The war on independently verifiable information (history) is on a roll in Floriduh, the state that is run by head Florida Man, Goobernor Ron DeSanctis. German studies are fine, but African-American studies are verboten, especially when it involves Black farmers from Alabama. And some of those farmers happened to have been communists as well.
While you may think that I have broken into the medical marijuana stash, the book that has been banned from the African-American studies course, first by DeSanctis and then by the College Board, is titled Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Worse still, the author is a distinguished history Professor at UCLA, Robin D. G. Kelley. To people who have survived the Alabama public school system, such as myself, the book was mind blowing, as it is the perfect example of history having been erased.
The history is both simple and understandable. Black workers, deprived of any other form of political representation, turned to union organizers who were affiliated with the Communist party. The great oral history by Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, is about one branch of the party, the sharecropper’s union. Sharecropping was the system that replaced slavery, and it was designed to replace chattel slavery with debt peonage–a person perpetually in debt can be coerced into obedience. Sharecroppers saw the union and the party as their quickest way to freedom and prosperity.
The industrial workers in the steel mills of Birmingham, who were mostly Black, unionized as well, for better wages and working conditions. The result was predictable–US Steel and other corporations paid the local KKK to terrorize people, to the rate of 50 bombings in 40 years. The biggest was 54 sticks of dynamite, laid at the foundation of Temple Beth-El in 1958. It failed to detonate due to a rainstorm.
When the national media discovered that Birmingham existed in 1963, they often commented on its resemblance to Berlin in the 1930’s. Maybe that’s why the Goobernor prefers German history to American.
Southern Fusion Cooking 