Hammer and Hoe

Alabama Communists during the Great Depression

Robin D. G. Kelley

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781469625492
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the "long Civil Rights movement, " Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality. The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals. After discussing the book's origins and impact in a new preface written for this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Kelley reflects on what a militantly antiracist, radical movement in the heart of Dixie might teach contemporary social movements confronting rampant inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.

Part I: The Underground, 1929–1935

We was up against some pretty rough terror. Those days was rough. You couldn't pitty-pat with people. We had that that we'd tell people—when you join, it's just like the army, but it's not the army of the bosses, it's the army of the working class, organizing to make things get better.

—Hosea Hudson

With our few pennies that we collected we ground out leaflets on an old rickety mimeograph machine, which we kept concealed in the home of one of our workers. We were obliged to work very quietly, like the Abolitionists in the South during the Civil War, behind drawn shades and locked doors.

—Angelo Herndon

Chapter One: An Invisible Army

Jobs, Relief, and the Birth of a Movement

We were the slaves in Pharaoh's land
You and he and I,
And we were serfs to feudal hands
Now that times gone by.
Prentices in cities, prisoners for debt.
Hunted vagrants, parish poor,
Our life is a lie.
We move an invisible army. . . .

—“All of Us Together” (Southern labor song, ca. 1930s)

For Communists eager to get on with the task of revolution, the South was a new, mysterious frontier. Arriving in Gastonia, North Carolina, Chattanooga, Tennessee, Greenville, South Carolina, and Birmingham, Alabama, they brought with them the cultural and ideological baggage of a Northern, urban-based movement, including assumptions about the backwardness of Southern workers. Yet, gnawing at the edges of their preconceptions was a policy that situated Southern blacks at the heart of the region's revolutionary movement. Following nearly a decade of resolutions and reassessments on the “Negro Question,” in 1928 the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International insisted that blacks concentrated in the black belt counties of the Deep South constituted an oppressed nation. This region, dominated by cotton plantations, consisted of counties with a numerical black majority. As an oppressed nation, the resolution maintained, African-Americans had the right to self-determination: political power, control over the economy, and the right to secede from the United States. In 1930 the resolution was altered to account for the differences between North and South. Northern blacks, the new resolution argued, sought integration and assimilation, and therefore the demand for self-determination was to be applied exclusively to the South.¹

The new position opened a new chapter in CPUSA history. With the possible exceptions of B. H. Lauderdale, a white Communist from Becken-bridge, Texas, who tried unsuccessfully to place the Communist Party on the ballot in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama in 1922, and William Z. Foster, who orchestrated a Southern presidential campaign tour in 1928, the Party never ventured south before 1929. Apparently unaware of the region's own history of working-class and rural radicalism, national Communist leaders presumed the South to be an impenetrable bastion of racist conservatism and derided the notion that Southern blacks had their own radical tradition. Communist John Owens opposed bringing Southern blacks into the Party because “the vast majority of southern Negroes are not revolutionary, not even radical. Given a society of peace, prosperity and security, they are content to drift through life.”²

On the other hand, Southerners evaluated Northern radicals through their own ideological lenses. When the Communists entered the Magic City to extend their form of immigrant, urban, working-class radicalism to the industrial South, they entered a world unaccustomed to “Reds” outside the pale of mythology. Residents became familiar with Communism through radio and newspapers or through hearsay and urban folklore—stories of North Carolina textile strikers were hardly ignored by Southerners, black or white.³ Popular myths of evil Reds wishing only to sow the seeds of discord were intended to neutralize the Party's message. But the depression had hit Alabama so hard that many working people, especially blacks, viewed hunger and joblessness as the greater evil. Thus, for some the Communists were devils incarnate; for others they were avenging angels. But for all Birminghamians the CP was a new and strange addition to the Southern landscape.

The Central Committee of the CPUSA chose Birmingham, the center of heavy industry in the South, as headquarters for the newly established District 17, encompassing Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Located on the fringe of the black belt, Birmingham also served as a jumping-off point for the organization of sharecroppers and agricultural workers.⁴ The first full-time organizers in Birmingham were Tom Johnson and Harry Jackson, two veteran white Communists who had been active trade union organizers in the North. Johnson had worked in Cleveland, and Harry Jackson had spent considerable time as a longshoreman in San Francisco. The precise moment of their arrival is rather hazy, but they were visibly active late in 1929, having established contact with Italian metal worker James Giglio before arriving. Giglio had earlier written to the CP-led TUUL in New York and shortly thereafter established a Birmingham chapter of the Metal Workers Industrial League. Through Giglio, Johnson met with black TCI workers in Ensley, an industrial suburb of Birmingham, and subsequently recruited the first Communist Party unit at a street-corner meeting in a black section of town. The Party even opened an office downtown (2117!/2 Second Ave. North), though its presence was brief. A few weeks later, on March 23, 1930, the TUUL held its first mass meeting. Some two hundred participants, about three-quarters of whom were black, piled into the Joy Boys Dance Hall in downtown Birmingham to hear speeches by Giglio, Tom Johnson, and Walter Lewis, a newly recruited black steel worker from Montgomery. The meeting went without incident, but within days Giglio's home was firebombed.⁵

The bombing was enough to convince Party leaders to lie low for the next two months. Meanwhile, the Central Committee dispatched an additional veteran organizer to strengthen the Birmingham cadre. Fresh from a year in the Soviet Union, the twenty-four-year-did, New York-born Frank Burns had been an active Communist since 1926. Bolstered by Burns's appointment, the Party resumed its organizing efforts with a mass meeting on May 22, at which Tom Johnson delivered a poignant address before a sympathetic and predominantly black crowd of over two hundred. Citing examples of recent lynchings in Georgia and Texas to excoriate Southern racism, Johnson proposed the idea of black self-determination in the black belt, advocated social and economic equality for blacks, and was reported to have “lauded the Soviet government.” The other two speakers, Burns and Walter Lewis, called for the abolition of segregation in the city's cafes and public transportation and strongly condemned racism as the stumbling block to improving all workers’ lives.⁶

The meeting made a lasting impression on several participants, including an eighteen-year-old black coal miner named Angelo Herndon, whose incarceration for organizing black and white workers in Atlanta two years later would make him one of the most celebrated black Communists in the country. Born on May 6, 1913, in the steel and coal mining town of Wyoming, Ohio, Herndon and his thirteen brothers and sisters grew up amid poverty. Herndon's mother, a very religious woman who had hoped young Angelo would choose the ministry as his livelihood, was left alone to care for fourteen children after the death of her husband. At age thirteen, Herndon and one of his brothers left home in search of jobs, eventually finding work in the coal mines of Birmingham. The grueling labor and unfair practices of coal operators ignited a number of confrontations between groups of workers and foremen—encounters that would eventually play a significant role in Herndon's radicalization. Persuaded by the Party's commitment to social justice and racial equality, Herndon joined the Communists and quickly became one of Birmingham's most active organizers.⁷

As the summer approached, Communists moved their gatherings from indoor halls to outdoor parks. In May, about seven hundred blacks and one hundred whites gathered in Capitol Park to demand relief for unemployed workers and to protest the recent arrests of six Communists in Atlanta. The organizers then led an impromptu march to the Birmingham Community Chest headquarters to demand immediate relief but were turned away by nearly one hundred police officers.⁸ The incident prompted city commissioner Jimmie Jones to conduct a full-scale investigation into radical activities and to introduce a strict criminal anarchy ordinance to “curb communism.” Passed unanimously by the city commission on June 17, 1930, the new ordinance made it unlawful for anyone to advocate “criminal anarchy” by print or word of mouth or to be a member of an organization which does so. Conviction could result in fines up to $100 and 180 days in jail.⁹

In defiance of the new ordinance, the Communists held an open meeting to elect delegates to the National Convention on Unemployment in Chicago, and a few days later a group of 250 black workers attended a demonstration in Capitol Park. The Party's disregard of the new law, compounded by heightened racial tensions surrounding black congressman Oscar DePriest's announced visit to Birmingham, induced greater police repression. During a demonstration in Wilson Park held on June 28, city detectives arrested several Communists, including leading black organizer Gilbert Lewis, charging them with “advocating social equality between whites and negroes.” Earlier that day, Tom Johnson and Oscar DePriest were burned in effigy by a mob of whites.¹⁰

Throughout the summer, Birmingham police invoked the criminal anarchy ordinance to arrest known activists and raid the homes of black workers suspected of possessing radical literature. Although the arrests led to few convictions and the charges were usually dropped or reduced to vagrancy violations,¹¹ the constant harassment took its toll on Party work. Conceding that the repression in the South was much greater than elsewhere, the district bureau formulated plans for creating armed and unarmed defense corps in Birmingham and Chattanooga. The unarmed groups were to be trained in street fighting tactics to protect demonstrators and delay police, while the select armed corps was supposed to protect organizers in mining camps and other isolated areas. Although the armed defense corps were apparently never activated, Communist leaders kept firearms for self-defense and occasionally pawned them when funds were low. When police raids failed to turn up documents, guns were often confiscated.¹²

In the midst of heightened police repression, the Party initiated a Southern-based radical weekly and established a workers’ school for its new recruits. At the behest of the Central Committee, twenty-four-year-old James S. Allen (né Sol Auerbach) left his post as editor of the Labor Defender, the journal of the ILD, and traveled south with his wife and comrade, Isabelle Allen, and a paltry sum of $200 to launch the Southern Worker. Datelined Birmingham in order to confuse police, it was originally published in Chattanooga where anti-Communist repression was not as great.¹³ The first issue of the Southern Worker appeared on August 16, 1930. Selling for two cents a copy, three thousand copies were printed and distributed throughout Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Allen's first editorial statement described the new publication as “a paper of and for both the white and black workers and farmers: It recognizes only one division, the bosses against the workers and the workers against the bosses.” The only way to achieve the demands of the working class, he reasoned, was through proletarian revolution. Surprisingly, the editorial statement did not mention the Party's position on self-determination in the black belt, and it contained very little discussion regarding the specific struggles of African-Americans. The paper's credo notwithstanding, so much space was devoted to the problems of black working people that Southern-born white Communists occasionally commented on the paper's perceived problack bias. In a letter to the editor, one white Party member complained that he could not sell subscriptions for a paper that “devotes 90 percent of its news to Negroes and 10 percent to whites.”¹⁴

Allen had good reason to devote more space to black working people. From the beginning, Birmingham blacks exhibited a greater interest in the Party than did whites. The Communists’ original cadre of three organizers in 1929 was augmented to over ninety by the end of August 1930, and over five hundred working people populated the Party's mass organizations, of whom between 80 and 90 percent were black.¹⁵ There was little doubt in the minds of district organizers that “Negroes ... are the decisive strata among [the] toiling masses in the South.” During the 1930 election campaign, the Communist Party did what no political party had done in Alabama since Reconstruction: it endorsed a black candidate, Walter Lewis, for governor. The election platform included complete racial equality and maintained that the exercise of self-determination in the black belt was the only way to end lynching and achieve political rights for Southern blacks.¹⁶

Alarmed by the Communist Party's growing support among black working people, leading white citizens and government officials temporarily breathed a sigh of relief when a congressional committee to investigate “communist propaganda” under Congressman Hamilton Fish decided to hold hearings in Birmingham. Predictably, as the Communists in Birmingham assailed the hearings as part of a sustained effort to outlaw the CP, local authorities and the press expressed confidence that the Fish Committee would end the radical menace once and for all. The hearings intensified anti-Communist hysteria, as various witnesses described the intricate workings of a secret, foreign-led movement whose predominantly black ranks numbered up to eight thousand strong in Alabama alone. In retrospect, these exaggerations are astounding since the Birmingham CP possessed just over one hundred members at the time.¹⁷

The publicity surrounding the hearings did not hinder the Party's growth that fall. Party units were established in three metal shops, in a mine, and on a cotton plantation some forty miles north of Birmingham, and Communists employed by the U.S. Pipe Company began publishing a shop newsletter entitled the Red Hammer. By late 1930 the Party had spread beyond the borders of Jefferson County and gained a few adherents among white farmers and miners in the northern Alabama counties of Cullman, Winston, Walker, St. Clair, Morgan, and Marshall—a region with a Republican, Populist, and to a lesser degree, Socialist tradition. In January 1931, Tom Johnson helped a group of Cullman County farmers form the Alabama Farmers’ Relief Fund, an affiliate of the Communist-led United Farmers’ League in North Dakota, and within two months at least nine small locals were scattered throughout the state.¹⁸

At the Seventh National Convention in June 1930, Party leaders elected to postpone the ambitious industrial organizing drive in Alabama in favor of a campaign that would focus on the immediate needs of the jobless. Central Committee as well as local Party leaders realized that, because of recent plant closures, the pressing need for work or relief eclipsed all other issues affecting Birmingham workers. The demand for jobs was so great that numerous independent efforts were launched by industrialists and middle-class organizations to relieve the situation. In addition to sponsoring public works projects, in 1930 the chamber of commerce worked out a plan through which meal tickets redeemable at participating restaurants could be purchased by needy citizens. The League of Women Voters instituted a “clean up, paint up, repair up” campaign in an attempt to relieve unemployment, but these efforts did little to remedy the situation. There was, however, one organized effort generated from the working class itself that was independent of, and even hostile to, the Communist Party. In April 1930, white labor organizer John Bago formed an all-white unemployed organization with about one hundred members. When one of its members suggested a march on city hall to demand $50,000 from the Board of Revenue, Bago opposed the idea, labeling such a march “communistic.” Having achieved nothing tangible, the organization disbanded within a few months.¹⁹

As the winter approached, the CP stepped up its own relief campaign by holding a series of demonstrations to draw attention to the plight of the jobless. In preparation for a rally in Capitol Park in September, local Communists issued a leaflet that spoke directly to Birmingham's growing number of homeless. “White and colored workers are being evicted from their homes and thrown out on the streets to shift for themselves. Gas and water is [sic] being cut off because the unemployed workers can not pay their bills.” Although police arrested organizers Angelo Herndon and Tom Johnson on the day of the rally, a large and restive crowd of blacks gathered and remained in Capitol Park until police turned them away.²⁰

A few weeks later, the Metal Workers Industrial League planned a mass meeting of unemployed steel workers in Ensley to demand immediate relief, an ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Hammer and Hoe
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Prologue
• Part I: The Underground, 1929–1935
• Part II: Up from Bolshevism, 1935–1939
• Part III: Back to the Trenches, 1939–1941
• Epilogue: Fade to Black
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index