Southern Worker and the Communist Press in the South

SOUTHERN WORKER AND THE COMMUNIST PRESS IN THE SOUTH. The idea to publish the Southern Worker, the first southern-based Communist tabloid, was proposed in the early part of 1930. Although the Daily Worker ran a few disparate articles on the South, a regionally based weekly was seen as a necessity by the Communists since conditions in the South were fundamentally different from those in the rest of the United States. In the spring of 1930, the Communist Party central committee asked James S. Allen (Sol Auerbach), who was currently editor of the Labor Defender (the journal of the International Labor Defense), to launch a weekly newspaper in the South. Although the paper was datelined Birmingham, it was actually launched in Chattanooga since the repression was seemingly greater in Birmingham.

The first issue of the Southern Worker, selling for two cents a copy, appeared on 16 August 1930. Three thousand copies were printed and distributed throughout Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas. In its first issue, the Southern Worker professed to be “neither a ‘white’ paper, nor a ‘Negro’ paper. It is a paper of and for both the white and Black workers and farmers. It recognizes only one division, the bosses against the workers and the workers against the bosses.” The only way to achieve the demands of the working class, the statement continued, was through proletarian revolution. Surprisingly, the editorial statement made no mention of the Party’s position on self-determination in the “Black belt,” and it contained very little discussion regarding the specific struggles of Afro-Americans.

Notwithstanding the paper’s “credo,” most of its columns were devoted to the problems of Black sharecroppers and workers in the South. During the early 1930s, the Southern Worker published numerous letters from Black sharecroppers describing the dismal conditions on most Alabama plantations and in the coal and ore mines of Jefferson County. Although its official circulation was never great, this did not reflect its actual readership. A single copy was often passed from person to person, and in some cases was read aloud to a group of illiterate and semiliterate working people. Articles dealing with Africa and the Caribbean were particularly appealing to Black southerners.

Allen and his wife, Isabelle, left the South in the fall of 1931. The editorship of the Southern Worker was taken over briefly by Harry Wicks, who also used the name James Allen, but he was soon replaced by Elizabeth Lawson. Lawson, using the name Jim Mallory, maintained publication well into 1932, but it was eventually suspended until 20 May 1933. Between 1933 and November 1936, the Southern Worker was published out of Birmingham, appearing irregularly on the average of once a month.

During the fall of 1936, the Southern Worker was changed to a small-magazine format under the editorship of Rob Hall, the Party’s district organizer in Alabama. Reflecting the Party’s Popular Front policies, the newspaper now carried articles directed toward southern liberals, including a regular column entitled “From the Churches.” In September 1937, delegates at the first open All-Southern Communist Party Conference in Birmingham agreed to abolish the Southern Worker and replace it with “an adequate southern Party organ.” Hence, in November 1937 appeared the first issue of the New South, a monthly newsmagazine carrying sophisticated political tracts dealing with mainstream southern politics, suffrage, southern liberals, and occasional pieces on southern history. Local news items and letters from workers and sharecroppers were discontinued. And after the first two issues, reference to the Communist Party was removed from its masthead and replaced with “Journal of Progressive Opinion.”

In 1939 the New South ceased publication, apparently in response to the Party’s rapid loss of liberal support due to the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Although no official Communist publication replaced the New South, Alabama Communist and leading liberal Joseph Gelders personally established his own left-wing newspaper in Birmingham, which practically served as the Party’s organ. Gelders’s idea came to fruition when left-wing philanthropist Dan Gillmor provided the necessary funds to launch the Birmingham-based tabloid. Its first issue appearing on 25 January 1940, Gelders’s Southern News Almanac was geared toward organized and unorganized labor, poor farmers, and African Americans across class lines. While slightly more sophisticated, it was in many ways reminiscent of the Southern Worker, although it never stated an affiliation with the Communist Party.

Gelders also solicited his own staff—a matrix of Communists and non-Communist labor supporters. The original editorial staff consisted of George Londa, Quentin P. Gore, and Sam Hall—three experienced journalists sympathetic to the southern Left and the labor movement. In addition to covering the activities of the southern labor movement in great detail, the Southern News Almanac devoted substantial space to the peace movement, civil rights issues, and police brutality in the Birmingham area. Unlike the early issues of the Southern Worker, the Almanac contained weekly religious columns directed at a working-class audience from radical ministers such as the Reverend Fred E. Maxey and Don West.

The Southern News Almanac was short-lived, however. It apparently ceased publication in November 1941.

Allen, James S. “Communism in the Deep South: The Opening, 1930–1931; A Political Memoir.” Unpublished manuscript, 1984.

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

Southern Worker, 1930-1937. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/southernworker/