Communist tabloids that published workers’ correspondence offer another, more personalized view of radical consciousness. The Party’s broad range of publications provided black Alabamians with a national forum to voice their collective and individual grievances, to lash out against their oppressors, and to articulate their own vision of an alternative world. Complaints from SCU members, which usually began with “I am writing a protest against my landlord,” described in detail sharecroppers’ daily treatment and closed by naming the landlord in question for the purpose of mobilizing readers from across the country to send postcards and letters of protest. The anonymity of the letters freed rural blacks, more commonly young men, to use an angrier, more profane voice than they would have used openly in their own communities, especially in confrontations with landlords or other white authority figures.

Excerpt from Robin D. G. Kelly’s “Hammer and Hoe”