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. Yet this still is a story of how these groups fought back, and fought together, for social justice and change in a fractured region.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. Through seven cases of the CPUSA (district 17) activity in the South, Stanton covers tortured notions of loyalty and betrayal, the cult of white southern womanhood, Christianity in all its iterations, and the scapegoating of African Americans, Jews, and communists.

What emerges from this narrative is a meaningful criterion by which to evaluate the Reds’ accomplishments. In this collective biography, Mary Stanton-a noted chronicler of the left and of social justice movements in the South-explores the resources available to Depression-era Reds before the advent of the New Deal or the modern civil rights movement. In Alabama alone, twenty black men were known to have been murdered, and countless others, women included, were beaten, disabled, jailed, “disappeared,” or had their lives otherwise ruined between March 1931 and September 1935. After the Scottsboro story broke on March 25, 1931, it was open season for old-fashioned lynchings, legal (courtroom) lynchings, and mob murder. Written from the perspective of the district 17 (CPUSA) Reds who worked primarily in Alabama, it acquaints a new generation with the impact of the Great Depression on postwar black and white, young and old, urban and rural Americans. Kelley's groundbreaking Hammer and Hoe and the first to explore its key figures and actions beyond the 1930s. Red, Black, White is the first narrative history of the American communist movement in the South since Robin D.

Hammer and hoe robin dg kelley