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Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression
by Robin D G Kelley
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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.…
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"The history of the black left is often a missing piece in the histories of how the civil rights movement grew. This is a foundational text for understanding the deep roots of the black left in the deep South, the lingering plantation economy and early southern industry. Many of the figures that Kelly treats in the book were early twentieth-century organizers who became mentors and teachers of civil rights leaders. Kelly shows the activists at work generations before the 1960s Civil Rights Revolution. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s an adept Marxian analysis of Alabama, and an economic and sociopolitical analysis of the region that is at the core of black life in the United States. Even though it’s no longer the case that the majority of black Americans live in the Deep South, that is where most of the roots of black life lie. Its stories are wonderful. Kelly drew from archives to deliver a strong sense of what black life was like in agricultural Alabama. It’s both a beautiful book and an instructive one. It frustrated Lorraine that figures in the theatre world looked down on ‘the social dramatist.’ She saw that all art is political, whether explicitly so or not. She didn’t subscribe to the idea that there’s something strange about artists engaging in the world that they’re trying to depict or change. The political economy has always been a central aspect of racial domination in this country, so it makes sense that people who are thinking deeply about questions of injustice are drawn to the ideas of the left. That is the political reason for the link. “Lorraine Hansberry saw that all art is political, whether explicitly so or not” There is also an institutional reason. All art depends on patronage. We think of patronage as an individual relationship, but patronage is usually institutional. The Communist Party had a cultural policy to nurture artists. During the New Deal, the WPA (Works Progress Administration) created institutions to employ black artists, writers and dramatists. Both institutions nurtured the blossoming of black artists and intellectuals."