Ebook: Hammer and hoe Alabama Communists during the Great Depression

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. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals. After discussing the book's origins and impact in a new preface written for this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Kelley reflects on what a militantly antiracist, radical movement in the heart of Dixie might teach contemporary social movements confronting rampant inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.;Preface to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition -- Preface -- Prologue. Radical genesis : Birmingham, 1870-1930 -- part I. The underground, 1929-1935 -- An invisible army : jobs, relief, and the birth of a movement -- In Egyptland : the share croppers' union -- Organize or starve! : communists, labor, and antiradical violence -- In the heart of the trouble : race, sex, and the ILD -- Negroes ain' black -- but red! : black communists and the culture of opposition -- part. II. Up from Bolshevism, 1935-1939 -- The road to legality : the popular front in Birmingham, 1935-1937 -- The CIO'S in Dixie! -- Old slaves, new deal : communists and the WPA -- The popular front in rural Alabama -- The democratic front -- part III. Back to the trenches, 1939-1941 -- The march of southern youth! -- Epilogue. Fade to black : the invisible army in war, revolution, and beyond.