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Hammer and Hoe

Alabama Communists During the Great Depression

Robin D G Kelley author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:The University of North Carolina Press

Published:30th Aug '15

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Hammer and Hoe cover

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.

ISBN: 9781469625485

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

408 pages

25th Revised edition