Hammer and hoe
by Robin D.G. Kelley · first published 1990
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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.
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thanks for the rec! gonna piggyback this and plug the book "hammer and hoe" by robin d.g. kelley if anybody wants a deeeeeep dive into a 20th century history of communism in alabama. the article touches on that (the sharecroppers unions etc)
on “Meet the rednecks running a mutual aid auto shop in Alabama” ↗…nearby, whose parents before that labored in the cotton fields, I can also testify the multi-century efforts of Black workers who fought the “hands that was fedding them”. America's Johannesburg [1] and Hammer and Hoe [2] for reference. [1] https://ugapress.org/book/9780820356273/americas-johannesbur... [2] https://uncpress.org/book/9781469625485/hammer-and-hoe/
on “Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama” ↗…Black farm land has been well documented https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-black-farmers-lost-326-b.... The point of communist organizing in Alabama during the 1930's -- detailed in Robin DG Kelley's "Hammer and Hoe" -- was to protect Black small farm owners from theft of their meager lands, and to take actions so that sharecroppers (tenant farm workers) could collectively control enough land to sustain themselves.
on “Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)” ↗…the professional culture. At the end of the day, we work, and these are real social forces that move people in certain directions. That said, it's not entirely arbitrary. Robin Kelley wrote this book, Hammer and Hoe, and in it he talks about black communist organizing during the Depression. The gist is that the Communist Party thought it was just going to educate industrial workers on straightforward class politics,…
on “Why must a socialist also be woke?” ↗