The Lived Experience of Sharecroppers in Depression-Era Alabama: An Intersection of Marxism and Cultural Nationalism

Christopher Eby Thesis Advisor: Dr. Mark Huddle Date of Submission: May 2, 2011

In his Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Harold Cruse writes of a dichotomy that he considers a persistent stumbling block to the progressive black leaderthe choice between Marxism (Paul Robeson, Richard B. Moore, Richard Wright, the elderly W.E.B. Du Bois, etc.) or cultural nationalism (Marcus Garvey, Baraka, Stokely Carmichael, etc.). Cruse considered the latter position necessary to any meaningful social progress on the part of the African-American; the unique nature of the black Americanher history of corporeal labor exploitation combined with the unique racism of the era and placerequired in Cruses estimation that race consciousness be fostered above all for any meaningful change to happen in the streets, in the home, in the workplace. Although the title of his book would seem to restrict its application to the intelligentsia, Cruse was careful to equate the failings of Paul Robeson with high housing prices in Harlem as well as those of the Communist Party with a setback in African-American political leadership. Implicit in Cruses critique, we can say with some certainty, is the antiMarxist position that the failings of an entire group or race are attributable to its leaders lack of the appropriate ideology, or in the case of American blacks, their (in)ability to recognize the singularity of the African-American Diaspora, to use it as a separating agent, and to put it in the service of politics.1 The black masses, in Cruse, are led successfully by key figures and personalities only when the latter have clearly delineated a position on the matter, and Cruse asserts that Marx and Engels could not possibly have understood the Negros exceptional history in America. Black Marxists, in his estimation, are and have been deluded, much like the prisoners in Platos cave, who see shadows and mistake them for corporeal entities because of their unique situationshackled to essentially opportunistic pro-Negro policies without perceiving their inauthenticity.2 Against the totalizing taxonomy of black consciousness versus class consciousness, of which Cruse is only the most notable adherent, I propose an idea that is at once both radical and eminently observable: 20th-century America has failed to realize both the socialistic goals of the later Martin Luther King, Jr. and the empowering pan-Africanism of Stokely Carmichael not because of an ideological failure at the highest echelons of black leadership but because of the conditions affecting the black worker, conditions that explain the willingness of the black masses
1

See Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: New York Review of Books, 1967), 94, 223-8.
2

Ibid., 263. Dismantling the prospects of a platform of class unity with the hackneyed notion that Marxism was invented by white Europeans and is thus inapplicable to the unique needs of AfricanAmericans, Cruse endorses a peculiar form of American exceptionalism: Marxism as a method of social inquiry is not native to America but to Europeit was transplanted to America by Europeans who never ceased being Europeans. But there has never been a nation that developed like the United States, or a system that developed like capitalism within the United States. See Cruse, Negro Intellectual, 262. It is no wonder, then, that Cruses thought develops away from Marxism: the former does not recognize any sort of universality in the struggle for black economic rightsfor Cruse, class is the lowest common denominator of economic exploitation only in specific countries and under certain political systems.

to support politically and endorse fully the set of ideas most likely to, first, effectuate economic opportunity in the short-term and, second, ameliorate the violence and prejudice of American racism. Put another way, working-class blacks have engaged rigorously with both of Cruses positions but been exclusive to neither.3 If there is a binary lacuna between American blacks, then it exists between intellectuals like Cruse who think that arcane distinctions determine the effectivity of a shared impulsethat of black advancement under the conditions of capitalism, an impulse first expressed by the not-so-radical Booker T. Washingtonand working-class blacks, whose self-preservative malleability and willingness to fluctuate between two diametrically opposed dogmatisms (in order to secure immediately needed ends) precludes any notions of the necessity of ideology.4 If ground is to be surrendered to the dichotomists, then it is only on the terrain of loyalty or fidelity that they can establish any superiority. The fate of any historical analysis is a restricted scope. If history is an attempt to determine a network of causes for an event, then this network will always be diminutive and reductive, infinitely specific, necessitating its own delimitation. With that in mind, I hope not to reduce the accomplishments and actions of the Sharecroppers Union of Alabama to those of each of its individuals but to portray their earliest struggles for survival as evidence of ideologys inessentiality to the effectivity of a collective impulse, particularly if it originates from an intimate setting of oppression. Since ideology necessarily requires fidelity, I argue that it was largely unimportant to Depression-era black sharecroppers, since the exigencies of Southern racism and labor exploitation made fidelitywhether to orthodox Marxism or Garveyism implausible and dangerous. At Camp Hill in 1931 and Reeltown in 1932, black Alabama sharecroppers exemplified, respectively and perhaps paradoxically, racial exclusionism and class solidarity, attempts at bi-racial cooperation as well as unprovoked physical confrontations with whites. And it is through considering this impulsedramatized in these two cases by the hardships of the Great Depression and the unique predations of Southern capitalist elites on sharecroppersthat we can delimit ideologys proper application to proletarian struggle: as fodder for intellectual leisure rather than as the sine qua non of the revolutionary vanguard.
The reader need only consider the effect of Nixons black capitalism campaign on the politically radical African-American or even the ostensible unilaterality of black political affiliation (with todays Democratic Party).
3 4

In fact, I would argue that this fact goes a long way towards explaining the influence of Christianity in the lives of working-class blacks, and the inescapable consequence of this influence for black sharecroppers was a type of folk Marxism in which certain tenets were overlooked as inessential to the virtues of Marxist social action. For more, see Robin D.G. Kelley, Comrades, Praise Gawd for Lenin and Them!; Ideology and Culture among Black Communists in Alabama, 1930-1935, in Science and Society 52, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 59-82. Helpful to understanding this fusion of Marxist social action and Christianity are the words of French philosopher Francois Laruelle, who calls ideology an effective, indescribable dimension of human phenomena, not a medium through which the subject can finally prioritize phenomena for action; it must be taken with the object of science rather than dismissed a priori by a science [in this case, the science of the past]. Francois Laruelle, Philosophie et Nonphilosophie (Paris: University Presses of Paris, 1987), 121. Original translation by Christopher Eby.

I. The Formation, Composition, and Early Activities of the Croppers and Farm Workers Union As 20th-century historian Robin D.G. Kelley has put it, Black Communists were not blank sheets when they entered the movementthey retained significant cultural influences that resonated through the Leninist wrappings, determining the everyday character of grass-roots activity.5 From the start, black sharecroppers who joined the union did not necessarily endorse Communist ideals (specifically, religious ones), even though they operated under the directive of self-determination and adopted the Marxist critique of religions political uses. These two areas reveal the chief obstacles to the Partys attempt to organize a rural union: that of fostering an international consciousness among a pastoral people and that of having to deny the limited agencyspiritualthat Alabama sharecroppers could claim. Although working-class blacks often accepted the Marxist theory of history as class struggle and certainly endorsed the Partys stance on black self-determination in the South, many black sharecroppers (as well as Kremlin functionaries) were unsure of how the assertion that blacks constituted a nation wherever they were found in high concentration in the Black Belt would change their lived experience of violent racism and stifling political and social inequities. In the early stages of the SCU, one sees the undecidable conjugation of the attractions of Marxist theory with those of an anti-Marxist, religious populism. Black sharecroppers deftly appropriated both traditions in order to effectuate the immediately necessary economic gains that trade unionism delivered, while clinging still to the ultimately necessary spiritual goal of a life devoid of all suffering.6 It was no coincidence, in other words, that Alabamas rural communists favored one particular sort of clandestine meeting place over all others: churches. Particularly in the area of religion, the Marxist-Leninist tradition of atheism fused with traditional African-American spirituality to create a group of black sharecroppers who were aware of religions political and oppressive uses yet navigated the inconsistency by claiming that hitherto existing Christianity, ideally suited for plasticity, was not true Christianity. For
5

Kelley, Comrades, 99.

The situation was much the same for many of the Alabama partys small white contingent; the ties connecting them to the Party were frayed, substantial only in terms of social action. Consider, for instance, the case of Fred E. Maxey, a white former labor department negotiator who also happened to be an ardent dispensational premillenialist and pastor of Mount Hebron Baptist Church in Leeds, AL. Maxey maintained his own column in the Southern News Almanac entitled Pulpit in Print in which he claimed Jesus as a radical and tried to fuse Marxism and Christianity. His congregation, it must be remembered, included many tenant farmers, and his crusades against widespread black disenfranchisement techniques (specifically, the poll tax and literacy tests) earned him the repeated ire of the Ku Klux Klan. Ideology, it must be said, proved only a stumbling block to Maxeys social action, for he could never pinpoint which one was responsible for his empathy with and work on behalf of the marginalized. See American Congregations, vol. 2, eds. James P. Wind and James Welborn Lewis, 133, 138-140.
6

example, a poor black farmer wrote an editorial, complaining of a pastor in Birmingham who tells Negro workers to wait for pie in the sky when you die, when they complain of unemployment, starvation, wages, and Jim-Crowism. This faker, no doubt, gets his 30 pieces of silver regularly.7 The irony in this editorial is particularly acidic, since the black farmer was using Christian metaphors to critique socially conservative preachers, equating Judass betrayal of Jesus to their betrayal of the working-class. A folk song entitled The Modern Church ran in the pages of the Communist Partys well-circulated southern newspaper, expressing this same disillusionment with mainstream American religion: The pastor looks us over, And then selects his texts. He reads it in a deep bass voice, And listen what came next. Servants, obey your masters. And do your duty well, And be content with your wages, If you would escape hell. Always pray for your bosses, Even though they may oppress, Submit to their demands meekly, And by and by you shall be blest I left the church in sorrow, I failed to find solace there. Where are the empty stomachs fed, Where, oh brother, oh where?8 In a May editorial, a Birmingham worker channeled a similar spirit, decrying the widespread attitude of Negro preachers, who say we cant bother about the [Scottsboro] 9 but should pray more.9 In the minds of many poor blacks, true religion or Christianity was considered transcendent and forever misappropriated, and this stance invalidated much of the Southern demagogic ammunition (i.e. Pauls dictum for slaves to obey their masters, etc.). In a sense, then, these attitudes effectively redefined black agency around the political compass of ending wage exploitation, something entirely unique and practically divorced from religious considerations. Broadly speaking, the impetus for the formation of the union was recognition of the need for a biracial struggle against wage slavery, made all the worse by the record-low price of cotton during the early 1930s. The union formed, then, to unite poor white farmers of northern Alabama and black tenants and sharecroppers in the black belt. The Partys position on social equality and equal rights alienated most poor white farmers, and from its inception the Sharecroppers Union (initially the Croppers and Farm Workers Union (CFWU)) was exclusively black with no notable exceptions. Apart from the Partys unpalatable stance on racial equality, there was another reason for the thoroughly ebony character of the union: in the black belt regions of Alabama, particularly in Tallapoosa County where Estelle Milner and the Gray brothers founded the union, blacks comprised the bulk of the regions tenant and rural laboring population,
7

Southern Worker, February 21, 1931. Hereafter abbreviated as SW. The full song is printed in SW, April 4, 1931. SW, May 30, 1931.

residing together, in this case, in the southern sectors of Tallapoosa county. At the center of the relationship between the young schoolteacher, who happened to be the daughter of an Alabama sharecropper, and Tommy and Ralph Gray, admitted Communists with a history of exploitation at the hands of white merchants and bankers, stood a newspaperthe Southern Workerand a Communist organizer from Chattanooga, TennesseeMack Coads. Although the CFWU (and later, the SCU) was composed exclusively of black tenant farmers and sharecroppers, the union made attempts to recruit white workers. Despite its de facto status as the union of the poor black farmer, the union never took measured steps to radicalize their members around the platform of racial unity. The Southern Worker, the Chattanooga-based Communist newspaper, is perhaps most responsible for the unions prioritization of economic advancement, rural worker solidarity, and a policy of racial inclusion; the publications editor, James S. Allen, was a Jewish Communist who penned many of the papers cries for proletariat solidarity. The Southern Worker, he wrote in the papers first edition, is neither a white paper nor a Negro paper. It is a paper of and for both the white and black workers and farmers. It recognizes only one division: that of the bosses against the workers.10 In Allens estimation, news about and for the Souths blacks sometimes preponderated in the pages of the Worker, but this was only because of the pervasive economic destitution of blacks. Thus, the Southern Workers widespread audience in the black beltmany illiterate sharecroppers would even have the paper read to themcombined with the economic despair engendered by the Great Depression, made a policy of cultural nationalism irrelevant, for black sharecroppers were keen enough to perceive that the exigencies of providing for a family would never be addressed if white businessmen and landowners thought of the union first as a group of black separatists. Unfortunately, the allure of the dollar proved sufficient motivation for white elites to blacklist CFWU members and to recruit police mercenaries in the interest both of suppressing strikes and declaring illegal any private meeting or assembly of blacks, for the dearth of white members in the union made expedient and efficient this profiling. After contacting the Party, then, Milner and the Grays waited for the promised organizer to help them build a union, secretly distributing the Southern Worker to anyone interested in organizing and fighting for higher day wages paid in cash, for more food advances to the croppers, for payment in cash for work done by the cropper on the landowners fields, for seed and fertilizer furnished by the landlord to plant food crops for the croppers families.11 Inspired in large part by the uprising of farmers in England, Arkansas, in which five hundred farmers demonstrated against low returns and high prices, the small Tallapoosa contingent became more interested in soliciting an organizer at the same time that the Communist Party was placing more
10

SW, August 16, 1930.

11

SW, June 27, 1931; the most explicit involvement of the Southern Worker in forming and sustaining the CFWU.

stock in the ability of sharecroppers to unionize.12 Events initially followed the England demonstrations blueprint when an inexperienced organizer arrived in the spring of 1931 in the form of Mack Coads, an illiterate black steel worker from Birmingham who had unsuccessfully run for municipal judge in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on the Communist ticket. In many ways, Coads was an atypical choice for organizing the union; the Partys industrial organizers were nearly all white, in positions of authority to teach Marxist doctrine, organize grassroots mobilization, and determine fixed objectives for a nascent union. The fact that the CFWUs composition was black from rank-and-file to secretary, combined with its growing membership (about eight hundred members in July of 1931), made the presence of the union seem far more menacing to local whites than it had when Coads was initially meeting with only a handful of sharecroppers in private residences.13 Arriving in Tallapoosa County in April 1931, Coads established himself as secretary of the CFWU with the chief short-term goal of extending food advances for sharecroppers. To avoid anti-union attention, Coads generally referred to the organization as the Society for the Advancement of Colored People, and he avoided substantiating the whispers of a black republic, rumors given credence by the Cominterns stance that blacks constituted a nation in several portions of the black belt. By the early summer of 1931, however, the unions victories had been limited, yet the enthusiasm to set us up a workers government like Soviet Russia and to make the bourgeoisiedance the Gigolo was growing in tandem with the CFWUs membership.14 So palpable and worrisome was this rising tide to local whites that July witnessed the unions first violent confrontation with the white power structure, and it was fought on the grounds of a race consciousness that could well be termed a Black Nationalist impulse. Yet this impulse, as will become clear, was defined for black sharecroppers and not adopted as a structural or constitutive ideology; in other words, it was white consciousness that made necessary, expedient, and reactionary the racial solidarity exhibited on the part of the Tallapoosa contingent. It is important to note that the hardships of starvation and joblessness were felt beyond the sharecroppers farm (which, of course, explains the Partys attempts at factory unionization), and yet the sharecroppers plight was still among the worst in the nation. To give the destitute black farmers their due agency, it can be said that Alabama sharecroppers were willing to forego
12

Initially, the Party considered rural workers unsuited to unionization. The isolation of rural farmers seemed to inculcate an individualism that had to be subordinated to collective bargaining for any union to flourish in the area. The collective toiling in Birminghams mines and steel mills made urban workers a prime target for unionization efforts. See Hosea Hudson, Black Worker in the Deep South: A Personal Record (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 36-47; Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 38.
13

SW, July 25, 1931.

14

SW, May 30, 1931, from a self-identified black communist living in rural Alabama; SW, July 4, 1931, from a farmer living in Thorsby, AL.

any racial radicalization of the union in the hopes that a racially-inclusive platform would make their economic demands and strike initiatives more palatable to the white power structure. Ultimately, black Alabamians were forced to confront just how sanguine this hope was; for 20thcentury poor Alabama whites as for their black counterparts, ideologyin this case, the unions professed belief in racial unity and its demonstrated attempts to recruit white memberswas not sufficient for acceptance or legitimacy. The oftentimes eloquent calls for working-class unity across racial lines seemed to Alabama whites in particular, and Southern whites in general, somehow fraudulent, especially since the historical and economic reasons behind the all-black union, not to mention the social retaliation that poor whites knew they would suffer if they became race traitors by joining, never became an object of logical consideration. Although it is certainly not my intention to downplay black agency in the slightest, it must be understood that agency is a relative, not absolute, term. Its possibility and conditions are necessarily structured with respect to the dominant, and any violently oppressed minority group that does not own the means of production will initially, of course, have only a limited ability to constitute itself. Until 1931, the union struck a delicate balance between de facto black working-class solidarity and both an express white influence via the Communist Party and a professed desire for racial unity. The events of Scottsboro would change this balance entirely and throw the CFWU and its members much further towards the black nationalism end of Cruses binary continuum. II. Camp Hill and the Drawing of Racial Lines: Getting Even for Scottsboro15 The Scottsboro verdict, The Scottsboro verdict, The Scottsboro verdict, Is not good enuf for me. Its good for big, fat bosses, For workers double-crossers For low-down slaves and hosses. But it aint good enuf for me 16 From the earliest days of the union, Alabama sharecroppers had formulated and expressed two explicit goals: to improve the standard of living for tenant farmers and sharecroppers, chiefly by opposing wage cuts and supporting the continuation of food advances,
15

The words of William Porter, secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, to a Mr. Andrews, July 17, 1931, Box G-6, NAACP Papers. See Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 42.
16

Originally printed as The Scottsboro Song, SW, July 18, 1931.

and to protest against the legal treatment of the Scottsboro boys, which was initially accomplished by sending resolutions of protest against the Scottsboro legal lynching to Governor Miller.17 This latter goal, however, was initially secondary to the unions economic activities, becoming a key issue for sharecroppers only once the stark miscarriage of justice became clear in early May, 1931; as noted earlier, demands for a rural farmers union had begun pouring into Birmingham in January of that year. The unions two disparate raisons dtre immediately suggest that Alabama sharecroppers were capable, first, of supporting economic relief for all poor rural workers, as well as advocating the merits of trade unionism as a check on powerful employers,18 and, second, of unifying around a collective experience (unique, as Cruse would say, to the United States) of legal injustice and race prejudice to help liberate the Scottsboro boys. The position of their two respective motivations in relation to the other changed drastically when local whites decided that the shameful specter of Scottsboro was attracting too many black farmers to the union. The added benefit to white elites and landowners of a violent clampdown on the uniona profitable dearth of oversight on tenancy practicesdetermined the role local police played in attempting to suppress the union and, ultimately, in the Camp Hill shootout. Chief of Police J.M. Wilson and Sheriff Kyle Young, a man with a reputation for handling Negro prisoners in a rough manner when making arrests, had seized CP literature from the houses of members throughout July, and these attempts to stifle the union culminated in a concerted effort on the part of the Sheriff and his deputies to break up a July 15 meeting at a country church located about 6 miles from Camp Hill.19 From seventy to eighty black men and women had come to the regular meeting to listen to Mack Coads and union organizer Taft Holmes discuss the CFWU and its plan to support the Scottsboro boys. After arresting union member Jasper Kennedy for possessing a score of Southern Workers, the posse decided to pump Tommy Grays family for information. Assault and interrogation of Grays wife, who suffered a fractured skull from the abuse, yielded only confirmation that the CFWUs sole non-economic platform was the release of the Scottsboro Nine. The crime that justified the assault and beatings,
17

SW, May 16, 1931.

18

Blacks comprised a sizable minority (about 33% of 31,000) in Tallapoosa County, but the region was almost exclusively bucolic. See Charles S. Johnson, Statistical Atlas of Southern Counties: Listing and Analysis of Socio-Economic Indices of 1104 Southern Counties (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1941), 53. White tenant and yeoman farmers abounded, therefore, and it was not an artificial universalism but a fairly stable terrain of race relations (there had not been a lynching in the county during the twentieth century) that led black farmers to attempt to include whites in their ranks and to advocate for rural wage controls and food advances for all farmers. Camp Hill, however, was the most predominantly black region of the county. James D. Burton, The Racial Disturbance in Tallapoosa County, Alabama, mimeo, 1931, p. 2, in Scottsboro Legal File, Commission for Interracial Cooperation Papers.
19

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according to Camp Hill police chief J.M. Wilson, was the possession of literature that demanded social equality with the white race, $2 a day for work, and the admonition to demand what you want, and if you dont get it, take it.20 Despite the violence visited upon union members the previous day, Coads decided on July 16 to hold another meeting in a vacant house southwest of Camp Hill for the express purpose of discussing and drafting resolutions condemning the miscarriage of justice in the Scottsboro trial. He decided to post sentries around the meeting place in case the Camp Hill Police or the Tallapoosa County Sheriffs Office decided to raid the meeting again. And try they did, acting first to discover the location of Coadss scheduled meeting after being tipped off by a black minister that he was indeed planning another of his radical meetings. The traditional defenders of Southern womanhood beat Estelle Milner senseless to try to find the location and purpose of the meeting, the former of which she disclosed, before collapsing with a fractured vertebra, as Mary Church in southwest Camp Hill.21 About a quarter-mile from the vacant house which doubled as a church, Sheriff Young, Chief Wilson, and his two deputies spotted a figure bent over, with a large bundle under one arm and a shotgun slung over the other. The sheriff pulled the car over to demand revelation of the bundles contents: none of your damn business, came the reply from Ralph Gray.22 When Young reached down to pull out his gun and demanded that Gray put his hands in the air, Gray unloaded both barrels of his shotgun, spraying birdshot into the sheriffs side and Deputy A.J. Thompsons arm. Young fell back into the car as Wilson and his deputies immediately opened fire on Gray, who fell to the ground before he could reload. Leaving the bullet-riddled Gray on the side of the road, Chief of Police Wilson rushed the birdshot-riddled Young back to Camp Hill, screaming to any and all who would listen that niggers shot the Sheriff all to pieces in a gunfight so loud and intense that it sounded like No Mans Land of more than a decade ago.23 As a local doctor escorted Young to a nearby hospital for treatment, Ralph Grays fellow union members carried him to his home, where they along with Coads and Grays family barricaded themselves inside the house, expecting retaliation from Youngs agents. In the end, it was a call placed into town for a doctor that gave the small group of union members away, and Chief Wilson was duly informed that the perpetrators of the
20

Kelley, 41; Birmingham Age-Herald, July 18, 1931; New York Times, July 17, 1931.

21

Milner had disclosed the location of the meeting but withheld its orders of business, knowing as she did that the specter of a protest against the Alabama justice system would only incite the armed posse to more violence. The same tipster that informed Sheriff Kyle Young of the gathering, one Rev. E.W. Ellis, accused Milner of hiding ammunition. See Liberator, October 17, 1931.
22

See Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press: 1979), 124; Birmingham Age-Herald, July 18-20, 1931; Birmingham News, July 19, 1931.
23

Beecher, The Sharecroppers Union, 125; Birmingham Age-Herald, July 20, 1931.

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violence were gathered at Grays house and that Gray himself was yet alive. Wilson then sent two ex-officersJ.M. Gantt and A.E. Alfordto finish the job he had started, but, when they approached Grays house, these two mercenaries were greeted by gunfire from the negroes in the shackand several other negroesin the woods nearby.24 Reinforcements arrived in the form of a fifty-man posse led by Chief Wilson, and officers retired and active fired over five hundred rounds into the two-room shack. The remaining contingent of union members fired back, holding them off long enough for everyone but Grays family to escape. When Wilsons posse finally entered Grays home, they found Gray lying in his bed and his family huddled in a corner, only two of whom, surprisingly, were injured. Although Birminghams newspapers all reported a variation of what the Age-Herald and News didnamely, that Gray received wounds [in the gun battle] that finished him or that he died en route to jailGrays family witnessed and reported to historian Robin D.G. Kelley a different denouement, which only the Southern Worker corroborated. Someone in the posse, Tommy Gray stated, poked a pistol into Brother Ralphs mouth and shot down his throat. It is unclear whether Gray was already dead before this happened, but the posse was not yet satisfied that revenge had been served. They burned Grays home to the ground and dumped his body on the steps of the Dadeville courthouse.25 The days immediately following the gun battle at Ralph Grays house witnessed largescale white paranoia throughout Tallapoosa County, an impulse that consumed local law enforcement as well as private families determined to protect themselves from advancing Negro Reds, who were thought to be assisting Tallapoosa sharecroppers in their bloody revenge campaign upon white landlords and, predictably, their wives and daughters.26 Within two hours of Grays death late Thursday night, most white men within twenty miles of Camp Hill had armed themselves with pistols, sawed-off shotguns, and rifles; about five hundred of these men spent the early hours of Friday morning patrolling the highways, seeking to round up, injure, or kill any possible culprit. Most of Fridays daylight hours were consumed by the search for the unknown Communist organizer behind the union (Mack Coads), who had fled all the way to Atlanta in the short hours since he escaped Grays shack; most black CFWU members who were in less demand hid out in forests or basements until Saturday evening, when the white posse had sufficiently revenged itself. Undermining the Partys initial claims that working-class starvation
24

Birmingham Post, July 21, 1931.

25

Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 41. According to Sheriff Kyle Young, who was in a hospital at the time of the shootout at Grays shack, Ralph Gray was alive when they entered his house, taken to jail, and died en route. See Dadeville Spotcash, July 23, 1931. The pages of the Southern Worker, however, charged Wilsons band of deputies with murdering Gray in cold blood while he was lying defenseless in bed. See Southern Worker, July 25, 1931. Mack Coadss reported to the Workers editor, James S. Allen, a similar story, stating that he was killed while lying defenseless in bed. See James S. Allen, Organizing in the Depression South: A Communists Memoir (Minneapolis, MN: MEP Publications, 2001), 72.
26

Birmingham Age-Herald, July 18, 1931.

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lay at the crux of the Camp Hill disturbance and that the Croppers Unionalso has white croppers in its membership, these palpable fears of a race war revealed that the actual tinder for the Camp Hill explosion was the racially divisive Scottsboro case that the Partys legal arm, the International Labor Defense, was spearheading. By Saturday evening, the I.L.D. had dozens more black clients to defend; 34 union members had been thrown into the jail at Dadeville, the Tallapoosa County seatfive for the alleged crime of assault with intent to commit murder, seven for carrying concealed weapons, and the rest with conspiring to commit a felony, despite the fact that only the deceased Gray had used violence in a pre-emptory manner.27 Sporting headlines such as, Further Red Violence Feared, local newspapers only threw fuel on the fire; the Birmingham News printed a picture of the vacant meeting-house accompanied by a specious caption that conjured up images of any vacant cabin or shack across the Alabama countryside: this cabin, situated in a lonely, isolated clearing in the woodswas where the Communist leaders met while a patrol of several hundred armed negroes guarded the approaches.28 To the press and most liberals, a small group of Communist organizers were responsible for the bloodshed, and the simple Negroes had merely been duped by foreign agents seeking to overthrow late capitalism. They accused white Communists of deluding the sharecroppers and pointed as evidence to the headings of the seized minutes and notes of the group, which had been labeled, The Society for the Advancement of Colored People, a cover name most likely chosen for its overtones of gradual, docile change. According to the New York Times, whites illegally and viciously sought to leave impression [sic] they represented the NAACP, employing the dishonest trick of using the name to mislead authorities and colored people.29
27

See Southern Worker, August 1, 1931. The other 4 that were arrested (of the total 38) in and around Camp Hill were sent to cut stovewood, in the words of Chief Wilson, a task from which they never returned. As the Southern Worker put it, When asked when they would return [from cutting stovewood], [Wilson] answered, They have lots to cut. The saying, cutting stovewood, is an American Fascist password which means the same as being taken for a ride. It seems probably that these Negroes have been beaten or lynched. Howard Kester of the Fellowship of Reconciliation took a 10-day trip to Tallapoosa County in August 1931 and reported that several other black union members besides these unfortunate souls had died from wounds inflicted during the gun battle at Grays shack. See Howard A. Kester to Walter White, August 15, 1931, Scottsboro Legal File 2, NAACP Papers.
28

Ibid., July 17, 1931; Ibid., July 20, 1931; Birmingham News, July 17, 1931. The Dadeville Spotcash, however, took a different approach. Charging the Birmingham newspapers with misrepresenting the facts, the local publication denied the reports that nearly 600 Tallapoosa whites were armed and deputized to find Coads and any other guilty blacks. Asserting that no more than 20 men had been deputized and only a few more armed, the Spotcash struck a reconciliatory and, it must be said, sanguine note, praising the coolness of the local population: Both races did their part nobly and patrioticallyThe colored citizenship of this part of the countyleft it to the law to take its course. See Dadeville Spotcash, July 23, 1931.
29

New York Times, July 18, 1931

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Attempts to show malicious intentions on the part of the Communists appeared perhaps predictably in the NAACPs reports of the uprising at Camp Hill; in a report to the New York Times, William Pickens, a field representative for the NAACP, deplored the union members misfortune of being share-croppers along with the further ill-luck of having communist politicians to come [sic] in and mix politics and the Scottsboro case with their simple desire to escape from the condition of being share-croppers.30 The factual inaccuracy of his statement, combined with the presumption that members of his own race could only be galvanized by racial injustice, make Pickenss statement representative of the mainstream liberal attitude after Camp Hill. Pickens was all too willing to blame the specter of Communism for the sharecroppers action, even though he was in actuality laying the blame squarely on one black man: Mack Coads, the only Party member and Communist organizer working closely with the union at the time, whose name and face neither the newspapers nor Chief Youngs armed posses could ascertain. In other words, the specter of Communism truly was incorporeal. And counter to Pickens claim, as we have already discussed, was the reality that the Communist editorialists and leaders did not stress the importance of Scottsboro as the unions motivation, preferring to nominate starvation and destitution; they were concerned with eradicating the liberal notion that mass action had to be predominantly race-based or saturated with visibly natural identity. For Pickens, bringing the substantial continuities between the injustices done to the boys in Kilby Prison to bear upon those suffered by Alabama sharecroppers would not bring justice for either group of oppressed blacks; Communists inherently had their eagle eye on world revolution, and therefore could not see a mere detail like this. However, in the collective estimation of the sharecroppers and their one initial Communist presence, justice could not be won piecemeal.31 As minorities oppressed politically and socially on the basis of race and economically on the grounds of class, poor Alabama blacks were hemmed into the box of a respondent. This is not to deny the creative agency of such minorities but to express that such agency does not occur on terrain favorable to the oppressed but on terrain defined by the oppressors. Despite the active heroism of Ralph Gray and the actions of his fellow union members at Camp Hill, it is crucial to understand that the color of their resistance was defined by the nature of what they were resisting: violent retaliation for the racially-charged Scottsboro case. In this sense, then, the
Ibid.; it is interesting to see how Pickenss pride colored his interpretation of the CFWU and his grudge against Communists. A month before the uprising, on June 7, Pickens gave a speech in Chattanooga at a NAACP meeting, the purpose of which was to win control of the Scottsboro legal defense from the Communist-controlled ILD, when Joe Burton, a young black Communist, interrupted his speech to call him and Walter White traitors to the Negro masses, men who were preoccupied with using the NAACPs money to crush the ILD, the only organization with the personnel and wherewithal to free the wrongfully convicted boys. The Chattanooga Times-Free Press gave Pickenss speech flashy headlines: Negro Speaker Warns Against Red Campaign; Dr. Pickens Cites Activities in the Scottsboro Case.. See Chattanooga Times-Free Press, June 8, 1931; Carter, Scottsboro, 94-6.
30 31

New York Times, July 18, 1931.

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protective impulse of Gray and his fellows, the racial and ostensibly nationalistic terrain on which they took their stand, was not the creative expression of a tenable, international platform of self-determination or, dare I say it, Black Nationalism, but a protective action (akin to those taken by Robert F. Williams in Monroe, North Carolina32) in response to a unified racialization from which the SCU was twice removed (Scottsboro, then the initiative action of armed whites against the small all-black union meeting). Although we can say that white fury over Scottsboro determined the race consciousness of the union members and thus the terrain of their agency, the actions of Ralph Gray and the CFWUs ability to reconstitute itself in the aftermath of the violence are brave and remarkable acts of determination in themselves. They were not enough, however, to save the union from further tragedy, which is perhaps the fate of any event or movement whose existence is contingent upon evading the regional displeasure of the oppressor. It should not surprise us that this event evinces a strong nationalist character, not just the militancy of taking ones own safety on oneself, but the binarized struggle of white versus black is always much more dominant in Black Nationalist traditions (Black Power, NOI, etc.). It is also no surprise that later black radical traditions and the CFWUs early struggles share a common oversight and misunderstandingthat of the place of women in a revolutionary movement and that of their capacity for leadership. The masculine-centered vision of militant resistance distorted the true, indispensable roles women played in both eras, and in particular it was the organizing and correspondence skills of women that grounded much of the CFWUs activity. In both traditions, then, a perpetual need for self-defense seems to have skewed the scale of trait valuation towards masculine ones, so that when a homogenous group of whites committed a violent and threatening act against a homogenous group of blacks, the default position left open time and time again was that purportedly masculine one of militant racial identification and subsequent violent action (or nationalism, to use Cruses word; or self-determination, to use the ambivalent phrasing of the CP). Perhaps, then, we should not be surprised that challenges to pride and immediate threats against life arouse exclusive, protective, nationalistic instincts, whereas challenges to principle and indirect threats against life (that is, those of economy, or against property and goods) evoke inclusive and preventative, yet no less sacrificial, instincts. The defensive nature of the resistance at Camp Hill only affirms this; Gray opened fire first but only after the violence of the previous day and only after seeing a carful of armed white men approach the largely defenseless meeting attendees. To summarize, the Scottsboro case along with the mortal wounding of Ralph Gray clearly and temporarily subordinated whatever class identity the union members felt to their collective identification with other members of the black side in the binarized struggle forced upon them.

See Timothy Tyson, Robert F. Williams, Black Power, and the Roots of the Black Freedom Struggle, in the Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (September 1998): 540-70.
32

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III. The Uprising at Reeltown: To stand up for all poor colored farmersand poor white farmers if theyd join.33 The baccer aint a sellin, The corn is dryin up, There aint a bit of tellin, Where the army o worms will sup. The weevil eats the cotton, The beetle eats the beans. Do you think its any wonder Theres nothing in my jeans?34 Far from extinguishing the unions Communist flame or suppressing its indigenous black leadership, the Camp Hill incident merely stunted its initial growth and rendered it more independent of Communist control. The first order of business for the union to address was reconstituting itself, for the CFWUs name and reputation had been stigmatized, listed as it now was on Sheriff Youngs register of radical, subversive organizations. On August 6, 1931just three weeks after the shootout at Grays house and, significantly, several days before the I.L.D. secured the release of twenty-two of the jailed sharecroppersthe remaining CFWU members (numbering around fifty-five) held their first meeting as the Alabama Sharecroppers Union (SCU) and transformed five of the old CFWU chapters into the first SCU locals.35 From this time until the spring of 1932, the SCU had only one direct link to the Communist Party: a young New England organizer who served as liaison, carrying information from the SCU locals to the district leaders in Birmingham. Even though we have not sent an organizer down there, the young liaison wrote, the union locals are carrying on the work on their own initiative.36 Such industry
Theodore Rosengarten, All Gods Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 309. Steeling himself to stand up for his destitute friend and neighbor, Ned Cobb resolved to do something about the rampant economic exploitation of small farmers, and his motivations, as we see here, are entirely proletarian, removed from racial exclusion or identity. The SCU, in Neds mind, was designed for this specific purposeto fight the abuses of landlords and banks. Or, in Neds words: a organization is a organization and if I dont mean nothing by joinin I ought to keep my ass out of it. Lived experience and demonstrated commitment (via membership in the SCU) was sufficient for Neds act of resistance.
33 34

Song printed as The Autumn Blues, in SW, September 20, 1930.

Clyde Johnson [Albert Jackson] to J.R. Butler, July 4, 1935, within In Memory of Ralph Gray, Southern Tenant Farmers Union papers, reel 1, University of Texas at Arlington Library. For the I.L.D.s role in the release of the twenty-two union members on grounds of insufficient evidence, see Southern Worker, August 15,1931.
35 36

See Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 43.

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was the result, first, of successful local leadership on the part of Eula Gray (Tommy Grays daughter and a Young Communist League member), who eventually assumed the role of liaison and served as ad hoc secretary of the union until May 1932, and, second, of new SCU secretary Al Murphy, who recognized the need to expand into the heart of the black belt and to take the union underground.37 The lessons Murphy gleaned from Camp Hill were myriad. SCU members were instructed not to walk or converse in large groups and not to face the lights of cars...or use flashlights. Meetings were never to be held in vacant houses. The strange interplay between folk religion and Marxism persisted in the SCU, even after the Camp Hill shootout ruled out the possibility of using these part-time churches as meetinghouses; under Murphys instruction, union locals often held Bible study meetings as a cover to discuss union business and plan wage strikes. Destitute black sharecroppers, it seems, could manipulate Southern societys religious preoccupations to mask their collective subversion with docile appearances, while still indulging themselves in the opiate of the masses. To avoid any repeat of the Camp Hill SAACP fiasco, minutes were rarely kept at meetings, and written records in general were rare. Although the pages of the Southern Worker encouraged union members to demand that land be secured to the Negro and white workers and small farmers who work it, Murphy was careful to instruct union members against this kind of abrasive and dangerous action. He did uphold the Partys directive on the use of violence against law enforcement or white mobs, agreeing with a letter sent from the Party headquarters in Birmingham to a Tallapoosa local: Never take action with arms before notifying us first, unless it is impossible to get out of a trap without fire. If ever the meetings are run in on by a sheriff or other officers, dont attempt to hold the meeting next day or night, or that week. Yet Murphys horizontal leadership strategy fostered the presence of guns of all kindsshotguns, rifles, and pistols at SCU meetings, which shared more in common with radical nationalist meetings than trade union initiatives. And yet the Reeltown shootout, as we will see, proceeded strictly from class identification, collapsing the false dichotomy that reserves militant black action solely for radical nationalists and not for the Marxist, pseudo-integrationist sheep in wolves clothing.38 In the meantime, the Communist Party was busy instilling a particular idea within the working-class (and particularly black) populations of the South; namely, that no worker was safe
37

Eula Gray bequeathed to Murphy a union that had swelled in ranks to 658 members in almost thirty Tallapoosa County locals and nine Lee County locals. Even in counties where the SCU was unincorporated, in Chambers and Macon counties, for instance, Murphy could count thirty members apiece. See James S. Allen, Communism in the Deep South, 106-7; Daily Worker, December 31, 1932.
38

SW, February 21, 1931; Dadeville Herald, December 12, 1932; Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Liberator Press, Chicago, IL: 1978), 400-02; Cruse, Negro Intellectual, 169.

17

from, to put it plainly, the increasingly visible encroachments of the capitalist elite upon the proletariats means of basic subsistence. By appealing to the immediate self-interest of struggling rural and urban laborers, the Party practiced a fear campaign of sorts, albeit the feared outcomestarvation and/or destitutionwas a fairly likely eventuality. In every Southern city, wrote the Southern Worker, [bosses] are cutting down their relief for the unemployed, pretending that there are plenty of jobs to be had. In the pages of the Southern Worker as well as those of the New York-based Daily Worker, warnings of beware the capitalists abounded, and the Partys rent strikes in northeastern citiesparticularly in New Yorkonly gained momentum when Party activists took up the cry that the next eviction, the next unemployed worker could be you. Even in the midst of the Camp Hill violence, the CP dutifully asserted that the clash occurred at a union meeting that was primarily a protest against starvation wages and only secondarily an attempt to draft a Scottsboro resolution to send to Governor Miller, whereas the priorities at the July 1931 meeting were truly and precisely the reverse.39 In contrast to the other regional publications, which in the events aftermath tended to exacerbate fears of racial violence, the Worker chose to attribute the entire event to anti-hunger protests. We can deduce, therefore, that contrary to prima facie appearances, radical action based on racial grounds demands that the individual subordinate herself to the group (she is defined by her skin color, and it is in opposition to that of the Other), whereas class-based action, at least under the regime of the Partys fear campaign, seems to demand that one act solely out of consideration for her own basic needs, which may not be unique but are certainly individual in several senses. Rather than highlight the racial Manicheanism that defined the Camp Hill explosion, the Party chose therefore to label as its tinder the base, egoistic needs that compelled the sharecroppers to join the union in the first place; eventual inclusion within the group of capitalist victims was the only encouraged collective identification. If this strategy seemed artificial in the days after Camp Hill, then it can be considered absolutely authentic in the case of the Reeltown uprising. The focal point of Ned Cobbs (alias, Nate Shaw) initial dissatisfaction with his life as a sharecropper was the bank and the mortgage lender, W.S. Parker (or Mr. Watson, as is his alias in Neds autobiography), as well as the system of capitalist usury that allowed racist considerations to affect the length and terms of such a loan. He tells the story of the banks attempt to defraud him, which occurred prior to the violence at Reeltown in 1932. Ned initially
See Mauritz Hallgrens discussion of the Unemployed Councils in Seeds of Revolt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933), 36, 129, 155, 169. Also see Kim Chernin, In My Mothers House, in Communism in America: A History in Documents (New York, Columbia University Press: 1997), 136-8. SW, July 25, 1931. Underneath the days main headlines, which, with phrases like, Croppers Union Fighting Against Cutting Off Food, For Cash Settlement at Picking, cannot be called abject lies (for these were indeed the economic goals of the CFWUof little importance, however, at the July 16 meeting), underneath news of Ralph Grays death, the Worker printed a letter from a Dadeville cropper purporting to show why the croppers of Tallapoosa and Lee counties were organizing. To Worker editor James S. Allen, the letter made clear a simple objective: to obtain something to eat read his caption, a phrase the paper touted as the unions raison detre and the chief purpose of its July 16 meeting.
39

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looked to the established banks as a safeguard against the abuses of landowners like Parker, who not only fixed a mortgage on my stuff without askin me any odds about it, just fixin it like he wanted but also would have succeeded in making Ned sign away all his farmland, animals, and equipment were it not for the literacy of Neds wife, Hannah, who stepped in at the last minute to read the loan contract instead of relying on Parkers word. And yet the representation of unbiased or colorblind capitalism in Neds narrativea man named Mr. Grace, who treated Ned fairly for one year as the latter paid off his loan at the bankultimately capitulated to the will of local elites like Parker: The note I just paid the bank, paid Mr. Grace, and he handed it to Mr. Watson [Parker]. O it hurt me so badthe note werent any good to the man, he couldnt collect a dime on itthat showed me what Watson wanted from mehis plans was naked as a baby. Such instances in Neds past shaped his role in the Reeltown confrontation, an exchange of gunfire between SCU members and local law enforcement, with the latter bent on executing the will of white landowners and creditors rather than that of their own hallucinated racial superiority.40 According to Clyde Johnson, who in the mid-1930s attempted to integrate the SCU and H.L. Mitchells Southern Tenant Farmers Union, Reeltown in 1932 had become one of the strongest sections of the union with the most fearless comrades. Clifford James, the leader of the Reeltown local, along with Al Murphy, the new secretary of the SCU, were careful to hold meetings in occupied (as opposed to vacant) houses, and they even developed a strategy for notetaking whereby they would underline sentences or portions of text in the Bible. Both men evidently succeeded in cultivating a feeling of mutual striving against the abuses of landlords and banks; according to Ned, at union meetings of the Reeltown local, we was taughtthat when trouble comes, stand up for one another. Whatever we was goin to dowe was goin to do it together.41 James previously had been denied credit by merchants, and his landlord, to whom he had been making regular payments with interest until the price of cotton dropped to six cents per pound, refused to allow him to defer a years payment. Although James had taken out the loan in 1924 to purchase the farm on which he had been sharecropping, his landlordthe very same W.S. Parkerannounced in December 1932 that James still owed all the principal and about half as much in addition for advances on food and tools. In other words, he was fifty percent further from owning his farm than he was eight years earlier when he made his first payment, and James was, by all accounts, a well-off tenant farmer (and a tenant he was in all but name only).42 It was
40

Nate Shaw, 266-270. Nate Shaw, 304.

41

Harold Preece, Epic of the Black Belt, Crisis (March 1936), 75; Beecher, The Sharecroppers Union, 127-8. James had pairs of several different livestock, and he had even owned an automobile for a short time before Parkers refusal to advance him the money for a license forced him to part with the luxury.
42

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not long after this announcement when Ned began to hear whispers that James was not the only black farmer on whom Parker had designs. Whispers were heard around Notasulga and nearby Reeltown, rumors prophesying that [Parker] goin to take all [Ned Cobb] got this fall and all [Clifford James]he goin to take everything they got. A deliberate effort, it seemed to Ned, was being made to ruin the leading organizers of the union, and the Notasulga police only sedimented this impression more thoroughly when they raided Jamess house in early December in a successful attempt to find radical literature. If landlords and police were working together to impoverish the unions most dedicated members, then Ned had little choice but to lend a hand when he knew that Jamess livestock would indeed be the target of the rumored taking; I knowed, recounted Ned, I was goin to be next.43 The tension was ostensibly diffused on Saturday, December 17, 1932, when Parker himself arrived at Clifford Jamess house to demand a years payment of his loan and departed after agreeing to accept a partial payment from James that Monday. Yet the compromise seemed a little too good to be true, and later in the day James learned from a neighboring tenant farmer that Parker had authorized Deputy Sheriff Elder to seize his cows and mules. As the poet John Beecher put it, to take [Jamess] livestock was to render him impotent to farm, to drive him, ruined and destitute, from the community he was troubling.44 As Ned Cobb approached Jamess house on Monday morning, after learning two nights before of Parkers plan to serve a writ of attachment on Jamess livestock, he spotted a small crowd at the head of which stood Elder and two young black men, who had been recruited to ride the mules ahead of the cows back to Parkers ranch. Ned decided to test the waters: Whats the matter here? Whats this all about? Im goin to take all old [Clifford James] got this morning, came Elders reply. Ned, attempting by the unions orders to act humbly and in a way of virtue, pleaded with Elder to reconsider. Please, sir, dont take it. Go to the ones that authorized you to take his stuff, if you please, sir, and tell em to give him a chance. Hell work to pay what he owes em. I got orders to take it, said Elder, unmoved, and Ill be damned if I aint goin to take it. Well, if you take it, Ill be damned if you dont take it over my dead body, Ned cried defiantly, steeling himself by thinking, Somebody got to stand upor we niggers in this country are easy prey. Sensing the resistance to his directive growing, Elder tried to invoke racial identification by conjuring the specter of Sheriff Kyle Young, the man responsible for Ralph Grays death: Ill just go and get [Kyle Young]; hell come down there and kill the last damn one of you. You know how he is; when he comes in, he comes in shooting.

43

Nate Shaw, 295; Birmingham Age-Herald, December 20, 1932; Nate Shaw, 306. Beecher, The Sharecroppers Union, 128.

44

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Although they all knew that [Young] was a bad fellow, Ned did not rise to this provocation, choosing instead to force the deputy away with a calm response: Go ahead and get [Young], Ill be here when he comes. It was at this point that James found his voice, chiming in, You nor Sheriff Young nor all his deputies is gonna get them mules.45 At this, Elder summoned the two young black boys, climbed into the car with them, and drove away from Jamess house. Ned knew where he was headedto Dadeville, the county seat, to report the mornings events to Sheriff Young. After Cobb confided his suspicions with James, the latter sent his wife and children away to the house of a nearby union memberJohn McMullen, who joined James and Cobb at the formers house, along with several other scared union members to keep them safe in the event that Elder made good on his threat. Although Ned seemed determined to defend his friends possessions, he didnt know the specifics of how much [James] owedor if he owed any at all. But, Ned recounted, that werent the issue with me. I was forced that year to face what was happenin.46 In the early hours of Tuesday morning, at about twelve-thirty or one oclock, Ned spotted the same car that left there that morning creeping up the gravel to Clifford Jamess house. Inside it rode a deputy from Dadeville as well as Deputy Sheriff Elder who, in lieu of an unusually gun-shy Sheriff Young, had recruited as reinforcements the same two ex-police officersGantt and Alfordwho first rained bullets on Grays shack in Camp Hill. Although several of Jamess friends came to his house with protective intentionsarmed variously with game shotguns and old civil war musketsevery one of them, including James himself, upon hearing Neds alert, runned out of there like rats runnin out of a woodpile, and all of emrun out the back, gone to the swamps and woods where the sheriffs couldnt see em, everyone save Ned Cobb.47 Armed with nothing but a .32 Smith and Wesson, Nate stood his ground as the four men positioned themselves around him and Jamess house. After an awkward silence in which both Ned and Elders posse did nothing but stare menacingly at one another, the sharecropper slowly tried to back from the porch into Jamess house. One of the ex-officers
45

The interlocution here is my own, and all quotes are taken from Nate Shaw, 305-8, with the exception of Jamess, which was reported in the Birmingham News, December 20, 1931. To understand the desperation of the sharecroppers, we must keep in mind that the price of cotton in 1932 was six cents per pound, that the average tenant farmer could bale anywhere from 6 to 10 pounds of cotton per day, and that the average price of a pound of meat was forty cents. The Alabama Department of Agriculture predicted that one-half of all tenant farmers would starve during the winter of 1931-2. See Allen, Organizing in the Depression South, 70. Nate Shaw, 310. In his own words, Ned could not remain under the whip of landowners and creditors, language that explicitly evokes the image of economic slavery rather than racial inferiority. See Nate Shaw, 317.
46 47

Nate Shaw, 309, 311; Birmingham Post, December 20, 1932.

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attempted to seize Neds arm, and, reacting with no uncalled for aggression, Ned flung him loose from his arm and continued moving slowly into the house for cover. Before he reached the threshold, the ex-officer had fired three shotgun blasts into Neds upper legs and hip. Managing to make it into the hallway of Jamess house, he turned and fired his entire clip at the closest two members of the posse, all of whom immediately sought cover behind trees in Jamess yard and then fled while he reloaded. I dont know how many people they might have thought was in that house, Ned mused several decades later, but that .32 Smith and Wesson was barkin too much for em to stand.48 Limping away from Jamess house and into the surrounding fields, grimacing not only from the lead in his body but also at the sight of John McMullens lifeless corpse, Ned noticed four or five union members who had armed themselves and were proceeding towards the source of the gunshots.49 They decided to stay in the fields to prevent any further trouble, and Ned slowly made his way home to ensure the safety of his family. Seeing the severity of his wounds, Neds son immediately drove him to Tuskegee hospital while his wife tended as best she could to his wounds. Since SCU secretary Al Murphy had given strict orders for members to conceal their relationship with the union, Ned elected not to tell the doctors the true story of how he sustained the wounds, chalking them up instead to a riot between the blacks and whitesa believable story, especially given the violence of the year before. Despite their sympathy for Neds plight and their diligent work removing the pellets from his lower body, the black doctors refused to admit him for the night, fearing white reprisals. Neds wife, Hannah, then hid him in nearby Macon County at the house of her cousin, resolving to leave Ned there, return to Reeltown, gather their children, and hide out at the house of union member Judson Simpson, which was located about a mile from Jamess house. Before safely arriving at Simpsons, Hannah disclosed Neds location to her brother, Milo Bentley, who promptly left Reeltown to join Ned at Chehaw, in Macon County. That same day, Tuesday, several separate armed bands of whites, many of which were led by police officers, began the task of apprehending black union members (local police had discovered a partial membership list in an exhaustive search of Jamess place that was conducted early Tuesday morning). A posse of armed whites caught up with Neds son and threatened to drown him if he did not tell them where his father was hiding; Vernon Cobb was spared, but only at the expense of putting bloodthirsty vigilantes onto his fathers trail. That same night, a despondent Ned upbraided Milo Bentley for foolishly endangering himself. You have no business comin down here, Ned told him; they goin to rally and raise the devil and shoot folks and kill em til they find me, and now you here too. Ned fully understood the consequences of resisting the institutions of capital, giving no quarter to the
48

Nate Shaw, 312.

McMullen had been trying to escape from the fields behind Jamess house to his nearby home when one of the ex-officers who had surrounded Cobb at the house noticed McMullen crawling away from the scene via a ditch. He shot him on sight. See Birmingham World, January 7, 1933.
49

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prospect that his near-fatal scrape with Notasulga and Reeltown police was sufficient blood tribute for his defiance. Annoyance at Milos being there quickly turned to alarmed concern when his brother-in-law heard cars roll up to the house; Ned immediately urged Milo to flee to the nearby woods, for, although Milo was not among those who had fled Jamess house, Ned had the sinking feeling that the approaching posse would overlook that fact when exacting their vengeance. Instead of giving Ned his gun and concealing himself in the nearby copse, Milo ran out the far side of the house, firing wildly at the police officers as he ran and falling quickly to the ground as they responded with dozens of bullets.50 Once the loud blasts of Bentleys breechloader expired, Ned knew the posse would come for him next, and that they did, but, instead of taking revenge through violent or extralegal means, they transported him to the Macon County jail (and to lend an air of legitimacy to their actions, they brought Bentleys fatally wounded body along as well), thereby delegating vengeance to Alabamas justice system. After three days, Ned was transported away from the dying Milo Bentley, who was refused medical care, to the Dadeville jail, where he was joined on charges of assault with a deadly weapon by Judson Simpson, who had been beaten severely when it was discovered that Neds wife had taken refuge in his home, a white farmer named Alfred White, who had sympathetically intervened to save Simpson from death by blunt force trauma, and Sam and Clinton Moss, two union members who had also not fired a shot throughout the entire uprising. All five were convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, with Ned receiving the harshest sentence of twelve to fifteen years and Sam Moss receiving the shortest with five to six years. Ned had to count his barn and much of his farm equipment among his losses, because his family was runned off that place in the days after Neds arrest and a riot crowd came to get what I had. As for Clifford James, he suffered the same fate as Bentleydeath in jail because of insufficient medical care.51 Although the Communist Party had certainly taken the blame for Camp Hillone editorial called Party leaders pied pipers leading astray the simple, trusting blacks with wily words the ultimate blame for that uprising, in the estimation of ordinary whites and newspapers alike, lay with the black Communist evangelists whose responsibility it was to disarm any belief the rank and file [of Negroes] may entertain that these Redsare their friends.52 Those guilty of, in an ironic play of words, failure to disarm were certain Birmingham black ministers as well as Communist organizers and politicians. However, the white outcry against members of their own raceagainst, for instance, James S. Allen, managing editor of the Southern Worker, or the attorneys of the ILD., who were paid with Jew gold to secure the release of the Scottsboro rapists and the Reeltown murderersreached a
50

Nate Shaw, 315.

Nate Shaw, 324; Jim Mallory (Elizabeth Lawson), What the Dadeville Trial Means, SW, May 20, 1933.
51

The Affair at Dadeville May be a Needed Lesson, Birmingham News, editorial, July 18, 1931; Birmingham News, July 18, 1931.
52

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fever pitch in the days after the shootout. Such consternation about growing converts to Communism was heard and such an outcry against radical ideas made that the state legislature breathed new life into an old proposal to ban the Communist Party in Alabama, and this was to augment an already extant law that empowered police to pick up any militant worker and send him to the chain gang for vagrancy.53 Irvin Schwab, the ILD lawyer who took up Ned Cobbs case, was repeatedly denied access to his client and reported death threats to any newspaper that would listen. Oh, they hated him, remembered Ned, and he could tell Schwab was a friend because of the treatment he received at the hands of Neds guards. Furthermore, in the aftermath of Neds resistance, posses of concerned white citizens again formed, only this time not to lynch or maimdespite Sheriff Kyle Youngs promise to get every Negro that runsbut to question local blacks, unearth Communist literature, glean evidence for legal action against suspected Reds, and expose leaders in the white community. So complete was their faith in the ability of the courts to exact racial justice that posse members contented themselves with invading privacy rather than taking life, which is not to say that their actions were not violent. Although perhaps less fearful for their lives, Reeltown union members suffered imprisonment when these inquiries and searches bore fruit; for Communist activities or sympathies, twelve blacks, in addition to those held in the Dadeville jail for assault with a deadly weapon, were arrested and incarcerated on charges of vagrancy and disseminating propaganda.54 Several liberal publications of the day painted a romanticized portrait of the Reeltown confrontation as an example of Negroes fighting a courageous battlecomparable to any event in the pioneer saga, and local newspapers as well as conservative publications similarly had no qualms about aggrandizing the role of black union members in the uprising, feverishly estimating anywhere from fifteen to one hundred armed Negro participants in the uprising at Jamess house.55 These publications clearly did a disservice to Ned Cobb: as at Camp Hill, one man took direct offensive action, and the members of an entire community were left to parry reprisals from an enraged white citizenry. While union members may not have stood their ground alongside Ned at Jamess house, they were not afraid to show support for their friends and neighbors at trial (in fact, the Dadeville courthouse had trouble accommodating all the black farmers who attended Neds trial), and blacks took an active interest in the proceedings despite their wholesale exclusion from all of the juries. Many union members, therefore, evinced solidarity with their family and friends as an underground form of retaliation after the violence, whereas
53

Editorial, Birmingham News, December 20, 1931. The bill was first proposed in March of 1931, failed to receive a majority vote in the Alabama legislature, and was then re-invigorated in the aftermath of Reeltown. See SW, February 14, March 14, 1931.
54

Nate Shaw, 324-7; Birmingham News, December 20, 1932; Birmingham Post, December 20-21, 1932.

Preece, Epic of the Black Belt, 75; Birmingham News, December 24, 1932; Birmingham Post, December 20, 1932.
55

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Ralph Grays family and friends came to his protection before his death in an attempt to deter white retaliation. And yet the site of Grays abasementthe steps of the Dadeville courthouse became the place where the overflow crowd from Cobbs trial congregated in support of him. If Ralph Gray fits the criteria of racial nationalism because his instincts were protective, centered on the defense of an unarmed meeting of black workers who were discussing the racial injustice of Scottsboro, then Ned Cobb is quite definitely a Marxist, questioning the claims of the bourgeois to control wages and defending neither family nor racegiving voice, instead, to a wholesale aversion to economic exploitation. As a neglected editorial read in the Birmingham Post, The causes of the trouble are essentially economic rather than racial. The resistance of the Negroes at Reeltown against the officers seeking to attach their livestock on a lien bears a close parallel to the battles fought in Iowa and Wisconsin between farmers and sheriffs deputies seeking to serve eviction papers. A good many farmers, ground down by the same relentless economic pressure from which the Negroes were suffering, expressed sympathy with the Negroes desperate plight, although thoroughly disapproving of their resistance to the law. Although this author then proceeded with the rote indictment of Communist leadership and ideals in the corruption of the areas poor black farmers, the editorial puts in stark relief the universal nature of Neds suffering and consequent defiance, of his armed resistance to the legalized robbery perpetrated by landlords and merchants, as perhaps suited the Party better than the Post could have imagined.56 As the white response reveals, when poor blacks were uniting under the banner of class instead of race, their agency was denied all the more, because it seemed unnatural to whites for destitute black sharecroppers (or at least one: Ned Cobb) to reject so violently and with such comprehension the capitalist benchmarks of usury and predatory lending. And in a certain sense they were right, for it is unlikely that Ned would have acted as he did without the inspiration and solidarity the union (and, by extension, the Party) inculcated. Many of the ideas were present in their platform, particularly that of the abolition of all debts owed by poor farmers and tenants, as well as interest charged on necessary items such as clothing, food, and seed, a platform that the SCU added to its agenda as a result of debates within the Partys National Negro Commission.57 But to act, to stake ones life on the well-being of someone else, to make the Other a self-referential term so that immovable solidarity seems the only logical option in the face of economic repossessionsuch dicta do not proceed from the Party, and there is no scapegoat or external source for such motives. It was not Neds budding Marxist ideas but his determined resolve and defiance that unsettled Tallapoosa whites so thoroughly, causing them to shift blame from mere writers and preachers to the only culprits they could indict: the race-

Beecher, The Sharecroppers Union, 130-1; Birmingham Post, December 20, 1932; Harry Haywood, Sept. 1933, The Communist).
56 57

Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 49.

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mixing Communist Party and the ILD., whose wholesale absence from public life was white Alabamas only antidote to its collective guilt for wage slavery and racism. IV. Ideology Contra Lived Experience By 1933, the SCU claimed 3,000 members, its growth unhindered by either gun battle. Faced with large-scale evictions resulting from New Deal acreage reduction policies, sharecroppers flocked to the union. By 1935, the SCU claimed 12,000 members, only about 2,500 of whom lived outside Alabama.58 The violence of its formative years was never replicated or equaled, since the SCU eventually went on to incorporate with Clyde Johnson and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Although most of those who joined the union were victims of mass evictions, the SCU led a series of strikes by cotton pickers in Tallapoosa, Montgomery, and Lee counties. Attempts to recruit white farmers to the cause persisted, but to little avail. By 1934, the SCU had failed to recruit a single white, dues-paying member, and the Partys attempt to form an all-white Tenants League failed miserably. The conflict at Reeltown, in retrospect, was an example of the powerful class identification that pervaded the lives of poor blacks in Depression-era Alabama, an identification in this case based on shared membership in the SCU and a shared experience (from Neds past) of economic exploitation at the hands of capitalist lenders; in fact, Ned identifies the same man as his creditor and JamessW.S. Parker, a wealthy storeowner and landowner in Tallapoosa County. Whereas Camp Hill exploded because of violence by a band of whites against a group of peaceably assembled blacks, Reeltown serves as an example of militant, even offensive resistance to the exigencies of late capitalism, a confrontation provoked, at least directly, by the indignation of a black farmer (and his reluctant friends). Rather than as the passive, vicarious recipient of retaliation for the racial offenses committed on that train at Paint Rock, Ned Cobb can only be classified as the freest of Depression-era black agents precisely because his action did not refer to skin color but to the unethical and ostensibly artificial practices of American capitalism, one of whichperhaps the most palpable for Nedhas been its alacrity for employing skin color as justification for the extraction of human surplus value.
Rural Worker, Vol. I, No. 5 (December 1935), 4; Preece, Epic of the Black Belt, 92. In a speech at a 1933 Party conference in New York, Al Murphy commemorated the unions first anniversary by corroborating the Rural Workers black membership statistics but denying that any whites had joined the SCU. We have been able to organize between 2,000 to 3,000 members, Murphy declared. Out of all of these members, we have not been able to organize one single white farmer. See Al Murphy, Achievements and Tasks of the Sharecroppers Union, in Communism in America, 142-3. The white members in question either joined after the Spring of 1933, or they were not white farmer members but simply friends of the union or industrial workers in the Birmingham area. In any case, it is certain that women were among the majority of these members, sometimes attending SCU meetings or writing editorials to the Southern Worker. By 1934, the standard of proof was sufficiently met for white vigilantes to indict one of their own race for Communist race-mixing; white Tallapoosa County tenant farmer J.W. Davis was kidnapped and lynched by a posse of almost fifteen whites for his support of the SCU. See Daily Worker, June 11, July 7, 1934.
58

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Camp Hill can be called an expression of Black Nationalism or racial identity, but only insofar as it was a response to threats first posed by members of the majority group, whose motives were explicitly racial. Reeltown, however, demonstrated the opposite, namely that class solidarity was sufficient to initiate an overthrow of the visibly artificial mode of capitalist usury that I have opposed to race or skin color, which seem visibly natural. And yet the motives for this overthrow were not purely organic to Ned, consistently reminded as he was by the Partys dictum that no worker, and especially no black sharecropper, was safe from the destitution wrought by the white elite. Whether we understand Ned as profoundly concerned about his own eventual well-being or the immediate welfare of his neighbor and union friend, the fact remains that, despite the ostensibly more universal nature of class identification, the poor black masses of rural Alabama defended their union, its members, and their economic interests out of a situational adherence to both ideologies and a loyal allegiance to neitheras ideology and Cruse would require.

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Bibliography PRIMARY Newspapers/Periodicals: Birmingham Age-Herald, 1931-2 Birmingham News, 1931-2. Birmingham Post, 1931-2. Birmingham World, 1933. Chattanooga Times-Free Press, 1931. Dadeville Herald, 1932. Dadeville Spotcash, 1931. Daily Worker, 1932, 1934. The Liberator, 1931. New York Times, 1931-2. Preece, Harold. Epic of the Black Belt. In Crisis 38, March, 1936. Rural Worker, Vol. I, No. 5, December 1935. Southern Worker, 1930-2.

Correspondence: Papers of the NAACP, Reel 6, Scottsboro Legal File, 1931-1950. Library of Congress, Washington D.C. Commission on Interracial Cooperation Papers, 1919-1944. Robert Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, Atlanta, GA. Southern Tenant Farmers' Union Collection, AR164, Box 2, Special Collections, The University of Texas at Arlington Library.

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Reference Materials: Fried, Albert, ed. Communism in America: A History in Documents. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Johnson, Charles S. Statistical Atlas of Southern Counties: Listing and Analysis of SocioEconomic Indices of 1104 Southern Counties. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1941. Lewis, James Welborn and James P. Wind, eds. American Congregations: New Perspectives in the Study of Congregations, Vol. 2. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Autobiography/Memoir: Allen, James S. Organizing in the Depression South: A Communists Memoir. Minneapolis, MN: MEP Publications, 2001. _________. Communism in the Deep South: The Opening, 1930-31A Political Memoir. Unpublished manuscript, 1984. Haywood, Harry. Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist. Chicago, IL: Liberator Press, 1978. Hudson, Hosea. Black Worker in the Deep South: A Personal Record. New York: International Publishers, 1972. Rosengarten, Theodore. All Gods Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1974.

Contemporaneous Monographs: Hallgren, Mauritz A. Seeds of Revolt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933. Kester, Howard. Revolt of the Sharecroppers. Introduction by Alex Lichtenstein. Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1997 reprint.

SECONDARY Journal Articles: Beecher, John. The Sharecroppers Union, in Social Forces Kelley, Robin D.G. Comrades, Praise Gawd for Lenin and Them!; Ideology and Culture

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Among Black Communists in Alabama, 1930-1935. In Science and Society 52, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 59-82. Tyson, Timothy. Robert F. Williams, Black Power, and the Roots of the Black Freedom Struggle. In the Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (September 1998): 540-70.

Books: Carter, Dan T. Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New York: New York Review of Books, 1967. Egerton, John. Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Foner, Philip S. Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1973. New York: International Publishers, 1976. Hoover, J. Edgar. A Study of Communism. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962. Kelley, Robin D.G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. __________. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working-Class. New York: Free Press, 1996. Laruelle, Francois. Philosophie et Non-philosophie. Original translation by Christopher Eby. Paris: University Presses of Paris, 1987. Mitchell, H.L. Mean Things Happening in This Land. Montclair, NJ: Allanheld, Osmun and Co., 1979. Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory,1910-1945. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Foreword by Robin D.G. Kelley. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Tindall, George. The Forgotten Farmers: the Story of Sharecropers in the New Deal. Urbana, IL: The University of Illinois Press, 1965.