Overview

A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the long Civil Rights movement, Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and '40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality. The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals. After discussing the book's origins and impact in a new preface written for this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Kelley reflects on what a militantly antiracist, radical movement in the heart of Dixie might teach contemporary social movements confronting rampant inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.

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"Author and historian Robin D. G. Kelley is one of the most distinguished experts on African American studies and a celebrated professor who has lectured at some of America's highest learning institutions. He is currently professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Thelonious Monk: His Story, His Song, His Times and is best known for his books on African American culture: Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class, Yo' Mama's DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America, and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. His career spans several esteemed universities, including serving as a professor of history and Africana at New York University as well as acting as chairman of NYU's History Department. While at NYU, Kelley was one of the youngest full professors in the country at thirty-two years of age. He was also the William B. Ransford Professor of Cultural and Historical Studies at Columbia and helped to shape programs at its Institute for Research in African American Studies. Kelley's work includes seven books as well as over 100 magazine articles, which have been featured in such publications as the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Code Magazine, Utne Reader, and African Studies Review. When he was seven, David Sadzin's first grade teacher gave him a paragraph to read out loud. She interrupted him halfway to proclaim him the ""Ringmaster"" in his class's musical extravaganza about the circus. He's been using his voice to get out of trouble ever since. After a few intense years on New York's stages, performing traditional and experimental theater, improv, and sketch comedy, he's now settled comfortably in front of the mic in his home studio in Brooklyn."

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