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