>From Marxism: Mark Solomon, "The Cry Was Unity" (U. of Mississippi Press, 1998): THE GROWTH OF LOCAL LEADERSHIP Out of the Party's growing base in the black community came a local leadership, new to communism but steeped in a rich social and cultural consciousness. Robin D.C. Kelley, in his incomparable study of Alabama Communists, points to the emergence of women who came to the Party through neighborhood relief committees and battles for adequate assistance from the city's welfare board. Addie Adkins, Alice Mosley, and Cornelia Foreman all were drawn to activism through struggles for sufficient relief. Helen Longs joined the Party because of its opposition to the Red Cross's draconian relief programs, which subjected black workers to prisonlike works projects for the lowest relief payments in the country. Estelle Milner, a young Birmingham schoolteacher, organized sharecroppers in Tallapoosa County. A small group of white working-class women led by Mary Leonard was drawn to the local Unemployed Council and from there to confrontations with the city welfare board — demanding food, clothing, decent medical care for desperately poor whites, and respect for women by the authorities. The cohesion and deep southern roots of Birmingham's black working class produced an exceptional group of leaders, many of whom went on to play important roles in larger arenas. One of these was Al Murphy, born in 1908 in McRae, Georgia, into a family of poor sharecroppers. His was a religious and race-conscious lineage: One grandfather had been a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and a presiding elder under Bishop Henry McNeil Turner, a clarion voice of black emigration in the late nineteenth century. As a marginally educated teenager, Murphy moved in with an aunt and uncle in Tuscaloosa, where he dug ditches, picked cotton, and handled corrosive chemicals in a pipe foundry. At the age of fifteen Murphy came to Birmingham where he continued his low-paid, onerous labors. But Murphy also enrolled in night school with a vague ambition to find a place in the limited sphere of black politics. When the Depression hit, Murphy's education shifted from night school to the bread line. One morning in the fall of 1930 he read a leaflet calling for an end to lynching, "full rights for the Negro people;' and opposition to "imperialist war." That leaflet haunted him; he talked about it with Fred Williams, a friend who had recently joined the Party. Williams brought Murphy to a meeting of the Unemployed Council, and the young man joined Party almost immediately. Murphy combined an introspective, analytical approach with a know familiarity with the brutal essence of Jim Crow. Feelings seethed inside him but he rarely, if ever, raised his voice in anger. A rather small man with a body hardened by onerous labor, he found in Marxism an explanation for the racism and exploitation that had shaped his young life. His low-key persona served him well as an ironworker in the Stockham steel plant in Birmingham where he sought to recruit black workers for the TUUL. Among his recruits was Hosea Hudson. Hudson was born in rural Georgia in 1898 into a sharecropper family. At fifteen he took up sharecropping to help support his family after his mother remarried and left their home. Hudson himself married in 1917 and continued sharecropping until his crop was wiped out by the boll weevil in 1921. In 1923 he moved to Birmingham and found a job as an iron molder at Stockham. Murphy, Hudson inherited a long memory, especially from his grandmother of slavery and of Reconstruction's promise and betrayal. Hudson had grow up protecting his own humanity, refusing to bow before injustice; dwelling in his consciousness was a sense of earthly liberation that was as compelling the gospel singing that formed part of his religious life. Hudson joined the Party on September 8, 1931. The date is enshrined in a remarkable writing with a solemnity that one gives to a marriage date or birth of a child. The oppressive working conditions and the low pay at foundry were not the immediate inducements to sign up. He was angered the Scottsboro case and the murderous assault on black sharecroppers at Camp Hill. Both of those incidents symbolized in Hudson's mind a cumulative attack on all Negroes. His response was to "national" suffering and in that sense his feelings typified what the Party meant by the "national question." The Party became a substitute church, extending in Hudson's mind a system of values and a code of moral behavior: "We all thought, 'well, now, this is the real religion; 'cause they said that Party members shouldn't mess around with another Party member's wife or his daughter.., and live a clean life, get Out and meet the public, people look upon you as a leader." Hudson joined the CP with eight other black workers, six from the Stockham foundry. He was elected "unit organizer" of the Stockham group and in that capacity met with other Birmingham unit leaders. He encountered a seriousness and discipline among his black comrades that was transforming for a man who claimed his interests had previously been mostly gospel music and women. The unit organizers talked about new political developments, immediate tasks, the Scottsboro campaign, cases of police brutality, ways to activate all members, checking on fulfillment of assignments, and "criticism and self-criticism." They tussled with the intricacies of self-determination and were comforted that Communists were obliged to support it "to the point of separation;' but not necessarily to the act itself. Those meetings were all black; the fashioning of agendas and tasks was an exclusively black enterprise. This reflected in part the difficulty of communication between white organizers from the North and the overwhelmingly black membership of the Birmingham CP organization. The first white comrade Hudson met was Harry Simms (Harry Hirsch), a nineteen-year-old from Springfield, Massachusetts, who became a liaison with the Share Croppers' Union. He was killed in the Kentucky coal strike of 1932. In late January 1932 Hudson was fired by Stockham along with two fellow workers. By that time Hudson was leading an underground fraction at the plant that had grown to six units with six members each. The sacking of Hudson and his comrades frightened other recruits, and attendance at unit meetings dropped sharply. It was in the dead of winter, Stockham was laying off many workers, and contact with the Party was broken: "We could not see anybody to tell us what to do." On a frosty night, standing at a footbridge, Hudson told his fired comrade John Beidel that he was thinking about going to Atlanta to seek work. Beidel begged not to be left alone; Hudson realized that he could not walk away from Birmingham, and he agreed to help rebuild the Units. Within weeks another Party unit had been formed, composed of both working and jobless women and men. The unit moved out to the larger community, building a core of supporters, spreading news of Scottsboro, distributing the Sunday Worker and the Southern Worker, often surreptitiously dropping literature on porches in the dead of night, putting leaflets and newspapers on church steps, and then following up with conversations among those exposed to the literature — always making sure that they were not talking to "police pimps. In the spring of 1932 Harry Jackson brought a new district organizer to the unit meeting. Nat Ross was a Jewish New Yorker and Columbia University graduate who had briefly attended Harvard Law School before joining the Party. A thoroughgoing Leninist, he insisted on stern discipline and tight organization. Hudson's unit had found a private home that became a headquarter for its members, a place to "chure [chew] the rag; to discuss issues, play checkers, and cultivate closeness and mutual support. After Ross's arrival, the Par took a major step: It organized an all-day conference on a Sunday in April. Otto Hall came from Atlanta, and so did Angelo Herndon, returning to Birmingham after leading a successful demonstration of white and black unemployed to Atlanta's City Hall. Sharecroppers from Camp Hill and Reeltown came, making this the first full-scale meeting between urban and rural radicals. A District 17 bureau was established, composed of Hudson, Ross, Henry Mayfield from the coal mines, Cornelia Foreman, Otto Hall, and a white farmer from Walker County. Since biracial meetings in Birmingham were permitted between "the better class of Negroes" and a few white ministers, bureau gatherings had to be secret all-day affairs in the homes of sympathetic non-Party Negroes. Each bureau member was responsible to bring one other to the meeting, whose location was secret. Arrangements were generally made to meet a street corner in early morning during police shift changes. If someone was more than five minutes late, his contact was instructed not to wait; the tardy member, said Hudson, had to "have a have a very good reasin for no shoring [showing] up on time.., if they did not. . . we would all give him or her hell". By early 1932 the Birmingham Party had a coherent southern program: freedom for the Scottsboro boys; interracial unions; the right of blacks to vote, hold office, and serve on juries; the right of sharecroppers to sell their own crops; public jobs at union wages; unemployment and social insurance; direct cash relief; and full social and political equality. For Hudson and his comrades such a program arose in large measure from their own experiences. In answer to the relentless charge that the Party was using blacks for its own (read "Soviet") ends, Hudson replied that the poor blacks drawn to the Party "knowed that they didn't have nothing but they chains of slavery to lose." As Hudson saw it, the Party was a working-class political organization, and blacks were members of the working class, an inseparable part of a movement dedicated to breaking "they chains of slavery." How then could a people be "used" by themselves? After all, their identities had become embedded in the Party. The organization became Hudson's spiritual home, a repository of values and a source of education both practical and theoretical. Don West, a Georgia minister, Party member, and co-founder of the legendary Highlander Folk School, attended "Party school" with Hudson in New York and helped him become literate. For all the leading black Communists of Birmingham, a wider world opened. Mac Coad, Archie Mosley, Comnelia Foreman, Henry Mayfield, and Al Murphy all traveled to Moscow in the 1930s. Murphy was a delegate to the Seventh CI Congress in 1935; Coad fought for the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. But what they built in Alabama was their most significant legacy— especially the Share Croppers' Union. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/ _______________________________________________ CrashList website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
