hammer and hoe alabama communists during the great depression

The ACP and the International Labor Defense, a communist-led legal advocacy organization, rallied behind the youth and spread the word throughout the South and eventually made national headlines. It was later revealed that the women were forced by police to testify that the youth had sexually assaulted them or else they would be arrested themselves.Īn all-white jury found them all guilty and eight were sentenced to death. Perhaps most notably, the ACP was instrumental in the handling of organization among rank-and-file communists and other workers in defense of the Scottsboro Nine, a case in which nine Black youth - Haywood Patterson, Clarence Norris, Charlie Weems, Andy and Roy Wright, Olin Montgomery, Ozie Powell, Willie Roberson and Eugene Williams - were arrested and falsely accused of sexually assaulting two white women on a train in 1931. Some of the notable victories of the SCU were the raise of wages per 100 pounds of cotton on some plantations in Alabama to 75 cents in 1934 (roughly $13 a day in 2017), as well as the stopping of evictions of Black and white workers who were tenants of petty-bourgeois, racist landlords. The SCU was developed and maintained by members of the ACP until its dissolution shortly after 1936, though by that point its membership was at 10,000. Despite threats often carried out by racist pigs, by 1934 the Alabama Sharecroppers’ Union was composed entirely of Black laborers and had a membership of 6,000 people, the largest of any Black union in the South. Though initially skeptical of a communist party in the South, the CPUSA, along with other communists all over the United States, eventually had to eat their words.

This alone proves the resilience of these revolutionary Southerners.

But it is important to understand that it took the collective effort of the local and state white supremacist government to bring down the organized party of mainly Black laborers and workers, and that it took over two decades to do. The eventual dissolution of the ACP was brought on by the Red Scare, the Ku Klux Klan and reactionary politicians in Alabama.

Kelley published the phenomenal book “Hammer and Hoe: The Alabama Communist Party 1928-1951,” documenting the 23-year history of the Alabama Communist Party, a chapter of the Communist Party USA.įormed and molded by Black sharecroppers and laborers such as Black revolutionary Hosea Hudson, the ACP went above and beyond fighting for the rights of laborers and workers, Black and white, to the rights to housing, food and equal pay. 14 in The Forge, a socialist newspaper for the South (). Women welders in Mobile, Ala., shipyards during the 1940s.Īn earlier version of this article originally appeared on Dec.

Hammer and hoe alabama communists during the great depression