Mary Stanton - Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950

RED BLACK WHITE

THE ALABAMA COMMUNIST PARTY 19301950

MARY STANTON

This publication is made possible in part through a grant from the Bradley Hale Fund for Southern Studies.

2019 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stanton, Mary, 1946 author.

Title: Red, black, white: the Alabama Communist Party, 19301950 / Mary Stanton.

Description: Athens: The University of Georgia Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019020543| ISBN 9780820356167 (hbk: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780820356174 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780820356150 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH : Communist Party of the United States of America. District 17 (Birmingham, Ala.)History. | CommunismAlabamaHistory20th century. | CommunismSouthern StatesHistory20th century. | CommunistsAlabamaHistory20th century. | CommunistsSouthern StatesHistory20th century. | AlabamaRace relationsHistory20th century. | Southern StatesRace relationsHistory20th century. | LynchingAlabamaHistory20th century. | LynchingSouthern StatesHistory20th century.

Classification: LCC HX 91. A 2 S 73 2019 | DDC 324.2761/07509043dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020543

In memory of Pauline Bonagura Mullaney My high school English teacher

The mind once stretched by a new idea never returns to its original dimensions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dont you mind being called Bolsheviki by the same people who called you nigger.

Crusader, June 1920

A good beginning includes acknowledging indebtedness to the hardworking staffs of major research institutions, libraries and archives who made identifying, studying, and understanding district 17 and its operation possible. They include the following:

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Book Division

New York Public Library

Harlem, New York City

Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives

New York University

Washington Square, New York City

Southern Historical Collection and Southern Oral History Program Collection

University of North Carolina

Wilson Library

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Clark Atlanta University

Woodruff Library

Archives Research Center

Atlanta, Georgia

Alabama Department of Archives and History

624 Washington Avenue

Montgomery, Alabama

Birmingham Public LibraryCentral Division

Archives and Special Collections

Birmingham, Alabama

Birmingham Civil Rights Institute

520 16th Street North

Birmingham, Alabama

New York Public Library

Research DivisionStephen A. Schwartzman Building

New York City

RED BLACK WHITE

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened.

Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

At eight oclock Wednesday morning, June 24, 1964, I was one of a thousand high school seniors lined up outside the Brooklyn Fox Theater waiting for the doors to open and our graduation ceremony to begin. I had spilkesanxiety, agitation, apprehensionall of it. Everything was happening too fast, it was all too big, too soon, and too much. I couldnt shake a nagging feeling of dreadthis was supposed to be a happy day.

It had nothing to do with the Fox. Id been inside that massive Art Deco movie palace many times. By the mid-sixties it was home to disc jockey Murray the Ks Swingin Soireesred, hot, and blues all the way!... Hed brought Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and the Ronettes to Flatbush Avenue. No, it wasnt the Fox...

Although Franklin K. Lane High School was one of the largest in the city, the gym and auditorium together couldnt accommodate all of us, but the four-thousand-seat Fox could, so thats where we would commence our futures. A generational tsunami, we were the first wave of baby boomersborn in 1946, one year after the soldiers came home.

As it turned out, my dread that morning wasnt entirely misplaced. The legacy of the biggest and brightestat least best-educated generation of the twentieth centurywould be three white male presidents: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump (all 1964 graduates), who, to be fair, represented the full gamut of our attitudes, ideals, and ambitionsthe ones we would continue to either champion or challenge through five succeeding decades of culture war.

The world is growing sick and tired of us. It was not always so. Once we were the ones designated to carry the ball into the end zone. We cant complain that our country didnt pay enough attention to usor certainly that we didnt pay enough attention to each other!

I gravitated to the political leftsomething that would have been hard to predict in my sophomore or junior years. In November 1963, three months into our first term as seniors, President Kennedy was assassinated. In January 1964, Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. Freedom Summer was launched that June, and three days before our graduation, three civil rights workerstwo from New York Citywere reported missing in Mississippi. Their decomposed bodies would turn up in August.

By the end of that year there were twenty thousand U.S. military advisors in Vietnam, and by 1965 draft cards were beginning to burn. Suddenly there was a good deal to fight about. I admired the courage of those who protested the draft, the war, and segregation, and who championed voting rights, feminism, and fair housing. I was, in fact, all admiration and no action. Strong opinions didnt get white girls like me invitations to the prom. Besides, Franklin K. Lane sat on Jamaica Avenue exactly and often uncomfortably on the White QueensBlack Brooklyn border. That made for a lot of strong opinions.

Several years ago, I was asked to develop a Black History Month presentation to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the Scottsboro Boys arrestsa tribute both to them and to the case that became the Rosetta stone for civil rights justice claims. In the course of my research, I discovered the Southern Worker, a 1930s weekly written by communistsmany from New York Citywho were working to save the lives of these nine black young men, wrongly accused of raping two white women. Their passion stirred memories of some of my former classmates who Id idolized as a journalist-in-training on the