AWhen the historian Robin DG Kelley began the research for his dissertation at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in the 1980s, which became a book entitled “Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression” Should become a multi-award-winning classic of radical historiography, he was also on the road as a political activist. At the time, the fight against apartheid was the focus of the Afro-American student’s commitment. Kelley was a leader in a movement that wanted California universities to sell their investments in South Africa and Namibia. However, his original scientific idea of writing a comparative study of black radicalism and the communist left in two industrial centers – Johannesburg in South Africa and Birmingham in Alabama – fell through. The declaration of a state of emergency in South Africa in 1985 made research there impossible. So Kelley focused on the communists in Alabama. And what at first glance appeared to be esoteric material not only offered numerous lessons for historical research in Kelley’s work, but also gained a place in the strategic thinking of generations of young North American activists who deal with questions of “race”, gender, and class and deal with solidarity.
With Marx against racism
In “Hammer and Hoe” Kelley explains in his characteristic vivid prose how black workers appropriated communism, the writings of Marx and Lenin with those of the black churches and the long experiences of resistance against slavery, segregation and the linked racist terrorism. The majority of the Communist Party in Alabama were black small farmers, domestic servants, aid recipients and factory workers; of women and men who were denied access to “skilled” jobs for racist reasons. Kelley shows that for them the demand for voting rights and their struggle against economic exploitation by landowners, factory owners and the supposedly progressive representatives of a highly unequal NewDeal order belonged closely together.
Kelley explains the renewed response of his 1990 debut, which was published several times, with the fact that the current fight against police violence and the prison system, as embodied by the Black Lives Matter movement, are one in the struggles of the black communists in Alabama Have precursors. His study seeks to convey something of how the daily confrontation with racism and exploitation changes people’s ideas about their possibilities and about the reasons for their poverty and oppression and what alternatives to a capitalism impregnated with racism could look like. Incidentally, in his academic and intellectual work he does not presume to practice dispassionate objectivity. “Criticism”, he recently stated in an interview, “is better than objectivity. From my point of view, objectivity is a wrong attitude. I am not neutral, it never was. ”This is not contradicted by the fact that as a historian and author he always tries to be truthful and honest. The chair of American history held by Kelley at his alma mater is named after Gary Nash, the pioneer in the history of urban radicalism of the revolutionary era, who died on July 29, 2021.
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