Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930-1950 by Mary Stanton

Abstract

Reviewed by: Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930-1950 by Mary Stanton Michael K. Law Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930-1950. By Mary Stanton. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019. 248 pp. $29.95. ISBN: 9-780-8203-5617-4. The virtue of the Communist Party in Alabama was its role as instigator of change. The party's minor successes and major failures, especially in the courtroom, do not belie its real impact on the momentum of radical organizing in the region. Rather, it was the pressure and the spotlight that the Communists repeatedly cast upon Alabama's racial and labor mores that helped to force eventual change, regardless of the relative success of its direct actions. Mary Stanton asks readers to bear this ultimate effect in mind in reassessing the Communist Party of the United States of America's (CPUSA) Birmingham Regional District 17. [End Page 84] Stanton highlights a small, but momentous group of actors moving through a short, but vital lifespan. Beginning with the Scottsboro Trial of 1931, and ending with the Levon Corlock case of 1934, she follows seven court cases from their violent beginnings to their most often tragic ends. In each, a Black, male defendant was accused of raping a white woman, with little, or highly disputed evidence. And in each case, the defendants, or their families, opted for representation from the International Labor Defense (ILD)---the legal arm of the CPUSA. The contention, both internal among the lawyers of the ILD and external between the ILD and others like the NAACP, or more moderate progressives, is the main focal point of the work. Stanton bookends the story of these cases with a look at the formation and the demise of the district office. The excellent history of District 17 that Stanton presents is thorough and compelling. Rather than rehash broad overviews of communism in the South, or the more prominent Alabama Sharecroppers Union (ASU) covered in works like Robin D. G. Kelley's Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990), she places this particularly important district office under the microscope. In combing the intricate details of happenings in and around District 17, Stanton gives a more personalized, intimate portrait of its key figures, and of the region itself. The "gory details" treatment the book renders is vital. A top-down view into CPUSA aims, even just in the South, could not do justice to the unique place District 17 held in the party. And consideration as merely another specimen of broader radicalism in the South would, likewise, undercut District 17's distinctive role. The work of the protagonists operating in this party office radiated. Their work and their circumstances were far too unique simply to follow CPUSA marching orders or latch onto wider trends. Stanton does splendid justice to District 17 by largely extricating it from Moscow's influence, which was minor and slight where it appeared at all. More widely known players, like Angelo Herndon and Hosea Hudson, receive ample attention, but District 17 was local in the deepest sense. [End Page 85] Primary to Stanton's argument is her assertion that regardless of the revolving, undisciplined, and occasionally careless choices of the individual characters moving through District 17, it remained in motion at a time when more moderate progressives stood still. Though almost in passing, her mention of Raymond Parks is particularly telling. Parks and his wife Rosa supported the party's defense of the Scottsboro Nine, and they were often more comfortable, even in the 1930s, with the militant leftists from the CPUSA than with the more conservative NAACP, whose inaction they found bitterly disappointing. Ultimately, Stanton indicates, the prospects for each of the defendants were bleak no matter who represented or supported them. Institutionalized southern elite white oppression was much larger than the individual outcomes of the court cases, and the "Reds" were the only ones offering a challenge. Penetrating and engaging as the Stanton's closer-to-the-bone examination is, and as deftly as she avoids redundancy within this scholarly territory, there are some drawbacks. For instance, the work is almost entirely dependent upon the broader...