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.
The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious, semi-literate black laborers, sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, 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 result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals.
After 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.
- ISBN13 9781469625485
- Publish Date 3 August 2015 (first published 1 January 1980)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 7 July 2021
- Publish Country US
- Imprint The University of North Carolina Press
- Edition 25th Revised edition
- Format Paperback
- Pages 408
- Language English