For many readers, the book does three things. The reviews over all have been great, but more importantly the way a number of activists and organizers on the Left have talked about that book has been very heartening. Looking over it again, I am not sure what I would do differently because I said what I needed to say. Camp How have you felt about its reception over the past two decades? Kelley It’s been interesting. Part of what Hammer and Hoe tried to do was look at Alabama society as whole, not just black workers. I couldn’t look at the black working class as a kind of solid whole, nor could I look at the white working class in the same way. Yet with a South African framing of what became a US story I was forced to think hard about things like intraracial class tensions and conflicts. I ended up dropping the South Africa piece because I was denied access to the country. My dissertation began as a comparative study of radicalism in South Africa and the US South. I was involved in campaigns at UCLA and was simultaneously trying to write about an original rainbow coalition. At the same time, the Jesse Jackson campaign and the Rainbow Coalition was taking off, as was the idea of multiracial and multiethnic organizing actually led by people of color. My interest was in southern Africa, specifically the South African Left. The project was conceived in the early 1980s. Can you talk about how the conjuncture shaped your study? Robin D. It began as your dissertation in the history department at UCLA, which you completed in 1987. Camp 2010 marked the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Hammer and Hoe. It aims to clarify the historical lessons of the black freedom and radical labor struggles in the 1930s for confronting the current crisis.

Conducted in Los Angeles during 2011, it has been since edited and revised. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), an anniversary that fell amid the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: This interview was occasioned by the twentieth anniversary of Robin D. Black Radicalism, Marxism, and Collective Memory: An Interview with Robin D.

Robin dg kelley hammer and hoe