Well, the biggest thing you notice when reading this piece is the sheer amount of bravery and courage displayed by these people fighting an uphill battle against capitalism, sexism, and white supremacy. Barely a page goes by in the book where somebody isn’t being arrested, beaten, bombed, or lynched just for having the gall to speak up for themselves or others. The case of a black union organiser Ralph Gray, for example, was particularly haunting (the following happened the day after he saved his brother’s family from being massacred in their home by a racist mob):

“Despite the violence, about 150 sharecroppers met with Coad the following evening in a vacant house southwest of Camp Hill. This time sentries were posted around the meeting place. When Sheriff Young arrived on the scene with Camp Hill police chief J. M. Wilson and Deputy A. J. Thompson, he found Ralph Gray standing guard about a quarter-mile from the meeting. Although accounts differ as to the sequence of events, both Gray and the sheriff traded harsh words and, in the heat of argument, exchanged buckshot. Young, who received gunshot wounds to the stomach, was rushed to a hospital in nearby Alexander City while Gray lay on the side of the road, his legs riddled with bullets. Fellow union members carried Gray to his home where the group, including Mack Coad, barricaded themselves inside the house. The group held off a posse led by police chief J. M. Wilson long enough to allow most members to escape, but the wounded Ralph Gray opted to remain in his home until the end. The posse returned with reinforcements and found Gray lying in his bed and his family huddled in a comer. According to his brother, someone in the group "poked a pistol into Brother Ralph's mouth and shot down his throat." The mob burned his home to the ground and dumped his body on the steps of the Dadeville courthouse. The mangled and lifeless leader became an example for other black sharecroppers as groups of armed whites took turns shooting and kicking the bloody corpse of Ralph Gray."

As was the treatment of Cliff James and Milo Bentley after another gunfight later:

“When the shoot-out was over, SCU member John McMullen lay dead, and several others were wounded, including Clifford James, Milo Bentley, Thomas Moss, and Ned Cobb. Within the next few days, at least twenty union members were rounded up and thrown in jail. Several of those arrested were not involved in the shoot-out, but their names were discovered when the police returned to James's home and uncovered the SCU local's membership list along with "considerable Communistic literature." The violence that followed eclipsed the Camp Hill affair of 1931. Entire families were forced to take refuge in the woods; white vigilante groups broke into black homes and seized guns, ammunition, and other property; and blacks were warned that if they appeared in the Liberty Hill section of Reeltown they would be shot on sight. A blind black woman reported to be nearly one hundred years old was severely beaten and pistol whipped by a group of vigilantes, and one Tallapoosa doctor claimed to have treated at least a dozen black patients with gunshot wounds. Despite severe injuries to his back, James managed to walk seventeen miles to Tuskegee Institute's hospital. After dressing James's gunshot wounds, Dr. Eugene Dibble of Tuskegee contacted the Macon County sheriff, who then removed James to a cold, damp cell at the Montgomery County jail. Milo Bentley, who reportedly had been shot in the head, back, and arms, was also taken to Montgomery County jail. Observers claimed that Bentley and James received no medical treatment from their jailers, and both were found "lying on filthy and flimsy blankets on the floor. Cliff James was lying naked on the floor in a separate cage, delirious from the loss of blood and with blood-soaked dirty dressings over those wounds which had been dressed." On December 27, James died from infected wounds and pneumonia, both caused by the lack of medical treatment. Ten and one-half hours later, Bentley's lifeless body was found in the same condition.”

And yet despite this, and much more, the people in Alabama persisted in their attempts to organise, often spurred on more by the attempts to crush them rather than be deterred by them. When their meetings were broken up, they found new ways to carry them out more covertly and safely, they found ways to take minutes of the meetings by underlining words in the bible in order to avoid keeping written records. When their homes were raided, they found new places to hide socialist literature. When they were arrested on the street on suspicion of being communists, they pulled the wool over the eyes of the white police by playing the stereotypical “dumb black southerner” only to go right back to organising upon their release. When the police violently suppressed women’s protests and marches and threatened to shoot them, they responded with cries of “shoot me and you shoot a thousand more” and then eagerly awaited the next march so they could “whip them a cop”. More often than not, the response to the suppression of the movement seemed to be an even stronger sense of determination and some clever new way to try and avoid falling victim to the same repressive tactics.

And, obviously, it wasn’t just the direct violence of reactionaries and the state that they had to try and overcome but also the structural violence of the racist, apartheid hellhole they were forced to live in. For example, at meetings they would read communist theory and newspapers despite the fact that most of them were illiterate and had basically no education. They would read and discuss them bit by bit together to try and ensure that they had grasped what the writings meant. I mean, I’m sure we all find it hard at times to push ourselves to read more theory and try to learn more, but can you even begin to imagine trying to crawl your way through ‘What is to be Done?’ whilst being functionally illiterate, having worked a long day in the fields, half-starved, anxious that a mob of Klansmen could break down the door any minute and string you up just because of the colour of your skin, all while trying to make it look like nothing more than an innocent bible study group?

Kelley has done a great job getting across the sheer strength and perseverance of the folks described in the first part of this book, and I’m in no doubt that if we could all summon even a minute fraction of the courage they possessed, the world would be a much finer place. Something else that also stood out when reading this chapter were the number of connections to phenomenon that we saw discussed when we read Freire’s ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ that kept popping up throughout the text. For example, Freire talked about some oppressed folks becoming “submerged in the reality of oppression” meaning that: “almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or ‘sub-oppressors.’ The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors.” We saw this in Hammer and Hoe when some only got involved in the communist and unionisation movements as an attempt to progress their own way up the ladder, or when some of the black folks supported racial equality movements solely so they might eventually be able to become rich business owners themselves.

Freire’s work was referenced by several commenters on a few other occasions also. Such as when the black elites in Alabama took it upon themselves to present the voice of all “reasonable” black people and denounce the communists at every turn, clearly happier to appease white supremacy than strike a blow at the system they were profiting from. Likewise, Freire’s writing on tactics of manipulation, divide and rule, etc. were also clearly visible throughout these chapters. When the economic crisis kicked in, for example, some whites started an independent organisation for unemployed people, however all it seems to have done was help foster more anti-communist sentiment and prevent people from undertaking any “communistic activities” that might have actually helped them.

All in all this has been a very enjoyable and interesting read so far (even if somewhat maddening and saddening at many points) which I would highly recommend.