaIs. These unlikely radicals, their milieu, and the movement they created make up the central subjects of this book. Heeding Victoria de Grazia's appeal to historians of the American Left for "a social history of politics," I have tried to construct a narrative that examines Communist political opposition through the lenses of social and cultural history, paying particular attention to the worlds from which these radicals came, the worlds in which they lived, and the imaginary worlds they sought to build. I pluralize "worlds" to emphasize the myriad individual and collective differences within the Alabama Communist movement. Those assembled under the red xii PREFACE banner did not all share the same vision of radical opposition, nor were they motivated by the same circumstances. Neither the "Jimmy (or Jane) Higginses" of historian Aileen Kraditor's mind nor the doughty, selfless caricatures of left-wing fiction, these woken and men came from the farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets, not as intellectual blank sheets but loaded down with cultural and ideological baggage molded by their race, class, gender, work, community, region, history, upbringing, and collective memory. Their ideas and concerns shaped the Party's political practice and social life at the most local level. And, in turn, Alabama radicals were themselves shaped by local CP leaders' efforts to change the way "ordinary" people thought about politics,