I N Memory of Hosea Hudson, Griot of Alabama Radicalism
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HAMMER AND HOE THE FRED W. MORRISON SERIES IN SOUTHERN 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 Depression I 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 0-80784288-5 (pbk : alk. paper) I. Communism-Alabama-History-20th century. 2. Communists- Alabama-History-20th century. 3. Depressions-l 929-Alabama. I. Title. II. Series. HX9 1 .A2K45 1 990 324.276 1 '075'09042-dc20 n memory of Hosea Hudson, griot of Alabama radicalism, Iwhose 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 pov- erty made this book a reality . CONTENTS Preface xi Acknowledgments xvii Abbreviations xxi Prologue. Radical Genesis: Birmingham, 1870-1930 1 PART 1. THE UNDERGROUND, 1929-1935 ONE An Invisible Army: Jobs, Relief, and the Birth of a Movement 13 TWO In Egyptland: The Share Croppers' Union 34 THREE Organize or Starve!: Communists, Labor, and Antiradical Violence 57 FOUR In the Heart of the Trouble: Race, Sex, and the ILD 78 FIVE Negroes Ain' Black-But Red!: Black Communists and the Culture of Opposition 92 PART 11. UP FROM BOLSHEVISM, 1935-1939 SIX The Road to Legality: The Popular Front in Birmingham, 1935-1937 119 SEVEN The CIO's in Dixie! 138 EIGHT Old Slaves, New Deal: Communists and the WPA 152 NINE The Popular Front in Rural Alabama 159 TEN The Democratic Front 176 viii CONTENTS PART Ill. BACK TO THE TRENCHES, 1939-1 94 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 fter spending several years hobnobbing with Euro- A pean, Asian, and Soviet dignitaries of the Third In- ternational, Daily Worker correspondent Joseph North made a most unfor- gettable 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 com- rade''-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 epito- mized 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 rene- gade 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 oppo- sition 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 politi- cal 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, history, and society. What emerged was a malleable movement rooted in a variety of different pasts, reflecting a variety of different voices, and incorporating countless contra- dictory tendencies. The movement's very existence validates literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin's observation that a culture is not static but open, "capa- ble of death and renewal, transcending itself, that is exceeding its own boundarie~."~ And Alabama Communists had titanic boundaries to exceed. More than in the Northeast and Midwest, the regional incubators of American Communism, race pervaded virtually every aspect of Southern society. The relations between industrial labor and capital, and landlords and tenants, were clouded by divisions based on skin color. On the surface, at least, it seemed that there existed two separate racial communities in the segregated South that only intersected in the world of work or at the marketplace. Sharp class distinctions endured within both black and white communities, but racism tended to veil, and at times arrest, intraracial class conflict as well as interracial working-class unity. Alabama Party leaders could not escape the prevalence of race, despite their unambiguous emphasis on class-based politics. Indeed, during its first five years in Alabama, the CP inevitably evolved into a "race" organization, a working-class alternative to the NAACP. As Nell Painter observed, the rank-and-file folk "made the Party their own. In Alabama in the 19303, the CP was a southern, working- class black ~r~anization."~ The homegrown radicalism that had germinated in poor black commu- nities and,among tiny circles of white rebels remained deep underground. Alabama Communists did not have much choice. Their challenge to racism and to the status quo prompted a wave of repression one might think inconceivable in a democratic country. The extent and character of anti- radical repression in the South constitute a crucial part of our story. When we ponder Werner Sombart's question, "Why is there no socialism in the United States?'in light of the South, violence and lawlessness loom large. The fact is, the CP and its auxiliaries in Alabama did have a considerable following, some of whom devoured Marxist literature and dreamed of a socialist world. But to be a Communist, an ILD member, or an SCU PREFACE xiit militant was to face the possibility of imprisonment, beatings, kidnapping, and even death. And yet the Party survived, and at times thrived, in this thoroughly racist, racially divided, and repressive social world. Indeed, most scholars have underestimated the Southern Left and have underrated the role violence played in quashing radical movements. Reli- gious fundamentalism, white racism, black ignorance or indifference, the Communists' presumed insensitivity to Southern culture, their advocacy of black self-determinationduring the early 1930s, and an overall lack of class consciousness are all oft-cited explanations for the Party's "failure" to attract Southern worker^.^ The experiences of Alabama Communists, how- ever, suggest that racial divisions were far more fluid and Southern work- ing-class consciousness far more complex than most historians have real- ized. The African-Americans who made up the Alabama radical movement experienced and opposed race and class oppression as a totality. The Party and its various auxiliaries served as vehicles for black working-class oppo- sition on a variety of different levels ranging from antiracist activities to intraracial class conflict. Furthermore, the CP attracted some openly big- oted whites despite its militant antiracist slogans. The Party also drew women whose efforts to overcome gender-defined limitations proved more decisive to their radicalization than did either race or class issues. I suppose I should say something about the now infamous debate over the CPUSA's relationship to the Communist International.