Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950 by Mary Stanton (review)

Mary Stanton has conducted ten years of research to chronicle the twenty-year history of District 17 of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), which was based in Birmingham, Alabama, and tasked with organizing steel workers, miners, and sharecroppers across racial lines in Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia. Much of Stanton's detailed history focuses on the early 1930s—years that are the focus of sixteen of the study's nineteen chapters—when the Communist Party was consumed with championing workers' rights as well as seeking justice for the victims of massacres, lynching, judicial violence, and other forms of racial terrorism. This CPUSA activism was exemplified in the Scottsboro Boys' case of 1931. Stanton was inspired to write this collective biography of District 17's organizers because of the research she first conducted to mark Scottsboro's eightieth anniversary, which led her to the pages of the CPUSA newspaper the Southern Worker. The impassioned commitment to social justice of the Southern Worker's contributors (many of whom were from New York City) reminded Stanton of her Brooklyn high school newspaper colleagues of African American, Jewish, and Latinx backgrounds, who encouraged her to abandon her self-described "proto-conservative" positions to advocate the causes of the progressive Left (p. 3). Although the monograph's endnotes are minimal, Stanton has consulted an array of primary sources that include newspaper articles, oral history interviews, memoirs, and the archival papers of some of her protagonists, such as James S. Allen, Harry Haywood, and Angelo Herndon.

In this narrative history, Stanton rejects the traditional Cold War historiographical interpretation that casts the CPUSA as a puppet of Moscow. Instead, she draws on the critically important work of historians like Robin D. G. Kelley, Mark Solomon, and Michael Kazin to demonstrate that the party operated as a dynamic organization throughout much of the 1930s, since members creatively adapted the party's internationalist demands to the local prerogatives, interests, and needs of the people whom they served. Indeed, Stanton's work reminds readers that many black southerners expressed indifference toward the Comintern's policy of national self-determination for African Americans in the black belt, which included the right to secede from the United States. Black people found appealing, however, southern communist organizers' dedication to the everyday struggle against racial violence, unemployment, hunger, evictions, and exorbitant utility bills, even as they faced fierce resistance from law enforcement officials, Ku Klux Klan members, local politicians, and industrialists who condemned the communists as a major threat to the southern way of life. To be sure, antiblack racism, anti-Semitism, and anticommunism converged in this story and fueled the various security measures that the white southern establishment employed to thwart real change. Stanton, like many of the aforementioned historians on whose work she draws, insists that black southerners were not mere pawns of the Communist Party but rather that they exploited the organization to advance their own interests. She concludes that, even though the CPUSA was of course not without its many faults, it occupies an important yet underappreciated place in U.S. history, not only because of its on-the-ground efforts to ameliorate the hardships of those who bore the brunt of the Great Depression, but also because of its challenges to mainstream organizations to pay greater attention to workers' rights, social justice, and racial equality. Stanton takes this argument further to contend that organizations like the Congress of Racial Equality and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that emerged during and after World War II bear the indelible mark of the CPUSA's political, economic, and social activist legacy.