ven as late
as the
1930s,
black
farmers in Alabama
labored under a highly
exploitative system of
that preserved much of the
power relations of slavery.
But with the aid of the
Communist Party, a
militant movement of
sharecroppers emerged to
challenge this system.
Robin D. G. Kelley tells
the story in his classic
book Hammer and Hoe:
Communists in Alabama
During the Great
Depression, now out in a
twenty-fifth anniversary
edition and excerpted
he rural world
Communist
organizers
entered in 1930–31 made
the poverty-stricken
streets of Birmingham
look like a paradise.
Cotton farmers were in the
midst of a crisis at least a
decade old. After World
War I, cotton prices
plummeted, forcing
planters to reduce acreage
despite rising debts, and
the boll weevil destroyed
large stretches of crop.
When the stock market
collapsed and cotton
prices reached an all-time
low, the real victims were
small landholders who
were forced into tenancy
and tenants whose
material wellbeing
deteriorated even further.
It is no coincidence,
therefore, that black
farmers straddling the line
between tenancy and
ownership formed the
nucleus of Alabama’s
Communist-led rural
Within the limited world
of cotton culture existed a
variety of production
relations. Cash tenants,
more often white than
black, usually leased land
for several years at a time,
supplied their own
implements, draft animals,
seed, feed, and fertilizer,
and farmed without
supervision. Share
tenants, on the other hand,
might own some draft
animals and planting
materials, but the
landowner provided any
additional equipment,
shelter, and if necessary,
advances of cash, food, or
other subsistence goods
such as clothing.
Verbal contracts were
made annually and the
landowner generally
marketed the crop, giving
the tenant between three-
fourths and two-thirds of
the price, minus any
advances or previous
debts. The most common
form of tenancy in the
South was sharecropping.
Virtually propertyless
workers paid with a
portion of the crops raised,
sharecroppers had little
choice but to cultivate
cotton — the landowner’s
choice of staple crops. The
landowner supplied the
acreage, houses, draft
animals, planting
materials, and nearly all
subsistence necessities,
including food and cash
advances. These
“furnishings” were then
deducted from the
sharecropper’s portion of
the crop at an incredibly
high interest rate.
The system not only kept
most tenants in debt, but it
perpetuated living
conditions that bordered
on the intolerable.
Landowners furnished
entire families with poorly
constructed one- or two-
room shacks, usually
without running water or
adequate sanitary
facilities. Living day-to-
day on a diet of “fat back,”
beans, molasses, and
cornbread, most Southern
tenants suffered from
nutritional deficiencies —
pellagra and rickets were
particularly common
diseases in the Black Belt.
The gradations of tenancy
must be understood in
relation to both race and
geographic distribution of
cotton production. The
Black Belt, the throne of
King Cotton in Alabama,
with its rich, black,
calcareous clay soil, still
resembled its antebellum
past in that blacks
outnumbered whites four
to one in some counties in
As with other cotton-
growing areas, the plant’s
life cycle and seasonal need
determined the labor and
living patterns of those
who worked the land. In
early spring, after the land
had thawed and dried from
winter, cotton farmers
plowed and fertilized rows
in preparation for
planting, which followed
several weeks later.
When the young plants
began to sprout, the cotton
had to be “chopped” —
grass and weeds were
removed and the stalks
separated so that they did
not grow too close
together. If this was not
done regularly the crop
could be lost. Picking time,
the most intense period of
labor involving all family
members, began around
September 1 and
continued through
October. Once the cotton
had been picked, ginned,
baled, and sold, accounts
were settled between the
tenant and the landowner.
The tenants, who usually
found themselves empty-
handed after settling
accounts, cultivated
gardens to survive the
winter, begged for food
and cash advances, or
spent several days without
anything to eat. And
throughout the entire
year, particularly during
the lean winters, tenants
hauled firewood, cut hay,
repaired their homes,
fences, tools, and watering
holes, cared for their stock,
cleared trees, and removed
stalks from the previous
Women’s lives were
especially hard in the
world of cotton culture.
Rising before dawn and
the rest of the family,
wives and daughters of
tenant farmers prepared
meals over a wood stove or
open fire, fetched water
from distant wells or
springs, washed laundry by
hand in pots of boiling
water, toted firewood,
tended livestock, made
preserves, dyes, clothes,
and medicinal remedies,
ground cornmeal, fathered
eggs, and tried to keep a
house that generally
lacked screens, windows,
indoor plumbing, and
electricity tidy.
Women also worked in the
fields, especially during
picking and chopping
time, and in the midst of
physically exacting labor
they bore and raised
children. Many had little
choice but to take in
laundry or perform
domestic work for meager
wages, thus tripling their
workload. Women
choppers and pickers
generally earned half as
much as their male
To make matters worse,
because husbands and
elder sons occasionally
migrated to nearby cities
or mines to find work,
responsibilities, or avoid
persecution in one form or
another, many women and
children in a variety of
female-headed households
and extended families
were left to organize
production without the
benefit of adult male labor.
It is tempting to
characterize the Black Belt
as a timeless, static, semi-
feudal remnant of the
post-Reconstruction era,
but such an idyllic picture
ignores the history of rural
opposition and does not
take into account
significant structural
changes that have
occurred since the 1890s.
Black and white populists
waged a losing battle
against the expansion of
tenancy, and in the wake of
defeat, many landless
farmers resisted debt
peonage with their feet.
Drowning in a sea of debt,
tenants often broke their
contracts, leaving an
unsuspecting landowner at
a critical moment in the
Given the demography of
the plantation, open
collective rebellion was
virtually impossible.
Shacks were placed near
the edge of the plantation,
and two or three miles
often separated tenant
families from one another.
Therefore, more
individualized forms of
resistance (theft, arson,
sabotage, “foot dragging,”
slander, and occasional
outbreaks of personal
violence) were used
effectively to wrest small
material gains or to
retaliate against unfair
Such tactics were
legitimated by folk
cultures that celebrated
evasive and cunning
activities and, ironically,
by the dominant ideology
of racist paternalism that
constructed an image of
blacks as naturally
ignorant, childlike,
shiftless laborers with a
strong penchant for theft.
Resistance, in some ways,
altered the structure of
production as well as the
planters’ ability to make a
profit. With the onset of
World War I, for example,
large numbers of workers
left the countryside
altogether to take
advantage of employment
opportunities in the
sprawling urban centers of
the North and South.
Areas most affected by the
exodus were forced to
adopt limited forms of
mechanization to make up
for the dwindling labor
force and rising wages.
The movement off the land
was accompanied by
improved roads and the
availability of affordable
automobiles, which
increased rural mobility.
The number of
automobiles owned and
operated by Alabama
farmers increased from
16 to 592 in 1920 and to
73,634 in 1930. Small
holders and tenants who
acquired vehicles were no
longer beholden to the
plantation commissary
and could now purchase
supplies at much lower
prices in the nearby urban
The revolution in
transportation compelled
landowners to furnish
tenants in cash in lieu of
credit lines at plantation
commissaries and county
stores in an attempt to
retain rural labor in the
face of competitive wages
offered in the cities. But
after 1929, cash was a rare
commodity, and
landowners resurrected
the commissary system,
effectively undermining
their tenants’ newly
acquired freedom and
By the time the
Birmingham Communists
established links to the
cotton belt in early 1931,
tenancy seemed on the
verge of collapse.
Advances of food and cash
were cut off, debts were
piling higher, and the city
opportunities to escape
Subterranean forms of
resistance were by no
means abandoned, but
groups of black farmers
now saw the logic in the
Communist Party’s call for
collective action.
The slogan demanding
self-determination in the
Black Belt did not inspire
Birmingham’s nascent
Communist cadre to
initiate a rural-based
radical movement. James
Allen, editor of the party
newspaper the Southern
Worker, argued that only
industrial workers were
capable of leading tenants
and sharecroppers because
the latter lacked the
collective experience of
industrial labor. Aside
from spouting rhetorical
slogans, party organizers
all but ignored the Black
Belt during their first year
in Birmingham.
Then, in January 1931, an
uprising of some five
hundred sharecroppers in
England, AR, compelled
Southern Communists to
take the rural poor more
seriously. Birmingham
party leaders immediately
issued a statement
exhorting Alabama
farmers to follow the
Arkansas example:
Call mass meetings in each
township and on each large
plantation. Set up Relief
Councils at these
meetings. Organize
hunger marches on the
towns to demand food and
clothing from the supply
merchants and bankers
who have sucked you dry
year after year . . . Join
hands with the
unemployed workers of
the towns and with their
organizations which are
fighting the same battle for
bread.
The response was
startling. The Southern
Worker was flooded with
letters from poor black
Alabama farmers. A
sharecropper from
Waverly, Alabama
requested “full
information on the Fight
Against Starvation,” and
pledged to “do like the
Arkansas farmers,” with
the assistance of
Communist organizers.
A Shelby County tenant
made a similar request:
“We farmers in Vincent
wish to know more about
the Communist Party, an
organization that fights for
all farmers. And also to
learn us how to fight for
better conditions.”
Another “farmer
correspondent” had
already begun to make
plans to “get a bunch
together for a meeting,”
adding that poor farmers
in his community were
“mighty close to a
breaking point.”
District leadership
enthusiastically laid plans
for a sharecroppers’ and
farmworkers’ union that
would conceivably unite
poor white farmers of
northern Alabama and
black tenants and
sharecroppers in the Black
Belt. An attempt to bring
black and white farmers
together in a joint
conference, however,
brought few results. The
party’s position on social
equality and equal rights
alienated most poor white
farmers, and within a few
months the party’s white
contacts in Cullman and St
Clair counties had
practically dissipated.
The Croppers’ and Farm
Workers’ Union (CFWU)
was eventually launched in
Tallapoosa County, a
section of the eastern
piedmont whose varied
topography ranges from
the hill county of
Appalachia in the north to
the coastal-like plains and
pine forests of the south.
In 1930, almost 70 percent
of those engaged in
agriculture were either
tenants or wage workers,
the majority of whom were
sharecroppers.
Blacks comprised the bulk
of the county’s tenant and
rural laboring populations,
and resided in the flat,
fertile southeastern and
southwestern sections of
the county. As in the Black
Belt counties further
south, antebellum planter
families in these two areas
retained political and
economic ascendancy,
despite competition from
textile and sawmill
interests. Not surprisingly,
the impetus to build a
union came from local
tenant farmers living
primarily in southeastern
Tallapoosa County.
Soon after the cotton had
been planted and chopped,
several landlords withdrew
all cash and food advances
in a calculated effort to
generate labor for the
newly built Russell Saw
Mill. The mill paid exactly
the same for unskilled
labor as the going rate for
cotton chopping — 50¢
per day for men and 25¢ a
day for women.
By mid-May the Southern
Worker reported
significant union gains in
Tallapoosa County and
announced that black
sawmill workers and
farmers in the vicinity
“have enthusiastically
welcomed Communist
leadership.”
The nascent movement
formulated seven basic
demands, the most crucial
being the continuation of
food advances. The right
of sharecroppers to market
their own crops was also a
critical issue because
landlords usually gave
their tenants the year’s
lowest price for cotton and
held on to the bales until
the price increased, thus
denying the producer the
full benefits of the crop.
Union leaders also
demanded small gardens
for resident wage hands,
cash rather than wages in
kind, a minimum wage of
$1 per day, and a three-
hour midday rest for all
laborers — all of which
were to be applied equally,
irrespective of race, age, or
sex.
By July 1931 the CFWU,
now eight hundred strong,
had won a few isolated
victories in its battle for
the continuation of food
advances. Most Tallapoosa
landlords, however, just
would not tolerate a
surreptitious organization
of black tenant farmers
and agricultural workers.
Camp Hill, Alabama
became the scene of the
union’s first major
confrontation with the
local power structure.
On July 15 Taft Holmes
organized a group of
sharecroppers near Camp
Hill and invited several
union members to address
the group in a vacant house
that doubled as a church.
In all, about eighty black
men and women piled into
the abandoned house to
discuss the CFWU and the
Scottsboro case. After a
black informant notified
Tallapoosa County sheriff
Kyle Young of the
gathering, deputized
vigilantes raided the
meeting place, brutally
beating men and women
alike.
The posse then regrouped
at CFWU leader Tommy
Gray’s home and assaulted
his entire family, including
his wife, who suffered a
fractured skull, in an effort
to obtain information
about the CFWU. Union
organizer Jasper Kennedy
was arrested for possessing
twenty copies of the
Southern Worker, and
Holmes was picked up by
police the following day,
interrogated for several
hours, and upon release
fled to Chattanooga.
Despite the violence,
about 150 sharecroppers
met with Mack Coad — an
illiterate Birmingham
steelworker originally
from Charleston, SC who
had become the party’s
organizer in Tallapoosa —
the following evening in a
vacant house southwest of
Camp Hill. This time
sentries were posted
around the meeting place.
When Sheriff Young
arrived on the scene with
Camp Hill police chief J.
M. Wilson and Deputy A.
J. Thompson, he found
Ralph Gray — Tommy
Gray’s brother and fellow
CFWU organizer —
standing guard about a
quarter-mile from the
meeting. Although
accounts differ as to the
sequence of events, both
Gray and the sheriff traded
harsh words and, in the
heat of the argument,
exchanged buckshot.
Young, who received
gunshot wounds to the
stomach, was rushed to a
hospital in nearby
Alexander City while Gray
lay on the side of the road,
his legs riddled with
bullets.
Fellow union members
carried Gray to his home
where the group, including
Coad, barricaded
themselves inside the
house. The group held off a
posse led by Wilson long
enough to allow most
members to escape, but
the wounded Ralph Gray
opted to remain in his
house until the end.
The posse returned with
reinforcements and found
Gray lying in his bed and
his family huddled in a
corner. According to his
brother, someone in the
group “poked a pistol into
Brother Ralph’s mouth
and shot down his throat.”
The mob burned the home
to the ground and dumped
his body on the steps of the
Dadeville courthouse. The
mangled and lifeless leader
became an example for
other black sharecroppers
as groups of armed whites
took turns shooting and
kicking the bloody corpse
of Ralph Gray.
Over the next few days,
between thirty-four and
fifty-five black men were
arrested near Camp Hill,
nine of whom were under
eighteen years of age.
Most of the defendants
were charged with
conspiracy to murder or
with carrying a concealed
weapon, but five union
members were charged
with assault to murder.
Although police chief
Wilson could not legally
act out his wish to “kill
every member of the
‘Reds’ there and throw
them into the creek,” the
Camp Hill police
department stood idle as
enraged white citizens
waged genocidal attacks
on the black community
that left dozens wounded
or dead and forced entire
families to seek refuge in
the woods. Union
secretary Mack Coad, the
vigilantes’ prime target,
fled all the way to Atlanta.
Behind the violence in
Tallapapoosa County
loomed the Scottsboro
case. But unlike
Scottsboro, the Camp Hill
defendants were members
of the party’s organization;
there was no question as to
who was going to defend
them. After lawyers
associated with the party
secured the release of all
but seven of the
imprisoned sharecroppers,
prominent Alabama
citizens wary of creating
another Scottsboro
episode pressured
authorities to quietly drop
the case.
National Communist
leadership praised the
union’s resistance at Camp
Hill as vindication of the
party’s slogan calling for
the right of self-
determination. The
successful legal defense of
the sharecroppers was
further proof, they
reasoned, of the
effectiveness of mass
pressure outside the
courtroom.
But union organizers
found little romance in the
bloodletting or in the
uprooting of hundreds of
poor black farmers that
followed the Camp Hill
battle. Moreover, rural
conditions in Tallapoosa
County had not improved
at all.
By September, the height
of the cotton-picking
season, landlords again
promised to cut off all food
and cash advances after the
cotton was picked, and
many tenants had to pick
cotton on other
plantations in order to
earn enough to survive the
winter. The going rate at
the time was a meager
30¢ per one
hundred pounds, a tidy
sum considering the
average laborer could only
pick about two
hundred pounds per day.
The repression and the
deteriorating economic
conditions stunted the
union’s growth initially,
but the lessons of Camp
Hill also provided a
stimulus for a new type of
movement, reborn from
the ashes of the old. The
Communist movement in
Alabama resonated with
the cultures and traditions
of black working people,
yet at the same time it
offered something
fundamentally different. It
proposed a new direction,
a new kind of politics that
required the self-activity
of people usually
dismissed as inarticulate.
The sun had not set on the
proud history of
Communists in Alabama
— black sharecroppers
would continue to
struggle.
August Third Collective South NAPLA
Haki Kweli Shakur #TheStruggleizForLand