So since I mentioned that infamous and terrible tome The South Was Right! in a previous post, it got me to thinking.
First off, stay far, far away from J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and any damnfool who tells you to read it. It’s all bootstrapping nativist garbage; Vance is a liar, a snitch, and worst of all, a yankee. What you should read instead:
Dixie be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South – “Far from the picturesque antebellum plantations and meekly repressed slaves of popular mythology, the American South has always had its share of social rebellion. Here, seven accounts of insurrectionary episodes in Southern history are tied together into a larger narrative about the long arc of revolt in the South. Countering images of the region as pacified and universally conservative, this adventurous alternative history covers slave rebellions, stockade burnings, multiracial banditry, labour struggles, prison uprisings, urban riots, and more.”
Gun Thugs, Rednecks, and Radicals: A Documentary History of the West Virginia Mine Wars – “Telling the powerful story of the West Virginia coal mining rebellions of the early 20th century, this book collects material from the leaders, the miners, and the journalists sent to report on the 1912 and 1921 West Virginia mine wars—explosive examples of strikes and union battles. Featured in the text are articles, speeches, and discussions between union leaders such as Samuel Gompers, Frank Keeney, Fred Mooney, Bill Blizzard, and Mother Jones. Also included are U.S. Senate committee testimonies from miners and their family members describing life and work in the coal camps and explaining their participation in the violence. These facts clearly portray the human cost of industry and present the hard choices of a rebellious and often politically radical populace who refuses to be beleaguered under any circumstances.”
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression – “Between 1929 and 1941, the Communist Party organized and led a radical, militantly antiracist movement in Alabama – the center of Party activity in the Depression South. Hammer and Hoe documents the efforts of the Alabama Communist Party and its allies to secure racial, economic, and political reforms. Sensitive to the complexities of gender, race, culture and class without compromising the political narrative, Robin Kelley illustrates one of the most unique and least understood radical movements in American history.
The Alabama Communist Party was built from scratch by working people who had no Euro-American radical political tradition. It was composed largely of poor blacks, most of whom were semiliterate and devoutly religious, but it also attracted a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, iconoclastic youth, and renegade liberals. Kelley shows that the cultural identities of these people from Alabama’s farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the development of the Party. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals.
In the South race pervaded virtually every aspect of Communist activity. And because the Party’s call for voting rights, racial equality, equal wages for women, and land for landless farmers represented a fundamental challenge to the society and economy of the South, it is not surprising that Party organizers faced a constant wave of violence.
Kelley’s analysis ranges broadly, examining such topics as the Party’s challenge to black middle-class leadership; the social, ideological, and cultural roots of black working-class radicalism; Communist efforts to build alliances with Southern liberals; and the emergence of a left-wing, interracial youth movement. He closes with a discussion of the Alabama Communist Party’s demise and its legacy for future civil rights activism.”Hammer And Hoe also contains the following passage, which watered my depression cleared my crops and cured my skin:
“I asked Mr. Johnson how the union succeeded in winning some of their demands; without the slightest hesitation, he reached into the drawer of his nightstand and pulled out a dog-eared copy of V.I. Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? and a box of shotgun shells, set both firmly on the bed beside me, and said, ‘Right thar, theory and practice. That’s how we done it. Theory and practice.’”
Any fellow southerners here should check out Redneck Revolt. Plus the SRA has several southern chapters. Big shout out to all the anarchists in the Appalachias too.
>the SRA
Let me very very strongly caution everyone *against* joining a creepy ultraleftist militia run by a petit-bourgeois wrecker. At least if you plan on staying out of jail.
I say this as a person who was in on the ground floor of the original SRA, before that weirdo got in and fucked it up.
SRA used to be one of the most promising orgs on the radical left but nowadays its only useful purpose is as a series of Facebook pages for me to steal pictures of guns from
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