All this was in return for two-room shanties and little or no pay.

Large landowners rented out small plots of land along with tools like plows to the legions of Black farm workers. Sharecropping was not much better than slavery. Its mostly rural African American population toiled in a form of agricultural peonage known as sharecropping. Kelley recounts the rise of Southern youth movements that ultimately gave birth to the student sit-ins and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.Īlabama during the 1930s was one of many desolate spots across the country. He sheds light on the unique homegrown resistance that granted Southern Blacks the ability to place their fight in the context of the anti-imperialist struggle for the first time. Kelley emphasizes how communism was able to synthesize with Southern Black culture. It highlights the struggles communists faced in organizing a sharecroppers’ union and building mass campaigns to free people accused of crimes in political frame-ups like the Scottsboro Boys. Kelley, chronicles the development of a communist movement in Alabama during the Great Depression. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals.Īfter 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.“Hammer and Hoe,” a 1990 book written by historian 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 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. 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.

Robin dg kelley hammer and hoe