Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression

In one sentence: Robin D.G. Kelley's breakout book, about a group of Black communist farmers organizing in Depression-era Alabama — a story nearly erased from memory, and one Kelley pulls straight into conversation with Amazon's Bessemer union fight nearly a century later.

Overview

The book tells a story that looks, on its face, unlikely: walk around Birmingham, Alabama in 1929 and you'd never guess the Communist Party would ever gain a foothold there, let alone that a union movement was possible. Yet that same year, communist organizers arrived at exactly the moment when everything converged — Black workers in the countryside had been waiting for the promises of Reconstruction to be honored, and when Black communist organizers showed up, local people responded almost immediately. The organizers brought more than ideology; they brought a connection to a world movement — illiterate farmers gathered under trees to hear newspapers read aloud, stories of revolutions in Kenya, South Africa, the Soviet Union, and realized they were part of something global. Some wrote letters addressed to Stalin, believing that if plantation owners moved to crush them, Soviet troops would land at Mobile and march north to help. At the same time, Roosevelt's New Deal convinced workers for the first time that the federal government was on their side, and union elections started to be won. That accumulated labor power was answered not with continued victory but with the Cold War — the FBI began targeting anyone even remotely connected to communism, and Alabama's Black communists were branded disloyal and systematically crushed.

Why It's Recommended

This is the narrative source for the episode's Part III, "There Are No Utopias," and Kelley's own breakout book — he uses the 2020 Bessemer warehouse union drive as his entry point, saying directly, "Robin Kelley tells this story in his seminal book, 'Hammer And Hoe,'" pulling a nearly-identical radical labor organizing effort from almost a century earlier into the present to make the point that Bessemer isn't an isolated event. What makes the book worth reading is that it offers more than a forgotten chapter of history — it offers a pattern for how labor movements' fortunes tend to run: the harder and more successfully Alabama's Black communists organized, the harder the backlash landed — first the Cold War, then another wave of suppression in the early 1970s, eventually giving rise to the neoliberal logic that "capital makes jobs, rich people are the ones who are going to save us." Kelley is emphatic that the Cold War, not some supposed decline in modern workers' militancy, was what actually crushed labor insurgency — and this book is the primary evidence for that claim.

Source

Author Robin D.G. Kelley is a professor of history at UCLA; this book is his foundational work on Black communists in Depression-era Alabama, and the story he tells firsthand in the 2022-02-20 episode "There Are No Utopias," hosted by Ramtin Arablouei and Rund Abdelfatah. It supplies the entire narrative backbone for Part III's account of the historical throughline connecting the Bessemer union fight to Alabama's radical labor past.