Hammer and Hoe describes the Communist Party's role in the efforts to win racial equality in the south, specifically in highly segregated Alabama, working for racial, economic, and political reforms. A 25th anniversary edition, with a new preface, was published in 2015. Kelley published Hammer and Hoe with the University of North Carolina Press in 1990. As a young organizer, Kelley worked to pressure the University of California system to divest from its holdings in South Africa and simultaneously became interested in radical black organizing in the US, specifically the Communist Party in Alabama, which became the topic of his dissertation and then the book. Kelley developed Hammer and Hoe during graduate school in the 1980s in a climate of activism, including the protests against police violence in Liberty City, Florida, Harold Washington’s election as Mayor of Chicago, and the growing presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson. The book won several prizes and was republished in a 25th anniversary edition in 2015. In particular Hammer and Hoe describes the way black workers brought existing traditions of resistance to racial oppression to their development of a unique version of Marxism. It describes labor, racial and social history in Alabama during the Great Depression, focusing on black communist organizing. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression is a 1990 book on U.S.
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