![[Book Club | PART 1 Discussion] Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/7Ah6wxRBYY.png){kind=link}
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
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.
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
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!