The Alabama Chapter of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was one of the most influential political bodies organizing poor African-Americans in the South during and after the Great Depression.
The Alabama CPUSA also played a vital role in organizing African-Americans during a period where many activists would later become leaders of the emerging Civil Rights Movement.
Despite mineral deposits being buried deep, insufficient water supply, and low metallic content, cheap labor made the Birmingham Industrial Complex a region known as the "Pittsburgh of the South."
[3] Further, control over the real estate, banking, and mining industries became centralized bringing large fortunes into the hands of less than 1 percent of the population.
[4] From 1928 to 1951, the Alabama Chapter CPUSA played its most important roles in terms of organizing and fighting against unemployment and the development of the Alabama Sharecroppers Union, a court case involving a group of falsely imprisoned Black youths known as the Scottsboro Case, and for basic civil rights such as voting, to sit on juries, as well as housing and employment equality.
[1] At the Seventh National Convention in 1930, the Party elected to focus their efforts campaign drives and organizing unemployed Black workers.
One Metal Workers Industrial League mass meeting was planned to organize unemployed steel workers and call for an end to evictions, immediate relief, free light and heat for the city's jobless, and to reaffirm their support for a Communist-sponsored social insurance bill that proposed minimum cash assistance of $25 per week to all unemployed.
On December 16, 1930, an eighteen-year-old black Young Communist League (YCL) activist, Joe Burton, took leadership of a spontaneous protest demonstration of over 5,000 workers.
Burton attempted to lead demonstrators in an action to storm the lobby of Hotel Morris and demand jobs or immediate relief, but police intervened and dispersed the protest.
[2]: 17–20 The Party also took a leading role in organizing unemployment committees and councils that through direct action helped prevent evictions and restore utilities of poor and working families.
Additionally, the Party-based committees led struggles against evictions and foreclosures by a range of tactics from flooding landlords with postcards and letters, to direct confrontational reasoning.
In the event a poor family lost access to utilities, activists and Party council members would use heavy gauged copper wires known as "jumpers" to "appropriate" electricity from public outlets or other homes.
With rising debts, when the stock market collapsed and cotton prices reached an all time low, small landholders were forced into tenancy and tenant's conditions deteriorated even worse.
Plagued with sickness, illiteracy, and extreme poverty, most sharecroppers were forced to beg for food and cash advances and or spent numerous days without eating.
While a legal defense team worked to successfully overthrow the case in court, the streets were flooded with protests, demonstrations, and struggle.
[7] The Alabama Chapter of CPUSA was subjected to numerous attacks by both the Ku Klux Klan as well as police forces including bombings, lynchings, vigilantism, and murder.
In fact, in many ways, the heightened police repression only fueled the Party, gave them national attention, and even piqued the interests of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
[2]: 70–75 In 1931, after a spontaneous uprising of sharecroppers in Arkansas, the Alabama CPUSA began extensive organizing campaigns around local farmers.
By this time the ASU and Croppers Farm Workers Union (CFWU) had been organizing sharecroppers for years, and had militantly secured a few local victories with about eight hundred members.
However, in Camp Hill, Alabama, after a meeting to discuss the Scottsboro case, the CFWU was raided by local organized deputized vigilantes.
During the raid both women and men were beaten before the group left and regrouped at the main organizer, Tommy Gray’s, home assaulting his entire family, including his wife who suffered a fractured skull.
At a subsequent meeting, Sherriff Young, police Chief JM Wilson, and his deputy AJ Thomson showed up and a confrontation followed.
While accounts differ as to the sequence of events, the encounter ended with a heated argument between Ralph Gray and the chief that resulted with each being shot.
By the end of 1934, extrajudicial acts of vigilante violence and terrorism against Black workers, Communists, and radical circles increased significantly.