UNC Press is offering this classic by Robin D.G. Kelley for free right now, with the blessing of the author. Classic status aside, I've never read it, but I got access to the free copy and I'm gonna give it a shot. If anybody's interested, the link and the description is below.

I've been swamped with trying to earn a living at my silly job, but it'd be nice to read something smart for the first time in awhile. Can't guarantee my endurance on this, but I'll try to post about it once a week if anybody wants to join in and talk about it?

https://flexpub.com/gratis/oVd4A

A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the "long Civil Rights movement," Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality.

The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals.

After discussing the book's origins and impact in a new preface written for this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Kelley reflects on what a militantly antiracist, radical movement in the heart of Dixie might teach contemporary social movements confronting rampant inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.