The Lived Experience of Sharecroppers in Depression-Era Alabama:

An Intersection of Marxism and Cultural Nationalism

Christopher Eby

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Mark Huddle

Date of Submission: May 2, 2011

2

In his Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Harold Cruse writes of a dichotomy that he

considers a persistent stumbling block to the progressive black leader—the choice between

Marxism (Paul Robeson, Richard B. Moore, Richard Wright, the elderly W.E.B. Du Bois, etc.)

or cultural nationalism (Marcus Garvey, Baraka, Stokely Carmichael, etc.). Cruse considered the

latter position necessary to any meaningful social progress on the part of the African-American;

the unique nature of the black American—her history of corporeal labor exploitation combined

with the unique racism of the era and place—required in Cruse‟s estimation that race

consciousness be fostered above all for any meaningful change to happen in the streets, in the

home, in the workplace. Although the title of his book would seem to restrict its application to

the intelligentsia, Cruse was careful to equate the failings of Paul Robeson with high housing

prices in Harlem as well as those of the Communist Party with a setback in African-American

political leadership. Implicit in Cruse‟s critique, we can say with some certainty, is the anti-

Marxist position that the failings of an entire group or race are attributable to its leaders‟ lack of

the appropriate ideology, or in the case of American blacks, their (in)ability to recognize the

singularity of the African-American Diaspora, to use it as a separating agent, and to put it in the

service of politics.1 The black masses, in Cruse, are led successfully by key figures and

personalities only when the latter have clearly delineated a position on the matter, and Cruse

asserts that Marx and Engels could not possibly have understood the Negro‟s exceptional history

in America. Black Marxists, in his estimation, are and have been deluded, much like the

prisoners in Plato‟s cave, who see shadows and mistake them for corporeal entities because of

their unique situation—shackled to “essentially opportunistic pro-Negro policies” without

perceiving their inauthenticity.2

Against the totalizing taxonomy of black consciousness versus class consciousness, of

which Cruse is only the most notable adherent, I propose an idea that is at once both radical and

eminently observable: 20th

-century America has failed to realize both the socialistic goals of the

later Martin Luther King, Jr. and the empowering pan-Africanism of Stokely Carmichael not

because of an ideological failure at the highest echelons of black leadership but because of the

conditions affecting the black worker, conditions that explain the willingness of the black masses

1 See Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: New York Review of Books, 1967),

94, 223-8.

2 Ibid., 263. Dismantling the prospects of a platform of class unity with the hackneyed notion that

Marxism was “invented” by white Europeans and is thus inapplicable to the unique needs of African-

Americans, Cruse endorses a peculiar form of American exceptionalism: “Marxism as a method of social

inquiry is not native to America but to Europe—it was transplanted to America by Europeans who never

ceased being Europeans. But there has never been a nation that developed like the United States, or a

system that developed like capitalism within the United States.” See Cruse, Negro Intellectual, 262. It is

no wonder, then, that Cruse‟s thought develops away from Marxism: the former does not recognize any

sort of universality in the struggle for black economic rights—for Cruse, class is the lowest common

denominator of economic exploitation only in specific countries and under certain political systems.

3

to support politically and endorse fully the set of ideas most likely to, first, effectuate economic

opportunity in the short-term and, second, ameliorate the violence and prejudice of American

racism. Put another way, working-class blacks have engaged rigorously with both of Cruse‟s

positions but been exclusive to neither.3 If there is a binary lacuna between American blacks,

then it exists between intellectuals like Cruse who think that arcane distinctions determine the

effectivity of a shared impulse—that of black advancement under the conditions of capitalism, an

impulse first expressed by the not-so-radical Booker T. Washington—and working-class blacks,

whose self-preservative malleability and willingness to fluctuate between two diametrically

opposed dogmatisms (in order to secure immediately needed ends) precludes any notions of the

necessity of ideology.4 If ground is to be surrendered to the dichotomists, then it is only on the

terrain of loyalty or fidelity that they can establish any superiority.

The fate of any historical analysis is a restricted scope. If history is an attempt to

determine a network of causes for an event, then this network will always be diminutive and

reductive, infinitely specific, necessitating its own delimitation. With that in mind, I hope not to

reduce the accomplishments and actions of the Sharecroppers Union of Alabama to those of each

of its individuals but to portray their earliest struggles for survival as evidence of ideology‟s

inessentiality to the effectivity of a collective impulse, particularly if it originates from an

“intimate” setting of oppression. Since ideology necessarily requires fidelity, I argue that it was

largely unimportant to Depression-era black sharecroppers, since the exigencies of Southern

racism and labor exploitation made fidelity—whether to orthodox Marxism or Garveyism—

implausible and dangerous. At Camp Hill in 1931 and Reeltown in 1932, black Alabama

sharecroppers exemplified, respectively and perhaps paradoxically, racial exclusionism and class

solidarity, attempts at bi-racial cooperation as well as unprovoked physical confrontations with

whites. And it is through considering this impulse—dramatized in these two cases by the

hardships of the Great Depression and the unique predations of Southern capitalist elites on

sharecroppers—that we can delimit ideology‟s proper application to proletarian struggle: as

fodder for intellectual leisure rather than as the sine qua non of the revolutionary vanguard.

3 The reader need only consider the effect of Nixon‟s “black capitalism” campaign on the politically

radical African-American or even the ostensible unilaterality of black political affiliation (with today‟s

Democratic Party).

4 In fact, I would argue that this fact goes a long way towards explaining the influence of Christianity in

the lives of working-class blacks, and the inescapable consequence of this influence for black

sharecroppers was a type of folk Marxism in which certain tenets were overlooked as inessential to the

virtues of Marxist social action. For more, see Robin D.G. Kelley, “‟Comrades, Praise Gawd for Lenin

and Them!‟; Ideology and Culture among Black Communists in Alabama, 1930-1935,” in Science and

Society 52, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 59-82. Helpful to understanding this fusion of Marxist social action and

Christianity are the words of French philosopher Francois Laruelle, who calls ideology “an effective,

indescribable dimension of human phenomena,” not a medium through which the subject can finally

prioritize phenomena for action; “it must be taken with the object of science rather than dismissed a

priori by a science [in this case, the „science of the past‟].” Francois Laruelle, Philosophie et Non-

philosophie (Paris: University Presses of Paris, 1987), 121. Original translation by Christopher Eby.

4

I. The Formation, Composition, and Early Activities of the Croppers’ and Farm Workers’

Union

As 20th

-century historian Robin D.G. Kelley has put it, “Black Communists were not

blank sheets when they entered the movement…they retained significant cultural influences that

resonated through the Leninist wrappings, determining the everyday character of grass-roots

activity.”5 From the start, black sharecroppers who joined the union did not necessarily endorse

Communist ideals (specifically, religious ones), even though they operated under the directive of

“self-determination” and adopted the Marxist critique of religion‟s political uses. These two

areas reveal the chief obstacles to the Party‟s attempt to organize a rural union: that of fostering

an international consciousness among a pastoral people and that of having to deny the limited

agency—spiritual—that Alabama sharecroppers could claim. Although working-class blacks

often accepted the Marxist theory of history as class struggle and certainly endorsed the Party‟s

stance on black self-determination in the South, many black sharecroppers (as well as Kremlin

functionaries) were unsure of how the assertion that “blacks constituted a nation wherever they

were found in high concentration in the Black Belt” would change their lived experience of

violent racism and stifling political and social inequities. In the early stages of the SCU, one sees

the undecidable conjugation of the attractions of Marxist theory with those of an anti-Marxist,

religious populism. Black sharecroppers deftly appropriated both traditions in order to effectuate

the immediately necessary economic gains that trade unionism delivered, while clinging still to

the ultimately necessary spiritual goal of a life devoid of all suffering.6 It was no coincidence, in

other words, that Alabama‟s rural communists favored one particular sort of clandestine meeting

place over all others: churches.

Particularly in the area of religion, the Marxist-Leninist tradition of atheism fused with

traditional African-American spirituality to create a group of black sharecroppers who were

aware of religion‟s political and oppressive uses yet navigated the inconsistency by claiming that

hitherto existing Christianity, ideally suited for plasticity, was not “true” Christianity. For

5 Kelley, “Comrades,” 99.

6 The situation was much the same for many of the Alabama party‟s small white contingent; the ties

connecting them to the Party were frayed, substantial only in terms of social action. Consider, for

instance, the case of Fred E. Maxey, a white former labor department negotiator who also happened to be

an ardent dispensational premillenialist and pastor of Mount Hebron Baptist Church in Leeds, AL. Maxey

maintained his own column in the Southern News Almanac entitled “Pulpit in Print” in which he claimed

Jesus as a radical and tried to fuse Marxism and Christianity. His congregation, it must be remembered,

included many tenant farmers, and his crusades against widespread black disenfranchisement techniques

(specifically, the poll tax and “literacy” tests) earned him the repeated ire of the Ku Klux Klan. Ideology,

it must be said, proved only a stumbling block to Maxey‟s social action, for he could never pinpoint

which one was responsible for his empathy with and work on behalf of the marginalized. See American

Congregations, vol. 2, eds. James P. Wind and James Welborn Lewis, 133, 138-140.

5

example, a poor black farmer wrote an editorial, complaining of “a pastor in Birmingham who

tells Negro workers to wait for pie in the sky when you die, when they complain of

unemployment, starvation, wages, and Jim-Crowism. This faker, no doubt, gets his 30 pieces of

silver regularly.”7 The irony in this editorial is particularly acidic, since the black farmer was

using Christian metaphors to critique socially conservative preachers, equating Judas‟s betrayal

of Jesus to their betrayal of the working-class. A folk song entitled “The “Modern Church” ran in

the pages of the Communist Party‟s well-circulated southern newspaper, expressing this same

disillusionment with mainstream American religion:

The pastor looks us over, And then selects his texts.

He reads it in a deep bass voice, And listen what came next.

„Servants, obey your masters. And do your duty well,

And be content with your wages, If you would escape hell.

Always pray for your bosses, Even though they may oppress,

Submit to their demands meekly, And by and by you shall be blest‟

I left the church in sorrow, I failed to find solace there.

Where are the empty stomachs fed, Where, oh brother, oh where?8

In a May editorial, a Birmingham worker channeled a similar spirit, decrying the widespread

attitude of “Negro preachers, who say we „can‟t bother about the [Scottsboro] 9‟” but should

“pray more.”9 In the minds of many poor blacks, “true” religion or Christianity was considered

transcendent and forever misappropriated, and this stance invalidated much of the Southern

demagogic ammunition (i.e. Paul‟s dictum for slaves to obey their masters, etc.). In a sense, then,

these attitudes effectively redefined black agency around the political compass of ending wage

exploitation, something entirely unique and practically divorced from religious considerations.

Broadly speaking, the impetus for the formation of the union was recognition of the need

for a biracial struggle against wage slavery, made all the worse by the record-low price of cotton

during the early 1930s. The union formed, then, to unite poor white farmers of northern Alabama

and black tenants and sharecroppers in the black belt. The Party‟s position on social equality and

equal rights alienated most poor white farmers, and from its inception the Sharecroppers‟ Union

(initially the Croppers‟ and Farm Workers‟ Union (CFWU)) was exclusively black with no

notable exceptions. Apart from the Party‟s unpalatable stance on racial equality, there was

another reason for the thoroughly ebony character of the union: in the black belt regions of

Alabama, particularly in Tallapoosa County where Estelle Milner and the Gray brothers founded

the union, blacks comprised the bulk of the region‟s tenant and rural laboring population,

7 Southern Worker, February 21, 1931. Hereafter abbreviated as SW.

8 The full song is printed in SW, April 4, 1931.

9 SW, May 30, 1931.

6

residing together, in this case, in the southern sectors of Tallapoosa county. At the center of the

relationship between the young schoolteacher, who happened to be the daughter of an Alabama

sharecropper, and Tommy and Ralph Gray, admitted Communists with a history of exploitation

at the hands of white merchants and bankers, stood a newspaper—the Southern Worker—and a

Communist organizer from Chattanooga, Tennessee—Mack Coads.

Although the CFWU (and later, the SCU) was composed exclusively of black tenant

farmers and sharecroppers, the union made attempts to recruit white workers. Despite its de facto

status as the union of the poor black farmer, the union never took measured steps to radicalize

their members around the platform of racial unity. The Southern Worker, the Chattanooga-based

Communist newspaper, is perhaps most responsible for the union‟s prioritization of economic

advancement, rural worker solidarity, and a policy of racial inclusion; the publication‟s editor,

James S. Allen, was a Jewish Communist who penned many of the paper‟s cries for proletariat

solidarity. “The Southern Worker,” he wrote in the paper‟s first edition, “is neither a „white‟

paper nor a „Negro‟ paper. It is a paper of and for both the white and black workers and farmers.

It recognizes only one division: that of the bosses against the workers.”10

In Allen‟s estimation,

news about and for the South‟s blacks sometimes preponderated in the pages of the Worker, but

this was only because of the pervasive economic destitution of blacks. Thus, the Southern

Worker‟s widespread audience in the black belt—many illiterate sharecroppers would even have

the paper read to them—combined with the economic despair engendered by the Great

Depression, made a policy of cultural nationalism irrelevant, for black sharecroppers were keen

enough to perceive that the exigencies of providing for a family would never be addressed if

white businessmen and landowners thought of the union first as a group of “black separatists.”

Unfortunately, the allure of the dollar proved sufficient motivation for white elites to blacklist

CFWU members and to recruit police mercenaries in the interest both of suppressing strikes and

declaring illegal any private meeting or assembly of blacks, for the dearth of white members in

the union made expedient and efficient this profiling.

After contacting the Party, then, Milner and the Grays waited for the promised organizer

to help them build a union, secretly distributing the Southern Worker to anyone interested in

organizing and fighting for “higher day wages paid in cash, for more food advances to the

croppers, for payment in cash for work done by the cropper on the landowner‟s fields, for seed

and fertilizer furnished by the landlord to plant food crops for the croppers‟ families.”11

Inspired

in large part by the uprising of farmers in England, Arkansas, in which five hundred farmers

demonstrated against low returns and high prices, the small Tallapoosa contingent became more

interested in soliciting an organizer at the same time that the Communist Party was placing more

10

SW, August 16, 1930.

11

SW, June 27, 1931; the most explicit involvement of the Southern Worker in forming and sustaining the

CFWU.

7

stock in the ability of sharecroppers to unionize.12

Events initially followed the England

demonstration‟s blueprint when an inexperienced organizer arrived in the spring of 1931 in the

form of Mack Coads, an illiterate black steel worker from Birmingham who had unsuccessfully

run for municipal judge in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on the Communist ticket. In many ways,

Coads was an atypical choice for organizing the union; the Party‟s industrial organizers were

nearly all white, in positions of authority to teach Marxist doctrine, organize grassroots

mobilization, and determine fixed objectives for a nascent union. The fact that the CFWU‟s

composition was black from rank-and-file to secretary, combined with its growing membership

(about eight hundred members in July of 1931), made the presence of the union seem far more

menacing to local whites than it had when Coads was initially meeting with only a handful of

sharecroppers in private residences.13

Arriving in Tallapoosa County in April 1931, Coads established himself as secretary of

the CFWU with the chief short-term goal of extending food advances for sharecroppers. To

avoid anti-union attention, Coads generally referred to the organization as the “Society for the

Advancement of Colored People,” and he avoided substantiating the whispers of a “black

republic,” rumors given credence by the Comintern‟s stance that blacks constituted a nation in

several portions of the black belt. By the early summer of 1931, however, the union‟s victories

had been limited, yet the enthusiasm to “set us up a worker‟s government like Soviet Russia” and

“to make the bourgeoisie…dance the Gigolo” was growing in tandem with the CFWU‟s

membership.14

So palpable and worrisome was this rising tide to local whites that July witnessed

the union‟s first violent confrontation with the white power structure, and it was fought on the

grounds of a race consciousness that could well be termed a “Black Nationalist” impulse. Yet

this impulse, as will become clear, was defined for black sharecroppers and not adopted as a

structural or constitutive ideology; in other words, it was white consciousness that made

necessary, expedient, and reactionary the racial solidarity exhibited on the part of the Tallapoosa

contingent.

It is important to note that the hardships of starvation and joblessness were felt beyond

the sharecropper‟s farm (which, of course, explains the Party‟s attempts at factory unionization),

and yet the sharecropper‟s plight was still among the worst in the nation. To give the destitute

black farmers their due agency, it can be said that Alabama sharecroppers were willing to forego

12

Initially, the Party considered rural workers unsuited to unionization. The isolation of rural farmers

seemed to inculcate an individualism that had to be subordinated to collective bargaining for any union to

flourish in the area. The collective toiling in Birmingham‟s mines and steel mills made urban workers a

prime target for unionization efforts. See Hosea Hudson, Black Worker in the Deep South: A Personal

Record (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 36-47; Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 38.

13

SW, July 25, 1931.

14

SW, May 30, 1931, from a self-identified black communist living in rural Alabama; SW, July 4, 1931,

from a farmer living in Thorsby, AL.

8

any racial radicalization of the union in the hopes that a racially-inclusive platform would make

their economic demands and strike initiatives more palatable to the white power structure.

Ultimately, black Alabamians were forced to confront just how sanguine this hope was; for 20th

-

century poor Alabama whites as for their black counterparts, ideology—in this case, the union‟s

professed belief in racial unity and its demonstrated attempts to recruit white members—was not

sufficient for acceptance or legitimacy. The oftentimes eloquent calls for working-class unity

across racial lines seemed to Alabama whites in particular, and Southern whites in general,

somehow fraudulent, especially since the historical and economic reasons behind the all-black

union, not to mention the social retaliation that poor whites knew they would suffer if they

became “race traitors” by joining, never became an object of logical consideration. Although it is

certainly not my intention to downplay black agency in the slightest, it must be understood that

“agency” is a relative, not absolute, term. Its possibility and conditions are necessarily structured

with respect to the dominant, and any violently oppressed minority group that does not own the

means of production will initially, of course, have only a limited ability to constitute itself. Until

1931, the union struck a delicate balance between de facto black working-class solidarity and

both an express white influence via the Communist Party and a professed desire for racial unity.

The events of Scottsboro would change this balance entirely and throw the CFWU and its

members much further towards the „black nationalism‟ end of Cruse‟s binary continuum.

II. Camp Hill and the Drawing of Racial Lines:

“Getting Even for Scottsboro”15

The Scottsboro verdict,

The Scottsboro verdict,

The Scottsboro verdict,

Is not good enuf for me.

It’s good for big, fat bosses,

For workers’ double-crossers

For low-down slaves and hosses.

But it ain’t good enuf for me… 16

From the earliest days of the union, Alabama sharecroppers had formulated and

expressed two explicit goals: to improve the standard of living for tenant farmers and

sharecroppers, chiefly by opposing wage cuts and supporting the continuation of food advances,

15

The words of William Porter, secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, to a Mr. Andrews,

July 17, 1931, Box G-6, NAACP Papers. See Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe (Chapel Hill, NC:

University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 42.

16

Originally printed as “The Scottsboro Song,” SW, July 18, 1931.

9

and to protest against the legal treatment of the Scottsboro boys, which was initially

accomplished by “sending resolutions of protest against the Scottsboro legal lynching to

Governor Miller.”17

This latter goal, however, was initially secondary to the union‟s economic

activities, becoming a key issue for sharecroppers only once the stark miscarriage of justice

became clear in early May, 1931; as noted earlier, demands for a rural farmers‟ union had begun

pouring into Birmingham in January of that year. The union‟s two disparate raisons d’être

immediately suggest that Alabama sharecroppers were capable, first, of supporting economic

relief for all poor rural workers, as well as advocating the merits of trade unionism as a check on

powerful employers,18

and, second, of unifying around a collective experience (unique, as Cruse

would say, to the United States) of legal injustice and race prejudice to help liberate the

Scottsboro boys. The position of their two respective motivations in relation to the other changed

drastically when local whites decided that the shameful specter of Scottsboro was attracting too

many black farmers to the union. The added benefit to white elites and landowners of a violent

clampdown on the union—a profitable dearth of oversight on tenancy practices—determined the

role local police played in attempting to suppress the union and, ultimately, in the Camp Hill

shootout.

Chief of Police J.M. Wilson and Sheriff Kyle Young, a man with a reputation for

“handling Negro prisoners in a rough manner when making arrests,” had seized CP literature

from the houses of members throughout July, and these attempts to stifle the union culminated in

a concerted effort on the part of the Sheriff and his deputies to break up a July 15 meeting at a

country church located about 6 miles from Camp Hill.19

From seventy to eighty black men and

women had come to the regular meeting to listen to Mack Coads and union organizer Taft

Holmes discuss the CFWU and its plan to support the Scottsboro boys. After arresting union

member Jasper Kennedy for possessing a score of Southern Workers, the posse decided to pump

Tommy Gray‟s family for information. Assault and interrogation of Gray‟s wife, who suffered a

fractured skull from the abuse, yielded only confirmation that the CFWU‟s sole non-economic

platform was the release of the Scottsboro Nine. The crime that justified the assault and beatings,

17

SW, May 16, 1931.

18

Blacks comprised a sizable minority (about 33% of 31,000) in Tallapoosa County, but the region was

almost exclusively bucolic. See Charles S. Johnson, Statistical Atlas of Southern Counties: Listing and

Analysis of Socio-Economic Indices of 1104 Southern Counties (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North

Carolina Press, 1941), 53. White tenant and yeoman farmers abounded, therefore, and it was not an

artificial universalism but a fairly stable terrain of race relations (there had not been a lynching in the

county during the twentieth century) that led black farmers to attempt to include whites in their ranks and

to advocate for rural wage controls and food advances for all farmers. Camp Hill, however, was the most

predominantly black region of the county.

19

James D. Burton, “The Racial Disturbance in Tallapoosa County, Alabama,” mimeo, 1931, p. 2, in

Scottsboro Legal File, Commission for Interracial Cooperation Papers.

10

according to Camp Hill police chief J.M. Wilson, was the possession of literature that

“demanded social equality with the white race, $2 a day for work,” and the admonition to

“‟demand what you want, and if you don‟t get it, take it.‟”20

Despite the violence visited upon union members the previous day, Coads decided on

July 16 to hold another meeting in a vacant house southwest of Camp Hill for the express

purpose of discussing and drafting resolutions condemning the miscarriage of justice in the

Scottsboro trial. He decided to post sentries around the meeting place in case the Camp Hill

Police or the Tallapoosa County Sheriff‟s Office decided to raid the meeting again. And try they

did, acting first to discover the location of Coads‟s scheduled meeting after being tipped off by a

black minister that he was indeed planning “another of his radical meetings.” The traditional

defenders of Southern womanhood beat Estelle Milner senseless to try to find the location and

purpose of the meeting, the former of which she disclosed, before collapsing with a fractured

vertebra, as Mary Church in southwest Camp Hill.21

About a quarter-mile from the vacant house

which doubled as a church, Sheriff Young, Chief Wilson, and his two deputies spotted a figure—

bent over, with a large bundle under one arm and a shotgun slung over the other. The sheriff

pulled the car over to demand revelation of the bundle‟s contents: “none of your damn business,”

came the reply from Ralph Gray.22

When Young reached down to pull out his gun and demanded

that Gray put his hands in the air, Gray unloaded both barrels of his shotgun, spraying birdshot

into the sheriff‟s side and Deputy A.J. Thompson‟s arm. Young fell back into the car as Wilson

and his deputies immediately opened fire on Gray, who fell to the ground before he could reload.

Leaving the bullet-riddled Gray on the side of the road, Chief of Police Wilson rushed the

birdshot-riddled Young back to Camp Hill, screaming to any and all who would listen that

“niggers shot the Sheriff all to pieces” in a gunfight so loud and intense that it “sounded like No

Man‟s Land of more than a decade ago.”23

As a local doctor escorted Young to a nearby hospital

for treatment, Ralph Gray‟s fellow union members carried him to his home, where they along

with Coads and Gray‟s family barricaded themselves inside the house, expecting retaliation from

Young‟s agents. In the end, it was a call placed into town for a doctor that gave the small group

of union members away, and Chief Wilson was duly informed that “the perpetrators” of the

20

Kelley, 41; Birmingham Age-Herald, July 18, 1931; New York Times, July 17, 1931.

21

Milner had disclosed the location of the meeting but withheld its orders of business, knowing as she did

that the specter of a protest against the Alabama justice system would only incite the armed posse to more

violence. The same tipster that informed Sheriff Kyle Young of the gathering, one Rev. E.W. Ellis,

accused Milner of hiding ammunition. See Liberator, October 17, 1931.

22

See Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State

University Press: 1979), 124; Birmingham Age-Herald, July 18-20, 1931; Birmingham News, July 19,

1931.

23

Beecher, “The Sharecroppers‟ Union,” 125; Birmingham Age-Herald, July 20, 1931.

11

violence were gathered at Gray‟s house and that Gray himself was yet alive. Wilson then sent

two ex-officers—J.M. Gantt and A.E. Alford—to finish the job he had started, but, when they

approached Gray‟s house, these two mercenaries were greeted by gunfire “from the negroes in

the shack…and several other negroes…in the woods nearby.”24

Reinforcements arrived in the

form of a fifty-man posse led by Chief Wilson, and officers retired and active fired over five

hundred rounds into the two-room shack. The remaining contingent of union members fired

back, holding them off long enough for everyone but Gray‟s family to escape. When Wilson‟s

posse finally entered Gray‟s home, they found Gray lying in his bed and his family huddled in a

corner, only two of whom, surprisingly, were injured. Although Birmingham‟s newspapers all

reported a variation of what the Age-Herald and News did—namely, that “Gray received wounds

[in the gun battle] that finished him” or that “he died en route to jail”—Gray‟s family witnessed

and reported to historian Robin D.G. Kelley a different denouement, which only the Southern

Worker corroborated. Someone in the posse, Tommy Gray stated, “poked a pistol into Brother

Ralph‟s mouth and shot down his throat.” It is unclear whether Gray was already dead before

this happened, but the posse was not yet satisfied that revenge had been served. They burned

Gray‟s home to the ground and dumped his body on the steps of the Dadeville courthouse.25

The days immediately following the gun battle at Ralph Gray‟s house witnessed large-

scale white paranoia throughout Tallapoosa County, an impulse that consumed local law

enforcement as well as private families determined to protect themselves from “advancing Negro

Reds,” who were thought to be assisting Tallapoosa sharecroppers in their “bloody” revenge

campaign upon white landlords and, predictably, their wives and daughters.26

Within two hours

of Gray‟s death late Thursday night, most white men within twenty miles of Camp Hill had

armed themselves with pistols, sawed-off shotguns, and rifles; about five hundred of these men

spent the early hours of Friday morning patrolling the highways, seeking to round up, injure, or

kill any possible culprit. Most of Friday‟s daylight hours were consumed by the search for the

unknown Communist organizer behind the union (Mack Coads), who had fled all the way to

Atlanta in the short hours since he escaped Gray‟s shack; most black CFWU members who were

in less demand hid out in forests or basements until Saturday evening, when the white posse had

sufficiently revenged itself. Undermining the Party‟s initial claims that working-class starvation

24

Birmingham Post, July 21, 1931.

25

Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 41. According to Sheriff Kyle Young, who was in a hospital at the time of

the shootout at Gray‟s shack, Ralph Gray was alive when they entered his house, taken to jail, and died en

route. See Dadeville Spotcash, July 23, 1931. The pages of the Southern Worker, however, charged

Wilson‟s band of deputies with “murdering Gray in cold blood while he was lying defenseless in bed.”

See Southern Worker, July 25, 1931. Mack Coadss reported to the Worker‟s editor, James S. Allen, a

similar story, stating that “he was killed while lying defenseless in bed.” See James S. Allen, Organizing

in the Depression South: A Communist’s Memoir (Minneapolis, MN: MEP Publications, 2001), 72.

26

Birmingham Age-Herald, July 18, 1931.

12

lay at the crux of the Camp Hill disturbance and that “the Croppers‟ Union…also has white

croppers in its membership,” these palpable fears of a “race war” revealed that the actual tinder

for the Camp Hill explosion was the racially divisive Scottsboro case that the Party‟s legal arm,

the International Labor Defense, was spearheading.

By Saturday evening, the I.L.D. had dozens more black “clients” to defend; 34 union

members had been thrown into the jail at Dadeville, the Tallapoosa County seat—five for the

alleged crime of assault with intent to commit murder, seven for carrying concealed weapons,

and the rest with conspiring to commit a felony, despite the fact that only the deceased Gray had

used violence in a pre-emptory manner.27

Sporting headlines such as, “Further Red Violence

Feared,” local newspapers only threw fuel on the fire; the Birmingham News printed a picture of

the vacant meeting-house accompanied by a specious caption that conjured up images of any

vacant cabin or shack across the Alabama countryside: “this cabin, situated in a lonely, isolated

clearing in the woods…was where the Communist leaders met while a patrol of several hundred

armed negroes guarded the approaches.”28

To the press and most liberals, a small group of

Communist organizers were responsible for the bloodshed, and the “simple” Negroes had merely

been duped by foreign agents seeking to overthrow late capitalism. They accused white

Communists of deluding the sharecroppers and pointed as evidence to the headings of the seized

minutes and notes of the group, which had been labeled, “The Society for the Advancement of

Colored People,” a cover name most likely chosen for its overtones of gradual, docile change.

According to the New York Times, “whites illegally and viciously sought to leave impression

[sic] they represented the NAACP,” employing the “dishonest trick” of using the name “to

mislead authorities and colored people.”29

27

See Southern Worker, August 1, 1931. The other 4 that were arrested (of the total 38) in and around

Camp Hill were sent to “cut stovewood,” in the words of Chief Wilson, a task from which they never

returned. As the Southern Worker put it, “When asked when they would return [from cutting stovewood],

[Wilson] answered, „They have lots to cut.‟ The saying, „cutting stovewood,‟ is an American Fascist

password which means the same as „being taken for a ride.‟ It seems probably that these Negroes have

been beaten or lynched.” Howard Kester of the Fellowship of Reconciliation took a 10-day trip to

Tallapoosa County in August 1931 and reported that several other black union members besides these

unfortunate souls had died from wounds inflicted during the gun battle at Gray‟s shack. See Howard A.

Kester to Walter White, August 15, 1931, Scottsboro Legal File 2, NAACP Papers.

28

Ibid., July 17, 1931; Ibid., July 20, 1931; Birmingham News, July 17, 1931. The Dadeville Spotcash,

however, took a different approach. Charging the Birmingham newspapers with misrepresenting the facts,

the local publication denied the reports that nearly 600 Tallapoosa whites were armed and “deputized” to

find Coads and any other “guilty” blacks. Asserting that no more than 20 men had been “deputized” and

only a few more armed, the Spotcash struck a reconciliatory and, it must be said, sanguine note, praising

the coolness of the local population: “Both races did their part nobly and patriotically…The colored

citizenship of this part of the county…left it to the law to take its course.” See Dadeville Spotcash, July

23, 1931.

29

New York Times, July 18, 1931

13

Attempts to show malicious intentions on the part of the Communists appeared perhaps

predictably in the NAACP‟s reports of the uprising at Camp Hill; in a report to the New York

Times, William Pickens, a field representative for the NAACP, deplored the union members‟

“misfortune of being „share-croppers‟” along with “the further ill-luck of having communist

politicians to come [sic] in and mix politics and the „Scottsboro case‟ with their simple desire to

escape from the condition of being „share-croppers.‟”30

The factual inaccuracy of his statement,

combined with the presumption that members of his own race could only be galvanized by racial

injustice, make Pickens‟s statement representative of the mainstream liberal attitude after Camp

Hill. Pickens was all too willing to blame the specter of Communism for the sharecroppers‟

action, even though he was in actuality laying the blame squarely on one black man: Mack

Coads, the only Party member and Communist organizer working closely with the union at the

time, whose name and face neither the newspapers nor Chief Young‟s armed posses could

ascertain. In other words, the specter of Communism truly was incorporeal. And counter to

Pickens‟ claim, as we have already discussed, was the reality that the Communist editorialists

and leaders did not stress the importance of Scottsboro as the union‟s motivation, preferring to

nominate starvation and destitution; they were concerned with eradicating the liberal notion that

mass action had to be predominantly race-based or saturated with “visibly natural” identity. For

Pickens, bringing the substantial continuities between the injustices done to the boys in Kilby

Prison to bear upon those suffered by Alabama sharecroppers would not bring justice for either

group of oppressed blacks; Communists inherently had “their eagle eye on „world revolution,‟

and therefore” could not see “a mere detail like this.” However, in the collective estimation of

the sharecroppers and their one initial Communist presence, justice could not be won

piecemeal.31

As minorities oppressed politically and socially on the basis of race and economically on

the grounds of class, poor Alabama blacks were hemmed into the box of a respondent. This is

not to deny the creative agency of such minorities but to express that such agency does not occur

on terrain favorable to the oppressed but on terrain defined by the oppressors. Despite the active

heroism of Ralph Gray and the actions of his fellow union members at Camp Hill, it is crucial to

understand that the color of their resistance was defined by the nature of what they were

resisting: violent retaliation for the racially-charged Scottsboro case. In this sense, then, the

30

Ibid.; it is interesting to see how Pickens‟s pride colored his interpretation of the CFWU and his grudge

against Communists. A month before the uprising, on June 7, Pickens gave a speech in Chattanooga at a

NAACP meeting, the purpose of which was to win control of the Scottsboro legal defense from the

Communist-controlled ILD, when Joe Burton, a young black Communist, interrupted his speech to call

him and Walter White “traitors to the Negro masses,” men who were preoccupied with using the

NAACP‟s money to crush the ILD, the only organization with the personnel and wherewithal to free the

wrongfully convicted boys. The Chattanooga Times-Free Press gave Pickens‟s speech flashy headlines:

“Negro Speaker Warns Against Red Campaign; Dr. Pickens Cites Activities in the Scottsboro Case.”. See

Chattanooga Times-Free Press, June 8, 1931; Carter, Scottsboro, 94-6.

31

New York Times, July 18, 1931.

14

protective impulse of Gray and his fellows, the racial and ostensibly nationalistic terrain on

which they took their stand, was not the creative expression of a tenable, international platform

of self-determination or, dare I say it, Black Nationalism, but a protective action (akin to those

taken by Robert F. Williams in Monroe, North Carolina32

) in response to a unified racialization

from which the SCU was twice removed (Scottsboro, then the initiative action of armed whites

against the small all-black union meeting). Although we can say that white fury over Scottsboro

determined the race consciousness of the union members and thus the terrain of their agency, the

actions of Ralph Gray and the CFWU‟s ability to reconstitute itself in the aftermath of the

violence are brave and remarkable acts of determination in themselves. They were not enough,

however, to save the union from further tragedy, which is perhaps the fate of any event or

movement whose existence is contingent upon evading the regional displeasure of the oppressor.

It should not surprise us that this event evinces a strong nationalist character, not just the

militancy of taking one‟s own safety on oneself, but the binarized struggle of white versus black

is always much more dominant in Black Nationalist traditions (Black Power, NOI, etc.). It is also

no surprise that later black radical traditions and the CFWU‟s early struggles share a common

oversight and misunderstanding—that of the place of women in a revolutionary movement and

that of their capacity for leadership. The masculine-centered vision of militant resistance

distorted the true, indispensable roles women played in both eras, and in particular it was the

organizing and correspondence skills of women that grounded much of the CFWU‟s activity. In

both traditions, then, a perpetual need for self-defense seems to have skewed the scale of trait

valuation towards masculine ones, so that when a homogenous group of whites committed a

violent and threatening act against a homogenous group of blacks, the default position left open

time and time again was that purportedly masculine one of militant racial identification and

subsequent violent action (or nationalism, to use Cruse‟s word; or self-determination, to use the

ambivalent phrasing of the CP). Perhaps, then, we should not be surprised that challenges to

pride and immediate threats against life arouse exclusive, protective, nationalistic instincts,

whereas challenges to principle and indirect threats against life (that is, those of economy, or

against property and goods) evoke inclusive and preventative, yet no less sacrificial, instincts.

The defensive nature of the resistance at Camp Hill only affirms this; Gray opened fire first but

only after the violence of the previous day and only after seeing a carful of armed white men

approach the largely defenseless meeting attendees. To summarize, the Scottsboro case along

with the mortal wounding of Ralph Gray clearly and temporarily subordinated whatever class

identity the union members felt to their collective identification with other members of the black

“side” in the binarized struggle forced upon them.

32

See Timothy Tyson, “Robert F. Williams, „Black Power,‟ and the Roots of the Black Freedom

Struggle,” in the Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (September 1998): 540-70.

15

III. The Uprising at Reeltown:

“To stand up for all poor colored farmers—and poor white farmers if they’d join.”33

The ‘baccer ain’t a sellin’,

The corn is dryin’ up,

There ain’t a bit of tellin’,

Where the army o’ worms will sup.

The weevil eats the cotton,

The beetle eats the beans.

Do you think it’s any wonder

There’s nothing in my jeans?34

Far from extinguishing the union‟s Communist flame or suppressing its indigenous black

leadership, the Camp Hill incident merely stunted its initial growth and rendered it more

independent of Communist control. The first order of business for the union to address was

reconstituting itself, for the CFWU‟s name and reputation had been stigmatized, listed as it now

was on Sheriff Young‟s register of “radical, subversive organizations.” On August 6, 1931—just

three weeks after the shootout at Gray‟s house and, significantly, several days before the I.L.D.

secured the release of twenty-two of the jailed sharecroppers—the remaining CFWU members

(numbering around fifty-five) held their first meeting as the Alabama Sharecroppers Union

(SCU) and transformed five of the old CFWU chapters into the first SCU locals.35

From this time

until the spring of 1932, the SCU had only one direct link to the Communist Party: a young New

England organizer who served as liaison, carrying information from the SCU locals to the district

leaders in Birmingham. “Even though we have not sent an organizer down there,” the young

liaison wrote, the union locals “are carrying on the work on their own initiative.”36

Such industry

33

Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1974), 309. Steeling himself to stand up for his destitute friend and neighbor, Ned Cobb resolved to

do something about the rampant economic exploitation of small farmers, and his motivations, as we see

here, are entirely proletarian, removed from racial exclusion or identity. The SCU, in Ned‟s mind, was

designed for this specific purpose—to fight the abuses of landlords and banks. Or, in Ned‟s words: “a

organization is a organization and if I don‟t mean nothing by joinin I ought to keep my ass out of it.”

Lived experience and demonstrated commitment (via membership in the SCU) was sufficient for Ned‟s

act of resistance.

34

Song printed as “The Autumn Blues,” in SW, September 20, 1930.

35

Clyde Johnson [Albert Jackson] to J.R. Butler, July 4, 1935, within “In Memory of Ralph Gray,”

Southern Tenant Farmers‟ Union papers, reel 1, University of Texas at Arlington Library. For the I.L.D.‟s

role in the release of the twenty-two union members on grounds of “insufficient evidence,” see Southern

Worker, August 15,1931.

36

See Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 43.

16

was the result, first, of successful local leadership on the part of Eula Gray (Tommy Gray‟s

daughter and a Young Communist League member), who eventually assumed the role of liaison

and served as ad hoc secretary of the union until May 1932, and, second, of new SCU secretary

Al Murphy, who recognized the need to expand into the heart of the black belt and to take the

union underground.37

The lessons Murphy gleaned from Camp Hill were myriad. SCU members were

instructed not to walk or converse in large groups and not to “face the lights of cars...or use

flashlights.” Meetings were never to be held in vacant houses. The strange interplay between folk

religion and Marxism persisted in the SCU, even after the Camp Hill shootout ruled out the

possibility of using these part-time churches as meetinghouses; under Murphy‟s instruction,

union locals often held Bible study meetings as a cover to discuss union business and plan wage

strikes. Destitute black sharecroppers, it seems, could manipulate Southern society‟s religious

preoccupations to mask their collective “subversion” with docile appearances, while still

indulging themselves in the opiate of the masses. To avoid any repeat of the Camp Hill

“SAACP” fiasco, minutes were rarely kept at meetings, and written records in general were rare.

Although the pages of the Southern Worker encouraged union members to “demand that land be

secured to the Negro and white workers and small farmers who work it,” Murphy was careful to

instruct union members against this kind of abrasive and dangerous action. He did uphold the

Party‟s directive on the use of violence against law enforcement or white mobs, agreeing with a

letter sent from the Party headquarters in Birmingham to a Tallapoosa local: “Never take action

with arms before notifying us first, unless it is impossible to get out of a trap without fire. If ever

the meetings are run in on by a sheriff or other officers, don‟t attempt to hold the meeting next

day or night, or that week.” Yet Murphy‟s horizontal leadership strategy fostered the presence

“of guns of all kinds—shotguns, rifles, and pistols” at SCU meetings, which shared more in

common with radical nationalist meetings than trade union initiatives. And yet the Reeltown

shootout, as we will see, proceeded strictly from class identification, collapsing the false

dichotomy that reserves militant black action solely for radical nationalists and not for the

Marxist, pseudo-integrationist “sheep in wolves‟ clothing.”38

In the meantime, the Communist Party was busy instilling a particular idea within the

working-class (and particularly black) populations of the South; namely, that no worker was safe

37

Eula Gray bequeathed to Murphy a union that had swelled in ranks to 658 members in almost thirty

Tallapoosa County locals and nine Lee County locals. Even in counties where the SCU was

unincorporated, in Chambers and Macon counties, for instance, Murphy could count thirty members

apiece. See James S. Allen, “Communism in the Deep South,” 106-7; Daily Worker, December 31, 1932.

38

SW, February 21, 1931; Dadeville Herald, December 12, 1932; Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik:

Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Liberator Press, Chicago, IL: 1978), 400-02; Cruse,

Negro Intellectual, 169.

17

from, to put it plainly, the increasingly visible encroachments of the capitalist elite upon the

proletariat‟s means of basic subsistence. By appealing to the immediate self-interest of struggling

rural and urban laborers, the Party practiced a fear campaign of sorts, albeit the feared

outcome—starvation and/or destitution—was a fairly likely eventuality. In every Southern city,

wrote the Southern Worker, “[bosses] are cutting down their relief for the unemployed,

pretending that there are plenty of jobs to be had.” In the pages of the Southern Worker as well as

those of the New York-based Daily Worker, warnings of “beware the capitalists” abounded, and

the Party‟s rent strikes in northeastern cities—particularly in New York—only gained

momentum when Party activists took up the cry that “the next eviction, the next unemployed

worker could be you.” Even in the midst of the Camp Hill violence, the CP dutifully asserted that

the clash occurred at a union meeting that was primarily a “protest against starvation wages” and

only secondarily an attempt to draft a Scottsboro resolution to send to Governor Miller, whereas

the priorities at the July 1931 meeting were truly and precisely the reverse.39

In contrast to the

other regional publications, which in the event‟s aftermath tended to exacerbate fears of racial

violence, the Worker chose to attribute the entire event to anti-hunger protests. We can deduce,

therefore, that contrary to prima facie appearances, radical action based on racial grounds

demands that the individual subordinate herself to the group (she is defined by her skin color,

and it is in opposition to that of the Other), whereas class-based action, at least under the regime

of the Party‟s “fear campaign,” seems to demand that one act solely out of consideration for her

own basic needs, which may not be unique but are certainly “individual” in several senses.

Rather than highlight the racial Manicheanism that defined the Camp Hill explosion, the Party

chose therefore to label as its tinder the base, egoistic needs that compelled the sharecroppers to

join the union in the first place; eventual inclusion within the group of capitalist victims was the

only encouraged collective identification. If this strategy seemed artificial in the days after Camp

Hill, then it can be considered absolutely authentic in the case of the Reeltown uprising.

The focal point of Ned Cobb‟s (alias, Nate Shaw) initial dissatisfaction with his life as a

sharecropper was the bank and the mortgage lender, W.S. Parker (or Mr. Watson, as is his alias

in Ned‟s autobiography), as well as the system of capitalist usury that allowed racist

considerations to affect the length and terms of such a loan. He tells the story of the bank‟s

attempt to defraud him, which occurred prior to the violence at Reeltown in 1932. Ned initially

39

See Mauritz Hallgren‟s discussion of the Unemployed Councils in Seeds of Revolt (New York: Alfred

A. Knopf, 1933), 36, 129, 155, 169. Also see Kim Chernin, “In My Mother‟s House,” in Communism in

America: A History in Documents (New York, Columbia University Press: 1997), 136-8. SW, July 25,

1931. Underneath the day‟s main headlines, which, with phrases like, “Croppers Union Fighting Against

Cutting Off Food, For Cash Settlement at Picking,” cannot be called abject lies (for these were indeed the

economic goals of the CFWU—of little importance, however, at the July 16 meeting), underneath news of

Ralph Gray‟s death, the Worker printed a letter “from a Dadeville cropper” purporting to “show why the

croppers of Tallapoosa and Lee counties were organizing.” To Worker editor James S. Allen, the letter

made clear a simple objective: “to obtain something to eat” read his caption, a phrase the paper touted as

the union‟s raison d’etre and the chief purpose of its July 16 meeting.

18

looked to the established banks as a safeguard against the abuses of landowners like Parker, who

not only “fixed a mortgage on my stuff without askin me any odds about it, just fixin it like he

wanted” but also would have succeeded in making Ned sign away all his farmland, animals, and

equipment were it not for the literacy of Ned‟s wife, Hannah, who stepped in at the last minute to

read the loan contract instead of relying on Parker‟s word. And yet the representation of

“unbiased” or “colorblind” capitalism in Ned‟s narrative—a man named Mr. Grace, who treated

Ned fairly for one year as the latter paid off his loan at the bank—ultimately capitulated to the

will of local elites like Parker: “The note I just paid the bank, paid Mr. Grace, and he handed it to

Mr. Watson [Parker]. O it hurt me so bad—the note weren‟t any good to the man, he couldn‟t

collect a dime on it…that showed me what Watson wanted from me—his plans was naked as a

baby.” Such instances in Ned‟s past shaped his role in the Reeltown confrontation, an exchange

of gunfire between SCU members and local law enforcement, with the latter bent on executing

the will of white landowners and creditors rather than that of their own hallucinated racial

superiority.40

According to Clyde Johnson, who in the mid-1930s attempted to integrate the SCU and

H.L. Mitchell‟s Southern Tenant Farmer‟s Union, Reeltown in 1932 “had become one of the

strongest sections of the union with the most fearless comrades.” Clifford James, the leader of

the Reeltown local, along with Al Murphy, the new secretary of the SCU, were careful to hold

meetings in occupied (as opposed to vacant) houses, and they even developed a strategy for note-

taking whereby they would underline sentences or portions of text in the Bible. Both men

evidently succeeded in cultivating a feeling of mutual striving against the abuses of landlords and

banks; according to Ned, at union meetings of the Reeltown local, “we was taught…that when

trouble comes, stand up for one another. Whatever we was goin to do…we was goin to do it

together.”41

James previously had been denied credit by merchants, and his landlord, to whom he

had been making regular payments with interest until the price of cotton dropped to six cents per

pound, refused to allow him to defer a year‟s payment. Although James had taken out the loan in

1924 to purchase the farm on which he had been sharecropping, his landlord—the very same

W.S. Parker—announced in December 1932 that James still owed all the principal and about half

as much in addition for advances on food and tools. In other words, he was fifty percent further

from owning his farm than he was eight years earlier when he made his first payment, and James

was, by all accounts, a well-off tenant farmer (and a tenant he was in all but name only).42

It was

40

Nate Shaw, 266-270.

41

Nate Shaw, 304.

42

Harold Preece, “Epic of the Black Belt,” Crisis (March 1936), 75; Beecher, “The Sharecroppers

Union,” 127-8. James had pairs of several different livestock, and he had even owned an automobile for a

short time before Parker‟s refusal to advance him the money for a license forced him to part with the

luxury.

19

not long after this announcement when Ned began to hear whispers that James was not the only

black farmer on whom Parker had designs. Whispers were heard around Notasulga and nearby

Reeltown, rumors prophesying that “[Parker] goin to take all [Ned Cobb] got this fall and all

[Clifford James]—he goin to take everything they got.” A deliberate effort, it seemed to Ned,

was being made to ruin the leading organizers of the union, and the Notasulga police only

sedimented this impression more thoroughly when they raided James‟s house in early December

in a successful attempt to find radical literature. If landlords and police were working together to

impoverish the union‟s most dedicated members, then Ned had little choice but to lend a hand

when he knew that James‟s livestock would indeed be the target of the rumored “taking;” “I

knowed,” recounted Ned, “I was goin to be next.”43

The tension was ostensibly diffused on Saturday, December 17, 1932, when Parker

himself arrived at Clifford James‟s house to demand a year‟s payment of his loan and departed

after agreeing to accept a partial payment from James that Monday. Yet the compromise seemed

a little too good to be true, and later in the day James learned from a neighboring tenant farmer

that Parker had authorized Deputy Sheriff Elder to seize his cows and mules. As the poet John

Beecher put it, “to take [James‟s] livestock was to render him impotent to farm, to drive him,

ruined and destitute, from the community he was troubling.”44

As Ned Cobb approached James‟s

house on Monday morning, after learning two nights before of Parker‟s plan to serve a writ of

attachment on James‟s livestock, he spotted a small crowd at the head of which stood Elder and

two young black men, who had been recruited to ride the mules ahead of the cows back to

Parker‟s ranch. Ned decided to test the waters: “What‟s the matter here? What‟s this all about?”

“I‟m goin to take all old [Clifford James] got this morning,” came Elder‟s reply. Ned,

attempting “by the union‟s orders” to act humbly and “in a way of virtue,” pleaded with Elder to

reconsider.

“Please, sir, don‟t take it. Go to the ones that authorized you to take his stuff, if you

please, sir, and tell em to give him a chance. He‟ll work to pay what he owes em.”

“I got orders to take it,” said Elder, unmoved, “and I‟ll be damned if I aint goin to take

it.”

“Well, if you take it, I‟ll be damned if you don‟t take it over my dead body,” Ned cried

defiantly, steeling himself by thinking, “Somebody got to stand up…or we niggers in this

country are easy prey.”

Sensing the resistance to his directive growing, Elder tried to invoke racial identification

by conjuring the specter of Sheriff Kyle Young, the man responsible for Ralph Gray‟s death:

“I‟ll just go and get [Kyle Young]; he‟ll come down there and kill the last damn one of you. You

know how he is; when he comes in, he comes in shooting.”

43

Nate Shaw, 295; Birmingham Age-Herald, December 20, 1932; Nate Shaw, 306.

44

Beecher, “The Sharecroppers‟ Union,” 128.

20

Although they all knew “that [Young] was a bad fellow,” Ned did not rise to this

provocation, choosing instead to force the deputy away with a calm response: “Go ahead and get

[Young], I‟ll be here when he comes.”

It was at this point that James found his voice, chiming in, “You nor Sheriff Young nor

all his deputies is gonna get them mules.”45

At this, Elder summoned the two young black boys, climbed into the car with them, and

drove away from James‟s house. Ned knew where he was headed—to Dadeville, the county seat,

to report the morning‟s events to Sheriff Young. After Cobb confided his suspicions with James,

the latter sent his wife and children away to the house of a nearby union member—John

McMullen, who joined James and Cobb at the former‟s house, along with several other “scared”

union members —to keep them safe in the event that Elder made good on his threat. Although

Ned seemed determined to defend his friend‟s possessions, he didn‟t know the specifics of “how

much [James] owed…or if he owed any at all.” But, Ned recounted, “that weren‟t the issue with

me. I was forced that year to face what was happenin.”46

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, at about twelve-thirty or one o‟clock, Ned spotted

“the same car that left there that morning” creeping up the gravel to Clifford James‟s house.

Inside it rode a deputy from Dadeville as well as Deputy Sheriff Elder who, in lieu of an

unusually gun-shy Sheriff Young, had recruited as reinforcements the same two ex-police

officers—Gantt and Alford—who first rained bullets on Gray‟s shack in Camp Hill. Although

several of James‟s friends came to his house with protective intentions—armed variously with

game shotguns and old civil war muskets—every one of them, including James himself, upon

hearing Ned‟s alert, “runned out of there like rats runnin out of a woodpile, and all of em…run

out the back…, gone to the swamps and woods where the sheriffs couldn‟t see em,” everyone

save Ned Cobb.47

Armed with nothing but a .32 Smith and Wesson, Nate stood his ground as the

four men positioned themselves around him and James‟s house. After an awkward silence in

which both Ned and Elder‟s posse did nothing but stare menacingly at one another, the

sharecropper slowly tried to back from the porch into James‟s house. One of the ex-officers

45

The interlocution here is my own, and all quotes are taken from Nate Shaw, 305-8, with the exception

of James‟s, which was reported in the Birmingham News, December 20, 1931. To understand the

desperation of the sharecroppers, we must keep in mind that the price of cotton in 1932 was six cents per

pound, that the average tenant farmer could bale anywhere from 6 to 10 pounds of cotton per day, and

that the average price of a pound of meat was forty cents. The Alabama Department of Agriculture

predicted that one-half of all tenant farmers would starve during the winter of 1931-2. See Allen,

Organizing in the Depression South, 70.

46

Nate Shaw, 310. In his own words, Ned could not remain “under the whip” of landowners and

creditors, language that explicitly evokes the image of economic slavery rather than racial inferiority. See

Nate Shaw, 317.

47

Nate Shaw, 309, 311; Birmingham Post, December 20, 1932.

21

attempted to seize Ned‟s arm, and, reacting with no uncalled for aggression, Ned “flung him

loose” from his arm and continued moving slowly into the house for cover. Before he reached

the threshold, the ex-officer had fired three shotgun blasts into Ned‟s upper legs and hip.

Managing to make it into the hallway of James‟s house, he turned and fired his entire clip at the

closest two members of the posse, all of whom immediately sought cover behind trees in James‟s

yard and then fled while he reloaded. “I don‟t know how many people they might have thought

was in that house,” Ned mused several decades later, “but that .32 Smith and Wesson was barkin

too much for em to stand.”48

Limping away from James‟s house and into the surrounding fields, grimacing not only

from the lead in his body but also at the sight of John McMullen‟s lifeless corpse, Ned noticed

four or five union members who had armed themselves and were proceeding towards the source

of the gunshots.49

They decided to stay in the fields to prevent any further trouble, and Ned

slowly made his way home to ensure the safety of his family. Seeing the severity of his wounds,

Ned‟s son immediately drove him to Tuskegee hospital while his wife tended as best she could to

his wounds. Since SCU secretary Al Murphy had given strict orders for members to conceal their

relationship with the union, Ned elected not to tell the doctors the true story of how he sustained

the wounds, chalking them up instead to “a riot between the blacks and whites”—a believable

story, especially given the violence of the year before. Despite their sympathy for Ned‟s plight

and their diligent work removing the pellets from his lower body, the black doctors refused to

admit him for the night, fearing white reprisals. Ned‟s wife, Hannah, then hid him in nearby

Macon County at the house of her cousin, resolving to leave Ned there, return to Reeltown,

gather their children, and hide out at the house of union member Judson Simpson, which was

located about a mile from James‟s house. Before safely arriving at Simpson‟s, Hannah disclosed

Ned‟s location to her brother, Milo Bentley, who promptly left Reeltown to join Ned at Chehaw,

in Macon County. That same day, Tuesday, several separate armed bands of whites, many of

which were led by police officers, began the task of apprehending black union members (local

police had discovered a partial membership list in an exhaustive search of James‟s place that was

conducted early Tuesday morning). A posse of armed whites caught up with Ned‟s son and

threatened to drown him if he did not tell them where his father was hiding; Vernon Cobb was

spared, but only at the expense of putting bloodthirsty vigilantes onto his father‟s trail.

That same night, a despondent Ned upbraided Milo Bentley for foolishly endangering

himself. “You have no business comin down here,” Ned told him; “they goin to rally and raise

the devil and shoot folks and kill em til they find me, and now you here too.” Ned fully

understood the consequences of resisting the institutions of capital, giving no quarter to the

48

Nate Shaw, 312.

49

McMullen had been trying to escape from the fields behind James‟s house to his nearby home when

one of the ex-officers who had surrounded Cobb at the house noticed McMullen crawling away from the

scene via a ditch. He shot him on sight. See Birmingham World, January 7, 1933.

22

prospect that his near-fatal scrape with Notasulga and Reeltown police was sufficient blood

tribute for his defiance. Annoyance at Milo‟s being there quickly turned to alarmed concern

when his brother-in-law heard cars roll up to the house; Ned immediately urged Milo to flee to

the nearby woods, for, although Milo was not among those who had fled James‟s house, Ned had

the sinking feeling that the approaching posse would overlook that fact when exacting their

vengeance. Instead of giving Ned his gun and concealing himself in the nearby copse, Milo ran

out “the far side” of the house, firing wildly at the police officers as he ran and falling quickly to

the ground as they responded with dozens of bullets.50

Once the loud blasts of Bentley‟s breech-

loader expired, Ned knew the posse would come for him next, and that they did, but, instead of

taking revenge through violent or extralegal means, they transported him to the Macon County

jail (and to lend an air of legitimacy to their actions, they brought Bentley‟s fatally wounded

body along as well), thereby delegating vengeance to Alabama‟s justice system. After three days,

Ned was transported away from the dying Milo Bentley, who was refused medical care, to the

Dadeville jail, where he was joined on charges of assault with a deadly weapon by Judson

Simpson, who had been beaten severely when it was discovered that Ned‟s wife had taken refuge

in his home, a white farmer named Alfred White, who had sympathetically intervened to save

Simpson from death by blunt force trauma, and Sam and Clinton Moss, two union members who

had also not fired a shot throughout the entire uprising. All five were convicted of assault with a

deadly weapon, with Ned receiving the harshest sentence of twelve to fifteen years and Sam

Moss receiving the shortest with five to six years. Ned had to count his barn and much of his

farm equipment among his losses, because his family “was runned off that place” in the days

after Ned‟s arrest and “a riot crowd came to get what I had.” As for Clifford James, he suffered

the same fate as Bentley—death in jail because of insufficient medical care.51

Although the Communist Party had certainly taken the blame for Camp Hill—one

editorial called Party leaders “pied pipers” leading astray the simple, trusting blacks with “wily

words”— the ultimate blame for that uprising, in the estimation of ordinary whites and

newspapers alike, lay with the “black Communist evangelists” whose responsibility it was “to

disarm any belief the rank and file [of Negroes] may entertain that these Reds…are their

friends.”52

Those guilty of, in an ironic play of words, failure “to disarm” were certain

Birmingham black ministers as well as Communist organizers and politicians. However, the

white outcry against members of their own race—against, for instance, James S. Allen,

managing editor of the Southern Worker, or the attorneys of the ILD., who “were paid with Jew

gold” to secure the release of the Scottsboro “rapists” and the Reeltown “murderers”—reached a

50

Nate Shaw, 315.

51

Nate Shaw, 324; Jim Mallory (Elizabeth Lawson), “What the Dadeville Trial Means,” SW, May 20,

1933.

52

“The Affair at Dadeville May be a Needed Lesson,” Birmingham News, editorial, July 18, 1931;

Birmingham News, July 18, 1931.

23

fever pitch in the days after the shootout. Such consternation about “growing converts to

Communism” was heard and such an outcry against “radical ideas” made that the state

legislature breathed new life into an old proposal to ban the Communist Party in Alabama, and

this was to augment an already extant law that empowered “police to pick up any militant worker

and send him to the chain gang for „vagrancy.‟”53

Irvin Schwab, the ILD lawyer who took up

Ned Cobb‟s case, was repeatedly denied access to his client and reported death threats to any

newspaper that would listen. “Oh, they hated him,” remembered Ned, and he could tell Schwab

was a friend because of the treatment he received at the hands of Ned‟s guards. Furthermore, in

the aftermath of Ned‟s resistance, posses of “concerned” white citizens again formed, only this

time not to lynch or maim—despite Sheriff Kyle Young‟s promise “to get every Negro that

runs”—but to question local blacks, unearth Communist literature, glean evidence for legal

action against suspected Reds, and expose leaders in the white community. So complete was

their faith in the ability of the courts to exact racial justice that posse members contented

themselves with invading privacy rather than taking life, which is not to say that their actions

were not violent. Although perhaps less fearful for their lives, Reeltown union members suffered

imprisonment when these inquiries and searches bore fruit; for Communist activities or

sympathies, twelve blacks, in addition to those held in the Dadeville jail for assault with a deadly

weapon, were arrested and incarcerated on charges of vagrancy and disseminating propaganda.54

Several liberal publications of the day painted a romanticized portrait of the Reeltown

confrontation as an example of “Negroes fighting a courageous battle…comparable to any event

in the pioneer saga,” and local newspapers as well as conservative publications similarly had no

qualms about aggrandizing the role of black union members in the uprising, feverishly estimating

anywhere from fifteen to one hundred armed Negro participants in the uprising at James‟s

house.55

These publications clearly did a disservice to Ned Cobb: as at Camp Hill, one man took

direct offensive action, and the members of an entire community were left to parry reprisals from

an enraged white citizenry. While union members may not have stood their ground alongside

Ned at James‟s house, they were not afraid to show support for their friends and neighbors at

trial (in fact, the Dadeville courthouse had trouble accommodating all the black farmers who

attended Ned‟s trial), and blacks took an active interest in the proceedings despite their

wholesale exclusion from all of the juries. Many union members, therefore, evinced solidarity

with their family and friends as an “underground” form of retaliation after the violence, whereas

53

Editorial, Birmingham News, December 20, 1931. The bill was first proposed in March of 1931, failed

to receive a majority vote in the Alabama legislature, and was then re-invigorated in the aftermath of

Reeltown. See SW, February 14, March 14, 1931.

54

Nate Shaw, 324-7; Birmingham News, December 20, 1932; Birmingham Post, December 20-21, 1932.

55

Preece, “Epic of the Black Belt,” 75; Birmingham News, December 24, 1932; Birmingham Post,

December 20, 1932.

24

Ralph Gray‟s family and friends came to his protection before his death in an attempt to deter

white retaliation. And yet the site of Gray‟s abasement—the steps of the Dadeville courthouse—

became the place where the overflow crowd from Cobb‟s trial congregated in support of him. If

Ralph Gray fits the criteria of racial nationalism because his instincts were protective, centered

on the defense of an unarmed meeting of black workers who were discussing the racial injustice

of Scottsboro, then Ned Cobb is quite definitely a Marxist, questioning the claims of the

bourgeois to control wages and defending neither family nor race—giving voice, instead, to a

wholesale aversion to economic exploitation. As a neglected editorial read in the Birmingham

Post, “The causes of the trouble are essentially economic rather than racial. The resistance of the

Negroes at Reeltown against the officers seeking to attach their livestock on a lien bears a close

parallel to the battles fought in Iowa and Wisconsin between farmers and sheriffs‟ deputies

seeking to serve eviction papers. A good many farmers, ground down by the same relentless

economic pressure from which the Negroes were suffering, expressed sympathy with the

Negroes‟ desperate plight, although thoroughly disapproving of their resistance to the law.”

Although this author then proceeded with the rote indictment of Communist leadership and

ideals in the corruption of the area‟s poor black farmers, the editorial puts in stark relief the

“universal” nature of Ned‟s suffering and consequent defiance, of his “armed resistance to the

legalized robbery” perpetrated “by landlords and merchants,” as perhaps suited the Party better

than the Post could have imagined.56

As the white response reveals, when poor blacks were uniting under the banner of class

instead of race, their agency was denied all the more, because it seemed unnatural to whites for

destitute black sharecroppers (or at least one: Ned Cobb) to reject so violently and with such

comprehension the capitalist benchmarks of usury and predatory lending. And in a certain sense

they were right, for it is unlikely that Ned would have acted as he did without the inspiration and

solidarity the union (and, by extension, the Party) inculcated. Many of the ideas were present in

their platform, particularly that of “the abolition of all debts owed by poor farmers and tenants,

as well as interest charged on necessary items such as clothing, food, and seed,” a platform that

the SCU added to its agenda as a result of debates within the Party‟s National Negro

Commission.57

But to act, to stake one‟s life on the well-being of someone else, to make the

Other a self-referential term so that immovable solidarity seems the only logical option in the

face of economic repossession—such dicta do not proceed from the Party, and there is no

scapegoat or external source for such motives. It was not Ned‟s budding Marxist ideas but his

determined resolve and defiance that unsettled Tallapoosa whites so thoroughly, causing them to

shift blame from mere writers and preachers to the only culprits they could indict: the “race-

56

Beecher, “The Sharecroppers Union,” 130-1; Birmingham Post, December 20, 1932; Harry Haywood,

Sept. 1933, The Communist).

57

Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 49.

25

mixing” Communist Party and the ILD., whose wholesale absence from public life was white

Alabama‟s only antidote to its collective guilt for wage slavery and racism.

IV. Ideology Contra Lived Experience

By 1933, the SCU claimed 3,000 members, its growth unhindered by either gun battle.

Faced with large-scale evictions resulting from New Deal acreage reduction policies,

sharecroppers flocked to the union. By 1935, the SCU claimed 12,000 members, only about

2,500 of whom lived outside Alabama.58

The violence of its formative years was never replicated

or equaled, since the SCU eventually went on to incorporate with Clyde Johnson and the

Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Although most of those who joined the union were victims of

mass evictions, the SCU led a series of strikes by cotton pickers in Tallapoosa, Montgomery, and

Lee counties. Attempts to recruit white farmers to the cause persisted, but to little avail. By 1934,

the SCU had failed to recruit a single white, dues-paying member, and the Party‟s attempt to

form an all-white Tenants League failed miserably.

The conflict at Reeltown, in retrospect, was an example of the powerful class

identification that pervaded the lives of poor blacks in Depression-era Alabama, an identification

in this case based on shared membership in the SCU and a shared experience (from Ned‟s past)

of economic exploitation at the hands of capitalist lenders; in fact, Ned identifies the same man

as his creditor and James‟s—W.S. Parker, a wealthy storeowner and landowner in Tallapoosa

County. Whereas Camp Hill exploded because of violence by a band of whites against a group of

peaceably assembled blacks, Reeltown serves as an example of militant, even offensive

resistance to the exigencies of late capitalism, a confrontation provoked, at least directly, by the

indignation of a black farmer (and his reluctant friends). Rather than as the “passive,” vicarious

recipient of retaliation for the racial offenses “committed” on that train at Paint Rock, Ned Cobb

can only be classified as the freest of Depression-era black agents precisely because his action

did not refer to skin color but to the unethical and ostensibly artificial practices of American

capitalism, one of which—perhaps the most palpable for Ned—has been its alacrity for

employing skin color as justification for the extraction of human surplus value.

58

Rural Worker, Vol. I, No. 5 (December 1935), 4; Preece, “Epic of the Black Belt,” 92. In a speech at a

1933 Party conference in New York, Al Murphy commemorated the union‟s first anniversary by

corroborating the Rural Worker’s black membership statistics but denying that any whites had joined the

SCU. “We have been able to organize between 2,000 to 3,000 members,” Murphy declared. “Out of all of

these members, we have not been able to organize one single white farmer.” See Al Murphy,

“Achievements and Tasks of the Sharecroppers Union,” in Communism in America, 142-3. The white

members in question either joined after the Spring of 1933, or they were not “white farmer members” but

simply friends of the union or industrial workers in the Birmingham area. In any case, it is certain that

women were among the majority of these “members,” sometimes attending SCU meetings or writing

editorials to the Southern Worker. By 1934, the standard of proof was sufficiently met for white vigilantes

to indict one of their own race for Communist “race-mixing;” white Tallapoosa County tenant farmer

J.W. Davis was kidnapped and lynched by a posse of almost fifteen whites for his support of the SCU.

See Daily Worker, June 11, July 7, 1934.

26

Camp Hill can be called an expression of Black Nationalism or racial identity, but only

insofar as it was a response to threats first posed by members of the majority group, whose

motives were explicitly racial. Reeltown, however, demonstrated the opposite, namely that class

solidarity was sufficient to initiate an overthrow of the visibly artificial mode of capitalist usury

that I have opposed to race or skin color, which seem visibly natural. And yet the motives for

this overthrow were not purely organic to Ned, consistently reminded as he was by the Party‟s

dictum that no worker, and especially no black sharecropper, was safe from the destitution

wrought by the white elite. Whether we understand Ned as profoundly concerned about his own

eventual well-being or the immediate welfare of his neighbor and union friend, the fact remains

that, despite the ostensibly more universal nature of class identification, the poor black masses of

rural Alabama defended their union, its members, and their economic interests out of a

situational adherence to both ideologies and a loyal allegiance to neither—as ideology and Cruse

would require.

27

Bibliography

PRIMARY

Newspapers/Periodicals:

Birmingham Age-Herald, 1931-2

Birmingham News, 1931-2.

Birmingham Post, 1931-2.

Birmingham World, 1933.

Chattanooga Times-Free Press, 1931.

Dadeville Herald, 1932.

Dadeville Spotcash, 1931.

Daily Worker, 1932, 1934.

The Liberator, 1931.

New York Times, 1931-2.

Preece, Harold. “Epic of the Black Belt.” In Crisis 38, March, 1936.

Rural Worker, Vol. I, No. 5, December 1935.

Southern Worker, 1930-2.

Correspondence:

Papers of the NAACP, Reel 6, Scottsboro Legal File, 1931-1950. Library of Congress,

Washington D.C.

Commission on Interracial Cooperation Papers, 1919-1944. Robert Woodruff Library, Atlanta

University Center, Atlanta, GA.

Southern Tenant Farmers' Union Collection, AR164, Box 2, Special Collections, The University

of Texas at Arlington Library.

28

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Allen, James S. Organizing in the Depression South: A Communist’s Memoir. Minneapolis, MN:

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SECONDARY

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