Alabama Communist Party

ALABAMA COMMUNIST PARTY. In 1921, at the Third International Congress in Moscow, V. Lenin criticized the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) for its failure to recruit African Americans in sufficient numbers. A Negro Commission was subsequently organized, and in1926 Harry Haywood, a young Black American student at the Moscow School who was studying the communist effort to fight racism, was assigned to the Commission. Haywood submitted a resolution, based on the Bolshevik policy of self-determination, to establish a Negro Soviet Socialist Republic in the US Black Belt. He defined African Americans as a subjugated people who were entitled to self-determination –– entitled to choose whether to remain part of the United States or to secede and create an independent Negro republic. In 1928 CPUSA adopted Haywood’s “Black Belt policy.” The CPUSA was, however, primarily an urban-based and largely northern movement committed to labor organizing across racial lines and to integration. Consequently, any program of Black self-determination had to be pursued in the South.

In 1929 the Party established District #17 in Birmingham to carry out the self-determination policy in Alabama’s Black Belt, a large agricultural region stretching from central Alabama through Georgia and Mississippi with a majority African American population. The new policy brought Communist organizers into uncharted territory. The Great Depression had arrived two years earlier, and the area was already overflowing with unemployed, homeless and starving farmers, laborers and sharecroppers seeking work, shelter or financial relief.

District #17’s jurisdiction included Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia, and its Birmingham headquarters was ninety miles north of the Black Belt. The median age of the District staff was twenty-four. Mostly male, well-educated and idealistic, none was a native Southerner, and many were Jewish. Initially they set aside self-determination and established unemployed worker councils, raised funds, organized public demonstrations to support an unemployment insurance bill pending in Congress, led protests against evictions and utility shut downs, and pressured local relief organizations like the Red Cross to increase assistance. Not until 1931, when a delegation of Black Tallapoosa County sharecroppers arrived in Birmingham to request help in organizing an agricultural union would the District staff find a path to testing the Black Belt strategy.

Despite their willingness to request assistance from District #17, Black croppers and tenant farmers opposed the entire plan of seceding or establishing an independent republic. They saw little difference between the Black Belt plan and segregation. Instead, they wanted full participation in American society and their fair share of the nation’s wealth.

On March 25, 1931 the Scottsboro Boys Case broke within the District’s jurisdiction, and within two years, the day-to-day operations of District #17 focused on organizing unemployed workers and black sharecroppers and, in addition, protesting police brutality and systemic racism within the South’s justice and judicial systems. In defending the Scottsboro Boys, the Birmingham headquarters operated like a firehouse in a constant state of emergency. Every crisis demanded immediate attention, and crises often overlapped. The small staff triaged, improvised, and often rushed themselves and others out back doors and into cars to get to safety. They called public meetings, planned and led demonstrations and protests, bailed comrades out of jail, and just kept moving. Within its first six years, District #17 encountered five lynchings, two riots, and two brutal labor strikes within its jurisdiction. White Alabamians treated District #17 as a threat to their political, economic and social stability –– as danger to a way of life based on white privilege.

Black novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston maintained that by and large African Americans did not buy into Communism, yet in Alabama many Black men and women accepted Communists as their allies. The local CP impressed African Americans with a willingness to stand up to white authority and by an unwavering commitment to social justice. By 1934 the Alabama Communist Party’s membership reached 1,000 and was overwhelmingly Black. The Party offered a sense of dignity that the Black middle class, including the NAACP, denied them.

The CP unemployed councils, its handling of the Scottsboro case ,and the Party’s pursuit of racial equality won them allegiance in Black communities. Their actions spoke louder than words. In opposing segregation, the Party not only advocated economic equality but also demonstrated for “equal pay for equal work.” When young Black men like Harry Haywood, Angelo Herndon, Al Murphy, and Hosea Hudson joined the Party they were trained to be organizers and groomed for leadership positions. Herndon later wrote, “we were called comrades without condescension or patronage. We were treated like equals and brothers.” Many Black women worked with the unemployed councils –– organizing, recruiting demonstrating and confronting state and local relief agencies, especially the Red Cross, for their disrespectful treatment of the poor. Many were arrested, beaten, and jailed because of it.

District #17 provided a model of inter-racial coalition building that would influence generations of later social activists in the South including SNCC, CORE, the SCLC and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Like District #17, these movements called out the contradictions between the Bill of Rights and Southern racism. Mid-twentieth century civil rights activists adopted these tools of mass protest, direct action and interracial protest. SNCC developed local leaders, and Alabama’s Black Panther Party, an outgrowth of SNCC, continued the struggle of the Black Belt farmers and sharecroppers for economic justice.

Stanton, Mary. Red Black White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930-1950. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019.

Kelley, Robin D.G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Solomon, Mark. The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.

Ottanelli, Fraser M. The Communist Party of the United States from The Depression to World War II. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991.