Part 1 | Preface - Chapter 5

About the Book

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.

Source: UNC Press

Hammer and Hoe | PDF

About the Author

Robin D. G Kelley is a distinguished professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S History. As a historian he researches "social movements in the U.S., the African Diaspora and Africa; [B]lack intellectuals; music and visual culture; Surrealism, Marxism, among other things." You can find his essays in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, The Nation, Monthly Review, New York Times, Color Lines, Counterpunch, Souls, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noir, Social Text, The Black Scholar, Journal of Palestine Studies, and Boston Review, for which he also serve as Contributing Editor.

Source: UCLA Faculty page

Books

Authored

Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (The Free Press, 2009); Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002); with Howard Zinn and Dana Frank, Three Strikes: The Fighting Spirit of Labor's Last Century (Beacon Press, 2001); Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997); Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994); Into the Fire: African Americans Since 1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) [Vol. 10 of the Young Oxford History of African Americans series]; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).

Co-Editor

Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View From the Third World (with Jesse Benjamin (New York: Verso, 2018); The Other Special Relationship: Race, Rights and Riots in Britain and the United States (with Stephen Tuck) (New York: Palgrave, 2015); Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the African Diaspora (with Franklin Rosemont) (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009); To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (with Earl Lewis) (Oxford University Press, 2000), volumes 1 and 2; Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (with Sidney J. Lemelle) (London: Verso Books, 1995); and the eleven volume Young Oxford History of African Americans (with Earl Lewis) (1995-1998).

Multimedia

Revisiting Black Marxism in the Wake of Black Lives Matter

What is Racial Capitalism and Why does It Matter

Belabored: Black Against Amazon, with Steven Pitts and Robin D.G. Kelley

Audiobook

  • marxisthayaca [he/him,they/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    "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'.