His books include Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists.

The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals.Īfter 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. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. 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. Sensitive to the complexities of gender, race, culture and class without compromising the political narrative, Robin Kelley illustrates one of the most unique. The book, which was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1990, documents the activities of the Alabama Communist Party in the 1930s and the impact of race and other cultural. 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. Kelley ends Hammer and Hoe reflecting on the direction of the movement through the 1950s and the legacy it left the resurgent movement of the 1960s. This collection’s interviews were conducted by Robin Kelley as research for his book Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. 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.

Hammer and hoe robin kelley