Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality.

A history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora in the twentieth century. Focusing on the visions of activists from C. L. R. James to Aimé Césaire and Malcolm X, Kelley writes of the hope that Communism offered, the mindscapes of Surrealism, the transformative potential of radical feminism, and of the four-hundred-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow.

An autobiography of Harry Haywood, the son of former slaves who became a leading member of the Communist Party USA and a pioneering theoretician on the Afro-American struggle.

Written by Jewish schoolteacher Abel Meeropol and sang and popularized by Billie Holiday, this powerful protest song was a mournful ode to racial injustice and the Black victims of lynchings in the Jim Crow-era South.

An article and historical analysis by Bob Wing, long time organizer and founding editor of ColorLines, on conceptual approaches to understanding the relationship between the State and white supremacy.

Harry Haywood, as a Black communist organizer in the 1920s - 1950s, saw the rise of the Soviet Union to a global power, fought fascists in Spain, and helped shift the line of the entire Communist Party towards one of national self-determination for the oppressed Black people of the United States.

A Jamaican poet and prominent contributor to the Harlem Renaissance. He worked with the Universal Negro Improvement Association and was politically active, having traveled to the Soviet Union to attend the Communist Party's Fourth Congress.

DuBois in Black Reconstruction in America (1935) famously argues that whiteness served as a “public and psychological wage,” providing poor whites in the nineteenth and early twentieth century a valuable social status bound to their categorization as “not-black.” This social order built on racial subordination in the late 19th century South militated against interracial class solidarities.

Cedric J. Robinson, professor and author of Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition is considered a pioneer in study of the Black Radical Tradition. His works deconstruct racial capitalism, white supremacy, Blackness in popular culture, and more.

a system of relationships between the state, foundations, owning classes, and non-profit/NGO social service organizations. This system results in a strategy for social movements based on replicating capitalist systems as opposed to challenging them, diverting public money through foundations; and monitoring dissent to make non-profit goals palatable to big business

the dominant ideology of modern capitalism over the last three decades, involving state non-intervention in the economy, widespread privatization, and the set of state policies that go with it. Emerging out of the debt crisis of the 1980’s, it has, on a global scale, “pushed social and economic life from public to private hands, weakening national sovereignty in the defense against imperialism” (International Week of Anti-Imperialist Struggle)

The African Blood Brotherhood was a radical black liberation organization with ties to the Communist Party, estimated around 3000 members. Founded by Cyril Briggs in 1919, members of A.B.B. went on to be key early Black cadre of the Communist Party, enabling it to recruit a base of thousands and thousands of Black members in the 1930s and 1940s, and to lead a militant struggle for Black liberation in those decades. (Source)

an attitude, conceptual apparatus, or set of empirical beliefs that frame Europe as the primary engine and architect of world history, the bearer of universal values and reason, and the pinnacle and therefore model of progress and development; it’s intimately tied to a history of colonial and imperial encounters (Source)

a body of thought, organizational activities, and aspect of black nationalism that refers to the economic, racial and political policies of Universal Negro Improvement Association-ACL founder Marcus Garvey. It was a Black nationalist perspective seeking separate self-development of African-Americans and taught that Black Americans would be respected only when they were economically strong, calling for an independent Black economy within the framework of white capitalism.

a system of colonialism in which settlers violently established colonial societies while expelling or killing indigenous communities. In today’s United States, this process also involved forced migration of enslaved Africans to serve as the primary labor force. Other modern states considered to have been established through settler colonialism include Canada, Australia, South Africa, and Israel. (Source: The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism by Gerald Horne)