Hammer and Hoe

Development and publication

Kelley developed Hammer and Hoe during graduate school in the 1980s, "surrounded by activism. There was an uprising against police violence in Liberty City, Florida; multiracial coalitions propelled Harold Washington to the mayor’s office in Chicago; and the presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson was gathering steam. As a young activist and campus organizer, Kelley was part of the movement that pushed the University of California system to divest from its holdings in South Africa, but he was also discovering a tradition of black radical organizing closer to home," namely the Communist Party in Alabama, which became the topic of his dissertation and then the book.

Kelley published Hammer and Hoe with the University of North Carolina Press in 1990. A 25th anniversary edition, with a new preface, was published in 2005.

Subject matter

Hammer and Hoe describes the Communist Party's role "in the fight for racial equality in the south, specifically Alabama, where segregation was most oppressive...[The] communist party tried to secure racial, economic, and political reforms." Writing at The Nation, Sarah Jaffe says, "Kelley details in wonderfully vivid prose how black workers in Alabama made communism their own, blending the teachings of Marx and Lenin with those of the black church and the lessons of decades of resistance to slavery, segregation, and racist terrorism."

Reviewing Hammer and Hoe for American Quarterly, historian David Roediger described Kelley's methodological approach: "Kelley asks not whether the Communist party was good (or correct or independent) but how the party came to attract a substantial number of African-American workers in Alabama and to energize their struggles [emphasis in the original]. Or, more exactly he asks how these black workers could embrace and use the Communist party as a vehicle for organizing themselves. He insists on measuring radicalism not by its ideological purity but by its ability to interact with a received culture to generate bold class organizations."

Reception

Roediger praised Hammer and Hoe as "superbly crafted...a story that is fresh in every way."

For Hammer and Hoe, Kelley won the Elliott Rudwick Prize from the Organization of American Historians, the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America, and the Francis Butler Simkins Award from the Southern Historical Association.

In 2015, Jaffe wrote that the book on "what might have seemed to be a fairly esoteric topic yet offered lessons that activists have been drawing on for twenty-five years. Throughout that time, the book has remained in print, winning awards and, more important to Kelley, a place in the hearts and strategic thinking of decades of young organizers struggling with the questions of race, gender, class, and solidarity."