![[Book Club | PART 1 Discussion] Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/7Ah6wxRBYY.png){kind=link}
Part 1 | Preface - Chapter 5
About the Book
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.
Source: UNC Press
About the Author
Robin D. G Kelley is a distinguished professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S History. As a historian he researches "social movements in the U.S., the African Diaspora and Africa; [B]lack intellectuals; music and visual culture; Surrealism, Marxism, among other things." You can find his essays in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, The Nation, Monthly Review, New York Times, Color Lines, Counterpunch, Souls, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noir, Social Text, The Black Scholar, Journal of Palestine Studies, and Boston Review, for which he also serve as Contributing Editor.
Books
Authored
Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (The Free Press, 2009); Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002); with Howard Zinn and Dana Frank, Three Strikes: The Fighting Spirit of Labor's Last Century (Beacon Press, 2001); Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997); Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994); Into the Fire: African Americans Since 1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) [Vol. 10 of the Young Oxford History of African Americans series]; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
Co-Editor
Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View From the Third World (with Jesse Benjamin (New York: Verso, 2018); The Other Special Relationship: Race, Rights and Riots in Britain and the United States (with Stephen Tuck) (New York: Palgrave, 2015); Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the African Diaspora (with Franklin Rosemont) (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009); To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (with Earl Lewis) (Oxford University Press, 2000), volumes 1 and 2; Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (with Sidney J. Lemelle) (London: Verso Books, 1995); and the eleven volume Young Oxford History of African Americans (with Earl Lewis) (1995-1998).
Multimedia
Revisiting Black Marxism in the Wake of Black Lives Matter
What is Racial Capitalism and Why does It Matter
Belabored: Black Against Amazon, with Steven Pitts and Robin D.G. Kelley
To me, it has been an eye-opening accounting of the activities of Alabama workers in the struggle against bosses and their violent guard dogs of capital. The book starts with an account of how Birmingham became the industrial center of the South, with Mining and Industrial sectors, and how that attracted the rural poor into the urban centers. It puts the union vote in Bessemer Alabama in a historical context, see his interview with Belabored for that discussion.
It also speaks to the very human hopes and flaws of organizers in the South. A lot of the northern communists did not have a fucking clue of what they were talking about, often treating Black workers as docile, and giving totally ahistorical accounts the South as an area of non-resistance. You can see this today on twitter and folks just dismissing the South in its entirety because of the entrenched white supremacist forces preventing democratic self-determination.
The CCP and its platform for self-determination ought to be studied and advocated even today. I don't if that idea has fallen out of favor.
I really appreciated reading about the day-to-day fights and marches demanding liveable wages, unemployment relief, and that shit resonates even today. One thing Communists should advocate right now is a better functioning unemployment system. The unemployment process is so broken in a lot of places. Something that minor could still have substantial improvement in the quality of workers.
100% comrade. Yes organising workers is important, but unemployed ones are just as, if not maybe even more important in today's climate. They're the ones getting screwed the hardest by capital at the moment.
Absolutely, the better things are for the unemployed and the better the welfare safety net is , the better it is for pretty much all workers, unemployed or not. If a someone is no longer afraid of losing their job because they know they will still be able to get by, even when unemployed, then they are far more likely to challenge their bosses, organise for better pay or conditions, or even go on strike. When the threat of being fired is reduced, workers gain far more leverage.
Thats a great point!