“Stand Up and Break Your Chains”: A Review Essay of Hammer and Hoe

CanadianReview of American Studies Volume23, Number 2, Winter 1993, pp. 171-181 171 "Stand Up and Break Your Chains": A Review Essay ofHammer and Hoe KathleenClark Robin D. G. Kelley. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the GreatDepression. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990. The way I caught it and the way I can explain it according to my best ideas, this here organization was workin to bring us out of bad places where we stood at that time and been standin since the colored people has remembrance. They didn't say to us how this was gain to happen-we didn't have time to work up a plan; only I felt it, I could feel it was somethin good. It was goin to rise us out of these old slum conditions which that we had been undergoin since slaverytimes, bring a clearer life to live,push the white man back. (Nate Shaw,All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, 319) Nate Shawwas one of hundreds of rural Alabama African Americans who were "straddling the line between tenancy and ownership" as the countryslid further into the Great Depression of the 1930s;like Shaw,these men and women acted on their feeling that the Share Croppers' Union (SCU) was "somethin good." Joining the ranks of the SCU in large numbers, they formed the nucleus of the Communist-led movement that claimed a membership of six thousand by 1934 (Kelley, 34). Founded on 172 Canadian Review of American Studies 6 August 1931, the SCU dedicated its energies to addressing the most immediate needs of its constituency of Afro-American tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and agricultural workers. The union's set of demands, which included guaranteed food advances, the right of sharecroppers to market their own crops, and the abolition of all debts owed by poor farmers, represented the essential requirements of men and women who were struggling to eke out a living under steadily worsening economic conditions (Kelley, 40-49). The SCU, however, constitutes only one chapter in the story told by Robin D. G. Kelley in Hammer and Hoe. Beginning the narrative, Kelley suggests that Communist Party organizers who ventured south at the onset of the Depression faced a formidable challenge: By 1930,black and white working people had very little in the way of organizing power, and in the shadow of a decade of Klan violence and racist backlash within the labor movement, the prospects of interracial unity seemed unrecognizable. As the effects of the depression began to take their toll, workers, particularly blacks, had few weapons against plant shutdowns and massive lay-offs. (10) Indeed, as he surveys the bleak situation of working people in Alabama at the brink of the Great Depression, Kelley turns a famous question on its head: he does not ponder why there was so little communism in Alabama in the 1930s; instead, he queries how the Communist Party ever came to "survive and even thrive" in such a "thoroughly divided and repressive world" (xiii). Kelley's quest to recover the operations of the Communist Party in Alabama takes him from the mills and coal mines of Birmingham to the cotton fields of rural Alabama counties. By charting the course of Communist Party activities from organizers' radical exhortation for AfroAmerican self-determination in the cotton belt to the futile efforts of the United Front to form a white liberal-labour coalition in the state, Kelley addresses a void in U.S. labour history-Southern Communists have for the most part gone unnoticed by historians. Kathleen ClarkI 173 Hammer and Hoe not only addresses this gap in labour history but also provides an example of grassroots organizing by Southern AfroAmericanworkers that predated the mass civil rights movement launched in the 1950s. Historians' efforts to root the civil rights movement in an evolving culture of opposition within Southern Afro-American communities should certainly be enhanced by Kelley's study. Moreover, Kelley's description of the Alabama National Association for the Advancement of ColoredPeople's (NAACP) gradual progress toward tactics of direct action inthe 1930shelps to deepen an appreciation for the "turbulent but workablemarriage " of "legal action and mass protest" in the 1950sand...