To me, it has been an eye-opening accounting of the activities of Alabama workers in the struggle against bosses and their violent guard dogs of capital. The book starts with an account of how Birmingham became the industrial center of the South, with Mining and Industrial sectors, and how that attracted the rural poor into the urban centers. It puts the union vote in Bessemer Alabama in a historical context, see his interview with Belabored for that discussion.

It also speaks to the very human hopes and flaws of organizers in the South. A lot of the northern communists did not have a fucking clue of what they were talking about, often treating Black workers as docile, and giving totally ahistorical accounts the South as an area of non-resistance. You can see this today on twitter and folks just dismissing the South in its entirety because of the entrenched white supremacist forces preventing democratic self-determination.

The CCP and its platform for self-determination ought to be studied and advocated even today. I don't if that idea has fallen out of favor.

I really appreciated reading about the day-to-day fights and marches demanding liveable wages, unemployment relief, and that shit resonates even today. One thing Communists should advocate right now is a better functioning unemployment system. The unemployment process is so broken in a lot of places. Something that minor could still have substantial improvement in the quality of workers.

Did you guys get to the part where Stalin offered to send the Red Army to occupy Mobile Alabama to protect Black people from racial violence?

:stalin: :stalin-shining: :stalin-shining: :stalin-shining: :stalin-shining:

Finishing ch5 atm but a few things stood out to me

Firstly the level of violence and disgusting levels of racism is obviously not a suprise, but still just gut wrenching. What a disgraceful and shameful legacy. And it makes their levels of resistance so much more inspiring, how the organisations would continually grow in size even after big roadbocks and attacks. Incredible stuff.

Second, holy shit how awesome is it that the International Labour Defence existed? People cricised the USSR for being non-interventionaist but the fact that they had this is amazing. Contrast this with the disgusting racism of the US government and anyone who tried to compare the two can go get fucked.

Most importantly, have been mulling over a lot over this passage and related bits: *

"Alabama's black cadre interpreted Communism through the lenses of their own cuItural world and the international movement of which they were now a part. Far from being a slumbering mass waiting for Communist direction, black working people entered the movement with a rich culture of opposition that sometimes contradicted, sometimes reinforced the Left's vision of class struggle. The Party offered more than a vehicle for social contestation; it offered a framework for understanding the roots of poverty and racism, linked local struggles to world politics, challenged not only the hegemonic ideology of white supremacy but the petit bourgeois racial politics of the black middle class, and created an atmosphere in which ordinary people could analyze, discuss, and criticize the society in which they lived. "

Its something I've been thinking about a lot, especially after reading Friere and Gramsci who talk alot about reciprocal teaching and fusing Marxism with the struggle of margianialised and minority groups. I know we all feel so hopeless with the amount of work to be done at the moment, but seeing these amazing comrades be so dedicated in their not only their resistance, but commitment to revolutionary programme is fucking inspiring!

Can we set up a chapo perusal for this?

"insured peaceful relations by creating alli- ances with white industrialists, and a handful secured enough "respectabil- ity" to retain the franchise"

"Negro Federation of Women's Clubs and alIied organizations occasionally focused on social welfare issues, black Birmingham's numerous religious and literary societies occupied a great deal of the black middle-class wom- an's time.7"

"Ku Klux Klan intimidation and other forms of repression partly explain the rapid demise of the NAACP during the 1920s, but racial violence notwithstanding, the association's local leadership ig- nored the problems black working people faced daily."

"~' What McPherson, Adams, and other traditional black leaders failed to admit, however, was that the organizational activity of their tiny inner circle excluded the opinions of the "non-reading classes." They assumed the mantle of spokesmen for black working people because they felt the masses were incapable of speaking for themselves."

Throughout the book you see a lot of respectable African Americans of the upper class/business strata, try to divert revolutionary energy. So we've taken to quote portions of Chapter 4 from Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Freire.

"The dominant elites, on the other hand, can—and do—think without the people—although they do not permit themselves the luxury of failing to think about the people in order to know them better and thus dominate them more efficiently. Consequently, any apparent dialogue or communication between the elites and the masses is really the depositing of "communiques," whose contents are intended to exercise a domesticating influence. Why do the dominant elites not become debilitated when they do not think with the people? Because the latter constitute their antithesis, their very reason for existence. If the elites were to think with the people, the contradiction would be superseded and they could no longer dominate. From the point of view of the dominators in any epoch, correct thinking presupposes the non-thinking of the people.”

- Freire, 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed'.

It's late, I am really upset to put a pause on it here; but tomorrow, I want to talk about Black Communists and organizers in general and women's role in the Communist movement in particular.

<3 everyone.

Oh dang I didn't realize there was this going on. I should do a reread with you guys.

Hollywood is shitty and there's zero hope they'd do justice; but the amount of drama you could mine from the Great Depression is just astronomical.

"But to be a Communist, an ILD member, or an SCU 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."

I wanna see this movie/HBO mini-series

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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.

"Communists cried out for direction, especially after wrestling with vague theoretical treatises on capital's crisis or on the growing specter of fascism."

There needs to be a special genre of communist literature that deals with all concrete processes of organizing, resistance, etc. I know it exists now, but that quote comes from the marked struggle by the CCP branch in Alabama, unable to continuously and consistently communicate with HQ, they were left pretty much to their own devices a lot of the time.

"Not only were lines of communica- tion between New York and Birmingham hazy throughout the 1930s and 1940s, but Birmingham Communists had enough difficulty maintaining contact with comrades as close as Tallapoosa County"

The problem now is that people normally hate their national HQs. I know most chapters aren't fond of DSA national.

I will slowly pepper annotations throughout this afternoon. But I want to either anonymize or just quote and reflect as I go. You can read all the annotations in context at the Perusall website.

"wave of repression one might think inconceivable in a democratic country"

Throughout the entire process of organizing in the South and Alabama specifically, the State used incredibly violent, legal (and extralegal) measures to deter the possession of radical literature. Bombed private property. Allowed KKK to sabotage meetings. etc.

When stupid libs are like "this si not who we are". I can't help but laugh.

I liked how they described one of the organizers, his comrades said "he 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". Damn that's fucking badass.

I had to look up "keeps his powder dry".

This colloquial expression, which originally alluded to keeping gunpowder dry so that it would ignite, has been used figuratively since the 1800s but today is less common than take care.

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