Hammer and hoe
Subtitle: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression
By: Robin D.G. Kelley
Edition: Twenty-fifth Anniversary edition.
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 369
ISBN-13: 9781469625485
Subjects: Communists; Communism; Depressions; History
Description: 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. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals. After discussing the book's origins and impact in a new preface written for this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Kelley reflects on what a militantly antiracist, radical movement in the heart of Dixie might teach contemporary social movements confronting rampant inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.
Notes: "With a new preface by the author."

Previous edition: 1990.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 301-333) and index.
Table of contents: title: 1. An invisible army: jobs, relief, and the birth of a movement; title: 2. In Egyptland: the share croppers' union; title: 3. Organize or starve! : communists, labor, and antiradial violence; title: 4. In the heart of the trouble : race, sex, and the ILD; title: 5. Negroes ain' Black-but Red! : Black communists and the culture of opposition; title: 6. The road to legality : the popular front in Birmingham, 1935-1937; title: 7. The CIO's in Dixie!; title: 8. Old slaves, new deal : communists and the WPA; title: 9. The popular front in rural Alabama; title: 10. The democratic front; title: 11. The march of southern youth!; title: Epilogue. Fade to Black : the invisible army in war, revolution, and beyond.