Red, Black, and White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950

Abstract

Mary Stanton's history of the Communist Party in Alabama is a modest contribution to the large literature on the party in the United States, racial violence, and movements for equality in the South. Inspired by Flannery O'Connor, that consummate southern storyteller, Stanton offers a highly readable narrative of the Black and white radicals who faced enormous danger and violence trying to create an integrated, more equitable society in the South. Predictably, the Scottsboro case, in which nine young African American men were unjustly accused of rape, occupies an important place in the story. While the enormous national significance of the case emerges clearly, however, its international impact is less clear. Most of the book consists of this and half a dozen other case studies of racist violence and interracial radicalism—the Camp Hill and Reeltown massacres, the Kentucky miners’ strikes, unemployed organizer Angelo Herndon's trial, and a series of lynching cases. The emphasis is on the court cases as well as the extralegal racial violence.A number of personalities emerge forcefully—steelworker and union and community organizer Hosea Hudson; the young unemployed organizer Angelo Herndon; Clyde Johnson, a white party organizer and victim of vicious violence; Rob Hall, another native white southerner who returned to the South to run the party's work in District 17; physicist/civil rights activist Joe Gelders; and sharecropper organizers Al Murphy and Mack Coad. A helpful final chapter updates the post-Depression history of these and other characters in the drama.This is a remarkable story. What is amazing here is not that the Communist Party failed in its revolutionary aims but, rather, that these radicals managed to carry on the fight in the face of staggering cruelty against Black radicals and any whites who dared to take up their cause. The human cost was enormous, and one is constantly asking, How did they maintain the faith in the midst of all this? Also, beyond the obvious heightened significance of race, how was the party's history different here than in other parts of the nation?One problem here is that Stanton largely fails to directly engage the relevant literature on this and related subjects. Much of the story has been conveyed in earlier works—Robin Kelley's study of Alabama's Black and white radicals (Hammer and Hoe), Mark Solomon's The Cry Was Unity, and perhaps above all, Glenda Gilmore's Defying Dixie, which argues that the work of communists and other radicals throughout the South laid the foundations for the modern civil rights movement. It is not clear how Stanton's story relates to these interpretations or the large and contested literature on the history of the Communist Party. Her sympathies lie with scholars who argue for the party as a genuine, if beleaguered, social movement, rather than simply an instrument of the Soviet Union's foreign policy. But there is little effort to connect Alabama's story to the broader history of the party.The book's notes are sparse and lean. The author relies on communist autobiographies, oral histories, some personal papers, the local press, and to a lesser extent, the party press (especially the Southern Worker and Labor Defender, but not the Daily Worker). Given the emphasis on court cases, it is not clear why there are no court records cited. The voluminous papers of the Communist Party USA, now available on microfilm and online, were apparently not consulted, even though they contain detailed documents for the party's various districts, including District 17, the focus of Stanton's study.What was the legacy of this radical opposition? Two brief concluding chapters provide something like an afterward on the post-Depression era. In other parts of the country, party members or their children provided some continuity between the Depression years and the social movements of the 1960s. Stanton's narrative suggests little of this sort of continuity in the South. But the party's activism did have an effect. At the least, as Stanton argues, the communists brought attention to some of the worst inequities and oppression, and some of their efforts demonstrated that interracial organizing was indeed possible, if extremely difficult, in the South.Mary Stanton is the author of studies on the civil rights movement, including a biography of Viola Liuzzo, who was murdered in Alabama. Her achievement here is to evoke the historical drama of an interracial radical movement in the heart of the Depression-era South.