As part of New Labor Press’s efforts of educating revolutionary workers and sympathetic activists on the history of our class struggles, and in honor of Black August, we wanted to share a brief overview and summary of the Sharecroppers Union and the Communist Party’s organizing within Alabama during the 1930s. Much has been written about the subject; however, little analysis has been done into the betrayal of the sharecroppers by the rightist leadership of the Communist Party USA.

From 1930 to 1936, the CPUSA organized tens of thousands of primarily Black workers and tenant farmers in Alabama and other parts of the South into independent class-conscious unions. These militant combative red unions not only pushed for economic demands but struggled against white chauvinism and for unity amongst the working class, and directly confronted white supremacism. This was in stark contrast to the American Federation of Labor (AFL) “business” unions, which segregated or outright prohibited non-white membership. The party’s organizing efforts among Black workers and sharecroppers was impulsed in part by the Communist International (Comintern), which called for the CPUSA to struggle against white chauvinism within the party and put forward resolutions in 1928 and 1930 recognizing that the question and struggles of the historical Black population living in the US, particularly in the region of the South known as the “Black Belt”, should be understood as a “special national question” and that the slogan of national “self-determination” needed to be applied. Simultaneously, the Comintern and the left line of the party also correctly critiqued the CPUSA’s policy of endlessly “boring-from-within” the racial segregationist AFL without results. It was through this that the party broke with the AFL and formed the red unions of the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL).

In late 1929, the Communist Party arrived in Birmingham, Alabama prompted by the party’s successes in organizing textile workers in the South earlier in the year. At the beginning of the year, the CPUSA sent veteran textile organizer Fred Beal to North Carolina to establish locals of the National Textile Workers Union (NTWU) in the region. The CPUSA had viewed the South as an entirely backward region of the country where little organizing was possible, it was not until Fred Beal organized thousands of textile workers across North Carolina that the party realized the revolutionary potential of the region. The Central Committee of the CPUSA chose Birmingham, the center of heavy industry in the South, as headquarters for a new district committee, which consisted of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Tom Johnson and Harry Jackson, experienced CPUSA trade unionists from the North, began their work with James Giglio who through contact with the TUUL had established a chapter of the Metal Workers Industrial League in the city.

The party quickly found success, establishing an office and organizing a meeting of two hundred mostly Black workers. However, the party, as quickly as they found success, was met with opposition from reactionary groups. James Giglio’s house was firebombed just days after speaking at a TUUL meeting. In response, the CPUSA sent additional organizers to Birmingham, and the party continued establishing its base, organizing another meeting of two hundred workers in May. Just a few weeks later, they held a rally and a spontaneous march to the Birmingham Community Chest headquarters to demand relief for unemployed workers. The rally, which brought out eight hundred people, was met by one hundred Birmingham police officers. Attempting to stop the Party from organizing, the city commissioners established an ordinance that would penalize anyone who advocated for “criminal anarchy.” The CPUSA defied this ordinance, however, organizing a rally of two hundred fifty workers. Over the summer, Birmingham police, attempting to shut down the party’s activities, invoked the “criminal anarchy” ordinance to arrest known party members and raid the homes of Black workers under the guise of them owning “radical literature.” The party did not back down, however, organizing armed and unarmed defense corps. It also furthered its organizing, establishing the Southern Worker, a weekly newspaper focusing on workers’ issues within the South, and establishing a workers’ school for new party members. It was during the summer of 1930 that Angelo Herndon, who would become one of the party’s most well-known members, began to attend party meetings in Birmingham.

Throughout 1930, the party would continue to have success organizing in Birmingham. At the time, large segments of the working class were left unemployed due to the Great Depression. In Alabama, the party organized thousands of Black steelworkers who were left out of work due to recent plant closures. Going into the fall and winter, the party ramped up its efforts, demanding jobs, an end to evictions, and material support. This reached its peak on December 16th when Young Communist League member Joe Burton led a march of nearly five thousand unemployed people. “Southern Worker, vol 1, Num 19” Carrying this momentum, the party established the neighborhood relief committees which organized neighborhoods to fight for demands.

Outside of Birmingham, however, the party had done little to forge ties with the large rural population of Alabama. At the time, 12 million Black people lived in the US, eight million of whom lived in the South. “The Communist, vol 9, Issue 3”, Over six million Black people lived in rural areas and engaged in farming. In 1928, the Comintern recognized the revolutionary potential of Black agricultural laborers and sharecroppers, stating: “The great majority of Negroes in the rural districts of the South are not ‘reserves of capitalist reaction,’ but potential allies of the revolutionary proletariat. Their objective position facilitates their transformation into a revolutionary force, which, under the leadership of the proletariat, will be able to participate in the joint struggle with all other workers against capitalist exploitation.”

While the Communist Party USA had previously raised the slogan of a farmer-labor alliance, they had all but ignored the task of organizing Black agricultural laborers and sharecroppers. The first notable contacts they made in rural Alabama came in late 1930 with a small group of white tenant farmers who had asked the TUUL for help obtaining government relief. It was in January of 1931 that the party was awakened to the revolutionary potential of sharecroppers when 500 rose up in England, Arkansas due to a food shortage. In response, in Alabama, Party leaders issued a statement within the Southern Worker calling for agricultural laborers and sharecroppers across the South to lead similar uprisings. This call to action received immense support across rural Alabama, with poor, mostly Black farmers flooding the party with letters asking for assistance in leading similar uprisings. In February, Angelo Hemdon went to Wilcox County to work with a group of sharecroppers who had begun organizing. The party founded the Croppers’ and Farm Workers’ Union (CFWU) in Tallapoosa County, with the goal of uniting white farmers and Black sharecroppers in Northern Alabama against their common oppressor. However, despite receiving large amounts of support from Black agricultural laborers and sharecroppers, the party struggled to break the entrenched white supremacy of rural Alabama, receiving very little support from white agricultural laborers.

By July 1931, the CFWU had eight hundred members and had won a few small victories.”Hammer and Hoe” This drew the attention of local landlords and police, who sought to put a stop to the organizing of Black sharecroppers. On July 15th in Camp Hill, Tallapoosa County, Sheriff Kyle Young became aware of a meeting of the CFWU occurring in an abandoned house. He gathered a group of vigilantes who went to the meeting and began assaulting a group of eighty sharecroppers and organizers. Despite the repression they faced, the following evening one hundred fifty sharecroppers gathered in a different abandoned house southwest of Camp Hill. Due to the assault by police and vigilantes the previous day, the union had members guarding the meeting. Sheriff Young showed up with the local police chief attempting to once again shut down the meeting. Before he reached the meeting, he was met by Ralph Gray, who was guarding the perimeter. Gray was a local sharecropper from a family with a long history of taking a militant stand against white supremacy. An argument broke out between him and Sheriff Young. Young pulled a gun on Gray, shooting at him, and Gray shot back; both Gray and Young were hit by bullets. Union members picked up Gray and carried him into his home. Local police, accompanied by a mob of white vigilantes, surrounded the house, eventually breaking inside and finding Gray, who had stayed in the house to allow others to escape. One vigilante pulled out a gun and murdered Ralph Gray. The vigilantes then burned down Gray’s house and left his body on the steps of the local courthouse. Groups of reactionaries would take turns kicking and shooting Gray’s lifeless body. Police repression continued, and over the next few days, between thirty-four and fifty-five Black men were arrested near Camp Hill.

The party and CFWU struggled to respond to the immense repression they received; membership within the CFWU dropped sharply over the next month, down to just fifty-five members. Those that remained, however, had learned hard-fought lessons from the struggles with police and vigilantes at Camp Hill and the earlier struggles over food advances in the spring. The remaining members of the CFWU met to reorganize, and on August 6, 1931, the now infamous Sharecroppers Union (SCU) was formed in Tallapoosa County. The union established five separate locals within the county as well.
For the first few months of its existence, the SCU was disorganized, with little leadership coming from the CPUSA. The locals were largely forced to operate on their own initiative. Local Young Communist League leader Eula Gray, niece of martyred Ralph Gray, served as a liaison between the different locals. She was responsible for passing directives from the party back to the SCU and for bringing reports back to the party. At the time, many party members doubted Gray due to her young age and gender, with a few describing her as merely a “little girl.” However, Gray worked tirelessly, helping to keep the union together during this period, and the SCU’s membership expanded greatly. The union in Tallapoosa County had grown to nearly six hundred members organized in twenty-eight locals, with ten youth groups, and twelve women’s auxiliaries. The SCU had also expanded to two neighboring counties with sixty-seven members in Lee County, and thirty members each in Chambers and Macon counties. “Hammer and Hoe”

In May of 1932, CPUSA district leadership appointed Al Murphy to the position of SCU secretary. Murphy had only recently joined the Communist Party in 1930, but had quickly become a strong voice for national self-determination and militancy within the party. He viewed the SCU as the embodiment of the Black national self-determination struggle in the Black belt. Murphy correctly recognized that the union needed to grow beyond its foothold in the eastern Piedmont counties and moved to Birmingham to expand the union and collaborate with local party leaders. Murphy reorganized the SCU, establishing a captain for each local, dues collections, and writers who would send articles to the party to be published.
Analyzing the repression the CFWU faced in Camp Hill the previous year, Murphy set security protocols to protect the union and preserve its members. No meetings were to be held in empty houses, and SCU members were not to walk in large crowds. Weekly meetings were held in secrecy to avoid police raids or vigilante attacks. Meetings were often conducted under the guise of being Bible studies, with some union locals disguising their meeting minutes within the Bible by underlining certain words and phrases. Members practiced self-defense, with party leader Harry Haywood reporting that one SCU local kept a small arsenal of weapons on hand. “There were guns,” he recalled, “of all kinds—shotguns, rifles, and pistols. Sharecroppers were coming to the meeting armed and left their guns with their coats when they came in.” Under Murphy’s leadership, the SCU was stronger than the UFWC ever was and had won demands at one Tallapoosa plantation for the right for sharecroppers to sell their own cotton, as well as a continuation of winter food advances.

A new wave of repression soon followed, however, on December 19th, 1932, Deputy Sheriff Cliff Elder attempted to seize the livestock of SCU leader Clifford James. Elder was met by fifteen armed SCU members who prevented the seizure. Elder left and returned a few hours later with Chief Deputy Dowdle Ware, former sheriff J. M. Gaunt, and a local landlord named J. H. Alfred. A shootout began as soon as Elder and company stepped on James’ property; Elder once again fled. SCU member John McMullen was killed in the shootout, and several other SCU members were injured. Elder gathered a group of white vigilantes from neighboring counties to hunt down SCU members and their families. A massive spree of white supremacist violence ensued across the county as white vigilante groups raided the homes of Black sharecroppers, threatening them with murder and forcing entire families into hiding. Twenty SCU members were arrested, many of whom had no involvement in the shooting but whose names were discovered when the sheriff’s department raided the home of Clifford James and found a list of union members. Clifford James and fellow SCU member Milo Bentley passed away several weeks after the shooting due to intentionally inadequate medical care from county jails they were imprisoned in.

This did not slow down the growth of the SCU; however, in June of that year, Al Murphy reported a membership of nearly two thousand with seventy three locals, eighty women’s auxiliaries, and twenty youth groups. The Communist Party had also established 5 additional rural Party units, each composed of thirty to thirty five members. “Hammer and Hoe” In late 1933, Alabama sharecroppers were met with a new challenge: the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), which was passed by the federal government as part of President Roosevelt’s “New Deal.” The AAA was intended to increase the purchasing power of landowning farmers by subsidizing acreage reduction. A year later, the Cotton Control Act and the Gin Tax Act were passed, which made cotton reduction programs mandatory and added a tax on the ginning of all cotton above the specified quota. Sharecroppers in the South were supposed to receive small benefit checks from the AAA, but outside of rare instances, they received nothing as landowning farmers controlled the distribution of payments. These laws threatened all sharecroppers, and during the 1933 cotton season, a number of tenants were evicted. In response, the SCU called strikes on several cotton plantations in Chambers and Lee counties and demanded fifty cents per one hundred pounds of cotton. The strike fell apart, however, when seven SCU leaders were arrested and vigilante groups forced pickers back into the fields. Despite the failed strike, the waves of evicted tenants led to a boom in the SCU’s membership; by 1934, the union had grown to six thousand members. “Hammer and Hoe” To combat the landowning farmers’ control of the distribution of the AAA benefits checks, SCU members often refused to give up their share of cotton until they received their AAA check. The union also won over segments of local day laborers and cotton pickers, convincing them to refuse to work for plantations that were particularly cruel in their exploitation of tenants and sharecroppers.

As the summer went on, the SCU began to organize a new wave of cotton pickers’ strikes with the demand of one dollar per hundred pounds of cotton. In mid-September, the strike began starting at B. W. Meadows’s plantation in Tallapoosa County but soon spread to several large plantations in Lee County as well. The strikes totaled around one thousand cotton pickers. “Hammer and Hoe” Due to its size, the landowning farmers were unable to evict the strikers at the height of the cotton-picking season. In response, they attempted to break the strike using local police and white vigilantes as their armed enforcers. In Lee County, police arrested seven union members, and in Tallapoosa, white vigilantes shot three strikers. Pinned to the doors of some suspected strikers’ homes was the following message: “WARNING. TAKE NOTICE. If you want to do well and have a healthy life, you better leave the Share Croppers’ Union.” In the middle of the night, Lee County Klan members kidnapped SCU organizer Comit Talbert, and the next night put two sharecroppers in chains, threatening to murder them if they did not leave the union. Local sheriffs arrived but arrested the chained sharecroppers and charged them with attempted murder. Despite this wave of repression and white supremacist violence, the union persisted, winning at least seventy-five cents per one hundred pounds of cotton at most striking plantations, and at other plantations, landowners raised wages in an attempt to avert a strike. At Howard Graves’s plantation, union members not only won their demand of one dollar per hundred pounds but they forced Graves to raise monthly credit allowances from ten to fifteen dollars. Union membership had also grown to eight thousand. “Hammer and Hoe”

However, at the same time, the CPUSA’s leadership had begun to sow the seeds which would lead to the betrayal of the rank and file of the sharecroppers’ union. The party’s Browderite leadership’s interpretation of the Comintern’s Popular Front line sought a “united front against fascism” with liberals and the same FDR administration whose AAA law had led to the eviction of thousands of Alabama sharecroppers. The party’s leadership saw the semi-underground militant SCU as a potential risk to the establishment of this front. In December of 1934, despite the SCU’s immense growth and recent victories, party leadership removed Al Murphy. Even with its eight thousand membership, the SCU had been unable to recruit a single white farm worker, and party leadership feared that an inability to build a white-black worker alliance would doom the popular front in the South to failure.

The party replaced Murphy with Clyde Johnson, a white veteran CPUSA organizer who moved to Alabama in January of 1935. Johnson further centralized the union, creating an executive board of elected union leaders. The union also decided to continue with Murphy’s plan for a strike in the Spring. The strike would be the union’s biggest effort since its formation. Some fifteen hundred laborers spread over thirty-five plantations in seven counties were instructed to leave the fields on May 1 unless they received a daily wage of one dollar. “Hammer and Hoe” In Tallapoosa, Lee, and Chambers counties, areas where the union was strong, they won nearly all of their demands and faced little repression. In Lowndes, Montgomery, and Dallas, the union was unable to overcome the repression they faced. In Dallas, sixteen SCU members were arrested and when CPUSA member Saul Davis returned to his hometown of Selma to investigate the arrests, he was arrested and immediately released by police to a group of white vigilantes who kidnapped and brutally beat him. International Legal Defense (ILD) member Robert Washington was then sent to Selma and he too was arrested, then handed over by police to white vigilantes who kidnapped, stripped and beat him, then dropped him off miles down the road. The next day, another ILD member, John Foster, was arrested and kidnapped. However, unlike Washington and Davis, Foster would never be seen again. Several other Communists would also be arrested, released, kidnapped, and brutally beaten during the strike, with Joe Spinner Johnson being killed and dumped in a field by white vigilantes on July 11th.

In August, the SCU prepared another wave of strikes as the cotton-picking season approached, with the strike first erupting on J. R. Bell’s plantation in Lowndes County. On the morning of August 19, J. R. Bell awoke to discover his fields were empty. He called Haynesville Sheriff R. E. Woodruff to attempt to end the strike. Woodruff and his deputies attempted to get SCU organizer Willie Witcher to end the strike. When he refused, Woodruff shot Witcher in the thigh and arrested him. Similar to Tallapoosa County sheriff Kyle Young in 1931, Woodruff organized a band of white vigilantes to hunt down and attack union members. On August 22nd, a group of vigilantes captured Jim Merriweather, a union member who had been evicted due to the strike; the vigilantes executed Merriweather at point-blank range. They then forced their way into Merriweather’s brother’s home, where they beat and killed Anne Merriweather, Jim’s wife. The murder of the Merriweathers was part of a plot by the Sheriff’s department and vigilantes to assassinate known SCU leaders. During the first week of September, SCU leader Ed Bracey was killed by Sheriff Woodruff, and the body of Rev. G. Smith Watkins, a Baptist preacher and SCU leader, was found riddled with gunshots. Three other unidentified potential union members were also killed during this time. Despite the violence and repression, the August strike won victories in Tallapoosa and Lee counties, where union workers won between seventy-five cents and one dollar per hundred pounds, and in some cases earned the right to gin and sell their own cotton. On at least one Montgomery County plantation, strikers won the full one dollar per hundred pounds of cotton wage rate. However, in Lowndes County where the strike began and the union faced the most intense violence, the strike was crushed, with workers returning to even worse rates than before.

Despite recent victories and the repression and violence the union faced, Johnson, in line with the party’s interpretation of the popular front line, sought to transform the SCU from a militant, armed, and combative union into an open one which was able to receive the recognition of the state and business unions. Johnson hoped to forge an alliance with the National Farmers Union (NFU), which in stark contrast to the SCU, NFU locals in Alabama were dominated largely by racist white farmers. This “alliance” proposed by Johnson and endorsed by party leadership was merely a liquidation into the NFU which would see the SCU merge into the NFU under the guise of building the popular front and in order to bore from within the NFU. Over the summer, the SCU and NFU formed joint committees to discuss the possibility of merging the two organizations. In October of 1936, the NFU agreed to bring the SCU into the NFU.

However, predictably, issues quickly arose as the NFU, which was dominated by white chauvinists, provided little support to the newly integrated former SCU organizers, leaving many without money for food or housing. Also, the high dues requirements of the NFU, which the NFU leadership upheld, made it difficult for much of the rank-and-file of the SCU to even join. Many former rank-and-file members of the SCU were also rightfully distrustful of the NFU due to its history of white chauvinism. The NFU’s strategy was oriented to small, independent farmers; unlike the SCU, it did not organize wage laborers. This meant that as evictions occurred against tenant farmers to which the NFU offered no defense, many evicted tenants switched to wage labor. These former tenants joined the AFL’s Farm Laborers and Cotton Field Workers Union, which would then turn into United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) following the CIO’s split. Without the militant organizing and strategies of the SCU, the NFU and UCAPAWA were so weak and defenseless that they were not able to organize a strike or any sort of response to repression or evicitions. By 1940, the UCAPAWA only had locals in one county in Alabama and soon completely collapsed.

The Sharecroppers Union in Alabama remains lauded to this day in many activist circles and all sorts of organizations hold studies of the book “Hammer and Hoe”, which covers the Sharecroppers Union and the activities of the Communist Party within Alabama at the time. What many of these organizations ignore in their support of the Sharecropper Union’s stance of national self-determination and struggles against white supremacy is the politics which guided the organization. Before its betrayal by the rightist leadership of the CPUSA, the SCU was a militant, armed and semi-clandestine union, unafraid to take action against the ruling class. This is what led to the SCU building a membership in the thousands within a few years, this is what allowed them to strike and win demands when business unions such as the NFU and UCAPAWA couldn’t even launch a response to repression and evictions. In 1936, the union reached 10,000 members, but ultimately, the Sharecroppers Union met the same fate as red unions of the TUUL, liquidated by the rightist leadership of the CPUSA just as it was reaching new heights.