Exhausting to even read about having to hustle that hard to feed your family, and then to hustle even harder to actually get paid or treated fairly within the context of this terrible job. The people that emerged, though, get a real, three-dimensional life out from Kelley, though - as with Ralph Gray, there's a real risk that being introduced to one of these figures means finding out they were brutally murdered a couple pages later. It also helps build a narrative that doesn't lean on the idea of these northern, white Communists coming down and organizing people - but rather of black sharecroppers demonstrating rather quickly a desire for collective action (which Kelley points out they'd been doing on a smaller scale for a long time) and organizing themselves according to the eccentricities of their own labor, community, and understanding of their objectives. Interesting too to see their open-ness to non-traditional leadership, women and younger people, the northern Communists didn't object to but seemed to find kind of eyebrow-raising.


"The Grays were known by their neighbors as a proud family with a militant heritage. Their grandfather Alfred Gray had been a state legislator in Perry County, Alabama, during Reconstruction and a staunch advocate of equal rights as well as a sharp critic of the Freedmen's Bureau. He told a mixed crowd in Uniontown in 1868, “I am not afraid to fight for , and I will fight for it until hell freezes over. ... I may go to hell, my home is hell, but the white man shall go there with me.”16

Ralph Gray, who had been nourished on stories of his grandfather, emerged as the fledgling movement's undisputed local leader. One of fifteen children, Gray was born in Tallapoosa County in 1873 and spent about one year of his adult life working in Birmingham. After returning to Tallapoosa in 1895, he married and settled down as a tenant farmer until 1919, when he and his family left Alabama in search of better opportunities. Having spent some time sharecropping in Oklahoma and New Mexico, he returned to the place of his birth in 1929 and purchased a small farm. Gray owned a plot of land but it was hardly enough to survive on. Nevertheless, he managed to remain debt-free and purchased his own automobile, thus earning the respect of his local community. Early in 1931 Gray applied for a low-interest federal loan with which to rent a farm from Tallapoosa merchant John J. Langley.

Because the loan check required a double endorsement, Langley was able to cash the check and withhold Gray's portion, who then retaliated by filing a complaint with the Agricultural Extension Service. “When the landlord heard what he had done,” his brother Tommy recalled, “he got mighty mad and jumped on Brother Ralph to give him a whipping. Instead Brother Ralph whipped him.” Soon thereafter, Ralph began reading the Southern Worker, joined the Communist Party, and set out with his brother to build a union."