Communism and Racial Equality in the South

We've had an eye on the historian Robin D.G. Kelley since...well, not just since we read his book on Thelonious Monk last year, but since we had first discovered--many years ago--Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism (Kelley wrote the introduction to the most recent edition).

When a few links to an NPR program on "How 'Communism' Brought Racial Equality to the South" popped up in the feeds today (not to mention on I Cite), we figured that Kelley must have been involved in some form. When I thought I'd make a joke about how some Republican hack was going to find this out and turn it into one of those rousing primary non-issues (LOOK! NPR IS PUSHING COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA!), I discovered that the interview is originally from February 2010. 

It's a short reminder (in fact a discussion of Kelley's Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression) that the Communist Party played an important role in organizing civil rights struggle in the 1930s, and something to think about as the Occupy movement reorganizes for 2012.

Prof. KELLEY: In 1928, the communist position internationally was that African-Americans in the South have the right to self-determination. Meaning: they have the right to create their own nation in the South. In this position that came out of Moscow, it came from other black communists around the globe.

And with that idea in mind, they sent two organizers to Alabama and they went to Birmingham. And they chose Birmingham because it was probably the most industrialized city in the South. And they went there thinking they would organize white workers. And from white workers, black workers would follow. But no white workers had come forward.

And so, the first two organizers was a guy named James Julio(ph), who was a Sicilian worker who had migrated to Alabama, and another guy named Tom Johnson(ph), and together they went out looking for white workers and black workers came.

And black workers came in fairly large numbers right away because to them, they had a memory of reconstruction, the memory of the Civil War. And in that kind of collective memory, they were told that one day the Yankees will come back and finish the fight. Well, when they saw these white communists, they said, oh, good, the Yankees are here. We cant wait to join.

And it was no small part of the movement:

Prof. KELLEY: Well, theres a couple of ways to think about this. One, in terms of actual dues-paying members, they never had more than 600, 700. But then, if you look at all the other auxiliary organizations, the International Labor Defense, which focused on civil rights issues, they had up to 2,000. The Sharecroppers Union had up to 12,000. You had the International Workers Order. You had the League of Young Southerners. You had the Southern Negro Youth Congress. If you add up all these organizations, it touched the lives easily of 20,000 people.

Finally, the moral:

MARTIN: Hmm. So, what would you hope people would take away from all the work that youve done, documenting this history?

Prof. KELLEY: Well, first what I really emphasize is the fact that these were ordinary people, most of whom could not read or write, who were able to, on their own, form a very strong and productive movement that saw not just black peoples problems, but all peoples problems as connected. They saw joblessness and Civil Rights, and the right not be raped or lynched, self-protection - that all these things are part of one big struggle. And they really did succeed in building an interracial movement. Even if the whites were in the minority, those whites were there with them. And that vision, that ordinary people can make change, was a legacy they left us.

Revisiting Monk, Rethinking Césaire

It's January 3rd, and it's also time to break our silence here at the Notes Taken. As many of you have experienced, the winter holidays are a slow time if your calendar is oriented around academia. It's a good time to put off things you don't want to do (like correcting exams), even if it is also necessary to delay starting any new projects.

And regarding books, the calendar new year doesn't mean much. Our new year is much closer to the release of Spring catalogs.

Nevertheless, the start of 2010 will perhaps allow me to revisit a theme that I discussed last year. In October I wrote that

Biographies of musicians, even in jazz, can be a mixed bag. Reviewing for the New York Times, August Kleinzahler writes that Robin D.G. Kelley,

the author of “Race Rebels” and other books, makes use of the “carpet bombing” method in this biography. It is not pretty, or terribly selective, but it is thorough and hugely effective. He knows music, especially Monk’s music, and his descriptions of assorted studio and live dates, along with what Monk is up to musically throughout, are handled expertly. The familiar episodes of Monk’s career are all well covered.

In retrospect, I should have written that I find both biographies and music journalism a mixed bag, but I chose to point readers toward Kelley's new bio of Monk instead. Kleinzahler, as shown by the choice of the 'carpet bombing' metaphor seems overwhelmed with the material. Fortunately, David Yaffa has reviewed the same book for The Nation, and he pronounces a stronger verdict:

Robin D.G. Kelley's exhaustive, necessary and, as of now, definitive Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original offers a Baedeker of sorts. Jazz may be filled with fascinating characters, but it has inspired relatively few exemplary full-length biographies. (Among the exceptions are David Hajdu's Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn; John Chilton's Sidney Bechet: The Wizard of Jazz; Linda Kuehl's unfinished With Billie, assembled by Julia Blackburn after Kuehl's death; and John Szwed's So What: The Life of Miles Davis.) Kelley is, in many ways, a rarity. While many music journalists write amateur history, Kelley is an eminent historian at the University of Southern California.

I highly recommend reading Yaffa's review, and the others he has written for The Nation. He's engaging and not afraid to through the reader for a loop or two (see his piece on Ornette Coleman), while striking the often difficult economy of prose required for reviewing books. And I say that in full cognizance that we're running a site on book reviews. I just want to add two things to the section of Yaffa's review that I have quoted:

First, I think the list of exemplary biographies ought to include John Szwed's Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra and Lewis Porter's John Coltrane: His Life and Music. Szwed does the difficult work of tracking down Sonny Blount's earthly origins, and Porter is unafraid to reproduce sheet music to show the progression of Coltrane's style and technique.

Unlike Coltrane, I think that Sun Ra and his Arkestra remain under appreciated. Sure the cosmic messages and costumes can stretch one's credulity, but Sun Ra is a great and unconventional piano player (or rocksichord player; I'm listening to Night of the Purple Moon right now), while John Gilmore's tenor is both bluesy and out there. In fact, this might be the problem some critics have with Gilmore's playing: there is not a gradual sense of progression (as in Coltrane); Gilmore, from the late fifties onward works simultaneously within a swing/blues style and with squawks, honks, register leaps and the high end of the altissimo range.

Second, when I first read about Kelley, I couldn't figure out why his name sounded familiar. When the department contracted me to teach Great Philosophers, I found out why: I had decided to include Aimé Césaire for a perspective on colonialism, and along the way rediscovered that Kelley wrote the introduction for the English translation of Discourse on Colonialism.

Kelley illuminates the framework in which Césaire wrote, the extent of his influence, and (most importantly for the students of my course) deals with the Discourse's positive references to the Soviet Union. Kelley is not immediately dismissive, which is usually how communism is dealt with these days; he reminds the reader of the hope inspired in the Third World of the 1940s 1950s by the idea of communism/socialism. I find that my students have very little knowledge of the Soviet Union, as many of the first year students were born after 1989, but I suppose that this is better than all the misinformation that I grew up with. Whether Césaire will be jarring for them or not, perhaps he will allow them to see how, far from being a relic of the 20th century, colonialism continues, in a different and less obvious form, in the 21st.