Building a Movement: American Communist Activism in the Communities, 1929-1945

In the mid-1930s, as communist community activism reached a peak, Birmingham organizer Hosea Hudson was less concerned with organizing communist-led unions as an alternative to AFL and SPA-led unemployment councils than he was with organizing churches and civic groups throughout the city against the social pillars of racism and discrimination. The local Birmingham district Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) functioned much like other Party clubs in cities without a strong industrial working base in that it was simply given orders from larger districts such as Detroit, New York, and Chicago, to get active in “mass organizations.” The way Hudson saw it, however, it was not always so easy to implement such a plan. He found that white Birmingham citizens “didn’t have no mass organization to go to, only into the unions [sic].” Black citizens, however, had their churches, their singing groups, their book clubs, and their local NAACP; many of which had cross membership, which was important to Hudson in terms of reaching out to the black community. Because of the circumstances, Hudson understood that to be an effective political force, American communists needed to direct their attention into organizing workers in a manner that paralleled rallying communities behind specific issues, such as racism. This more community-oriented struggle was unique to non-industrial towns throughout the South such as Birmingham where communists nevertheless had a presence, in addition to other areas where the ethnic tensions of workforces surfaced to be predominant barriers to organizing tactics, such as Detroit, Chicago, New York, as well as the agricultural fields of Texas and California. The community world of American Communism was distinguished from the labor world through its emphasis on local politics, culture, unemployment relief, and ending racial discrimination either a priori to or in tandem with tactics for organizing local workforces. Communist community organizer’s fight against evictions promoted large progressive reform and activism through the lens of grassroots community politics. More importantly, only by examining the individual experiences of communists in their respective communities, removed from the organizational politics of the CPUSA, Communist League of America (CLA), Communist Party (Opposition) (CP(O)) and the Workers’ Party of the United States (WPUS), can we see these varied experiences and how it links grassroots organizers together instead of separating them ideologically.