Birmingham Communism

BIRMINGHAM COMMUNISM. Center of the 1930s–1940s southern Left, and often referred to as the “Pittsburgh of the South,” the Birmingham-Bessemer industrial complex has had a history of working-class militancy dating back to the late nineteenth century. The Knights of Labor and the United Mine Workers of America initiated a tradition of interracial unionism, but southern racial mores and vicious anti-labor repression made it difficult to sustain. Despite the sentiment against interracial unionism, or anything else perceived to represent working-class radicalism, there was an active Socialist Party in Alabama. In 1908 the Socialists claimed 400 members organized in twenty locals, and two years later William Raoul began editing the Alabama Socialist weekly the People’s Voice. Unlike Louisiana and parts of Texas, where southern Socialists organized Blacks, albeit in separate locals, in Alabama the Socialist Party was exclusively white.

Outside of disparate meetings of Socialists during the 1920s, there was no left-wing movement in the Birmingham area before Communist organizers arrived very late in 1929. The Central Committee of the Communist Party, USA, chose to concentrate much of its southern organizing efforts in Birmingham because of the city’s level of industrial development as well as its proximity to the rural “black belt” counties. It was in these cotton-producing counties that the Party, in its official documents and formal pronouncements after the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern in 1928, demanded the right of self-determination for the Black majority. As early as 1930, Birmingham was designated the headquarters for District 17, encompassing Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee, and Mississippi.

Other than the handful of white Communists from the North and a few native white southerners, the overwhelming majority of pioneering Communists in Birmingham were Black Alabamians. Most of its rank-and-file membership typified Black working-class life and culture in the South. The majority were semiliterate churchgoing Christians who combined the Party’s politics and ideology with Black folk culture.

Between 1930 and 1933, the Party concentrated most of its efforts on organizing the unemployed. Attracting predominantly Black groups of unemployed workers, as well as a significant cadre of whites in the industrial suburb of Tarrant City, Communists led numerous demonstrations during this period, the largest drawing an estimated crowd of five thousand on 7 November 1932. However, most of these events led to arrests and severe beatings inflicted on local Party activists. By 1933, with the passage of New Deal legislation sanctioning the right of workers to organize, Birmingham Communists shifted their focus from the unemployed to the industrial working class.

Although Communists formed “rank-and-file committees” within various industrial unions, particularly in the United Mine Workers of America in Birmingham’s coal mines, they were most influential in the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, in part because Black workers in Jefferson County constituted the vast majority in both the industry and the union. Several Communists, both Black and white, held low- and middle-level positions in the union as open Communists. And with the assistance of the Unemployed Councils, the Party was active in a series of strikes that had erupted in the ore mines in 1934. During the Popular Front and afterward, especially with the election of left-wing labor leader Reid Robinson to the position of international president, Communists constituted the main body of local leadership in the Birmingham area.

Despite an intensification of jailings, beatings, and intimidation during the strike wave of 1934, the Communist Party and the International Labor Defense (ILD) in Birmingham increased their memberships to approximately 1,000 and 3,000, respectively, by May 1934. The changing character of the ILD partly explains its growing popularity in the early 1930s. After brief experiments with chapters of the American Negro Labor Congress and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, the ILD became Birmingham’s “Negro rights” organization. While it was active in local cases prior to the spring of 1931, the celebrated Scottsboro case marked a turning point in the nature of ILD activity, transforming Birmingham’s tiny legal-defense auxiliary into a very localized, mass organization. The Birmingham ILD defended members of the Share Croppers Union involved in violent confrontations with authorities and investigated numerous other local police brutality cases, lynchings, alleged rape cases, and extralegal mob violence directed at the Black community.

While the Popular Front was a reflection of international antifascist sentiment, for local Birmingham Party leaders it was an opportunity to demobilize massive anticommunist repression in the South by gaining the support of southern liberals and labor leaders. Communists and left-leaning activists not only faced police repression but also confronted violent reprisals from the Ku Klux Klan and the White Legion. In 1935 a tentative alliance was formed in opposition to a statewide anti-sedition bill as well as a number of local seditious-literature ordinances. Toward the end of 1934 and in the early part of 1935, Birmingham Communists drew up a “united front agreement” with a handful of southern Socialists, most of whom were affiliated with the Highlander Folk School and were openly supportive of the left-wing Revolutionary Policy Committee within the Socialist Party. Although most state Socialist leaders denounced the agreement, a good portion of rank-and-file Socialists joined the Communist Party soon afterward.

The local “Third Period” leadership, steeped in the militant left-wing and radical African American traditions, was replaced by a more sober, liberal-intellectual leadership during the Popular Front. Robert Fowler Hall (who initially arrived under the name “Bill Moseley”), a graduate of Columbia University and a native southerner, replaced Nat Ross as district organizer. In order to attract liberal and mainstream political attention, Alabama’s new leadership hoped to turn the Communist Party into an open, legal organization. Entire families of Party activists were encouraged to participate in open Communist meetings that included singing and political lectures.

In September 1937 the Party held its first open All-Southern Communist Party Conference. The participation of Earl Browder and James Ford signaled the growing importance of the South to the Communists during the Popular Front. Despite attempts to court white liberals, which included dropping its staunchly militant stance against racism, the Communist Party as an organization failed to establish a serious working relationship with the southern liberal intelligentsia. Instead, individual Communists often kept their affiliation to themselves and worked with liberal southerners behind the scenes.

Undoubtedly, the most influential Alabama Communist among liberal and New Deal circles was Joseph Gelders, a former physics professor from the University of Alabama. As the southern secretary of the National Committee for People’s Rights (an organization that superseded the southern chapter of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners and the ILD in Birmingham), Gelders fought on behalf of police-brutality victims and individuals incarcerated for violating seditious-literature ordinances. Because of his activities in support of jailed Communist Barton Logan (alias Jack Barton), Gelders was kidnapped and severely beaten by vigilantes in 1936. The beating outraged the southern liberal community and, in part, contributed to renewed attempts for a united front between liberals and left-wingers. Gelders went on to help found the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in 1938.

In addition to becoming a support organization for southern liberal activities, Birmingham Communists continued to organize workers in the Works Progress Administration through the Workers Alliance and played pioneering roles in the development of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), particularly in the steel and red ore mining industries. However, since Communist leadership in Birmingham no longer emphasized Party autonomy, several local Party activists—especially Black Communists—chose to devote nearly all of their time to the labor movement or other allied organizations. After 1937, the Party lost a large proportion of its Black Birmingham membership.

When the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed in 1939, its impact was felt only among the tiny circle of liberals the Party was trying to influence. Compounded by an intensification of anticommunist activity spurred on by the Dies Committee, the Communists in Birmingham were becoming more isolated than ever. The Party proper diminished rapidly, its Birmingham membership declining from approximately 400 or 500 paid-up members in 1938 to approximately sixty or seventy active members by 1940. The absorption of Black Communists into the CIO at the expense of Party activity, growing anticommunist sentiment, and the district leadership’s initial willingness to subordinate its militancy, particularly on racial issues, were the central reasons for the Party’s rapid decline during the late 1930s.

Nevertheless, movements that were led by Communists, or in which Communists played an important part, were becoming much more prominent in the overall fight for civil liberties and in the struggle to organize the industrial working class in the South. In addition to the CIO, the Communist-led Southern Negro Youth Congress, the League of Young Southerners, the Jefferson County Committee against Police Brutality, and the Right to Vote Club were attempts at mass-based political organizing in the Birmingham community.

In June 1941, just when the Party was in the midst of rebuilding itself by taking up the issues of suffrage and the extension of citizenship to African Americans, the Soviet Union was drawn into the international conflict. Birmingham Communists therefore turned most of their energies toward supporting the “people’s war against Hitlerism.” Although the suffrage campaign dwindled during the war, the Alabama cadre continued concentrating on the needs of the Black working class and made civil rights a central issue. Nonetheless, the Communist Party was only a shadow of its former self. In line with Browder’s position, in 1944 Rob Hall liquidated the Party and formed the Alabama People’s Educational Association. The association did not attract any considerable number of people, and most active Communists during the war kept a low profile and became untiring organizers for the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. Black Communists who did not enlist remained active in the CIO and the Southern Negro Youth Congress. Indeed, it was the talents of women such as Esther Cooper Jackson, Dorothy Burnham, and Augusta Strong that sustained and strengthened the SNYC during the war.

The period from 1945 to 1950 marked the last vestiges of Communist activity in Birmingham. In the South, where vehement anticommunism and segregationist thought were inseparable, open Communists faced fierce, violent opposition from authorities, vigilantes, and even conservative white labor leaders. Communists were expelled from nearly all CIO unions, and the predominantly Black, Left-led International Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers actually faced direct violence from white organizers in the United Steel Workers of America in Birmingham. Under the leadership of Sam Hall, the Party in Birmingham tried to breathe life into Henry Wallace’s faltering 1948 presidential campaign, and it faced violent reprisals when it attempted to organize several peace demonstrations in the city streets.

Although several individual Communists and left-leaning activists chose to leave Birmingham, many of those who remained continued their activity as silent civil rights activists during the late 1950s and early 1960s. But as the McCarthy era began to take on a clearer form and definition throughout the nation, Birmingham became one of the most untenable places for Communists. When the Alabama Communist Control Act became law in 1951, it was only the beginning of a flurry of antiradical legislation, marking the end of an era.

Carter, Dan T. Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South. 2d ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984.

Kelley, Robin D. G. “Comrades, Praise Gawd for Lenin and Them!: Ideology and Culture among Black Communists in Alabama, 1930–1935.” Science and Society 52 (Spring 1988).

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

Painter, Nell Irvin. The Narrative of Hosea Hudson. His Life as a Negro Communist in the South. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979.

Williams, John [Hosea Hudson?]. “Struggles of the Thirties in the South.” In The Negro in Depression and War: Prelude to Revolution, 1930–1945, edited by Bernard Sternsher. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969.