Red, black, white : the Alabama Communist Party, 1930-1950 / Mary Stanton.

"Red, Black, and White is the first narrative history of the American Communist movement in the South during the 1930s. Written from the perspective of the District #17 (CPUSA) Reds who worked primarily in Alabama, [the author's] purpose is to acquaint a new generation with the impact of the Great Depression on post-war black and white, young and old, urban and rural Americans. After the Scottsboro story broke on March 25, 1931 it was open season for old fashioned lynchings, 'legal' (courtroom) lynchings, and mob murder. In Alabama alone, twenty black men were known to have been murdered and countless others, women included, were beaten, disabled, jailed, 'disappeared, ' or had their lives otherwise ruined between March 1931 and September 1935. In this collective biography, Mary Stanton--a noted chronicler of the Left and social justice movements in the South--explains what resources Depression Era Reds worked with before those of either the New Deal or the modern Civil Rights Movement became available. What emerges from this narrative is a meaningful criterion to evaluate the Reds' accomplishments. They failed in some measure at everything they attempted--from labor organizing to exposing courtroom lynchings and institutional racism. Stanton looks at the Reds' strategies which in many cases made things worse by uniting angry white supremacists over their constant condemnation of the Southern Way of Life. Through seven cases of the CPUSA's activity in the South, Stanton covers tortured notions of loyalty and betrayal, the Cult of White Southern Womanhood, Christianity in all its iterations, and the scapegoating of Blacks, Jews, and communists. Yet this still is a story of how Blacks, Jews, and communists fought back, and fought together, for social justice and change"-- Provided by publisher

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Beginnings -- District 17 headquarters -- Southern worker and the dynamo of Dixie -- Scottsboro -- An all-purpose Jesus -- The massacre at Camp Hill -- The National Miners' Union, southeastern Kentucky -- The Shades Mountain rape and murders -- Staying the course -- Reeltown radicals -- Reversals and bombshells -- Justice for Angelo Herndon -- Big Sandy: a murder and two lynchings -- The lynching of Dennis Cross -- Memphis: mayhem and mistaken identity -- The late great District 17 -- Reaping the whirlwind -- A popular front -- A culture of opposition -- All things considered -- The rest of life.

Print version record.

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