Robin D. G. Kelley's book Hammer and Hoe explores the history of communism in the U.S. state of Alabama. Kelley asks not whether the Communist Party was ideologically correct, but how it came to attract a substantial number of African-American workers and how these workers could embrace and use the Communist Party as a vehicle for organizing themselves. He insists on measuring communism not by its abstract tenets but by its ability to interact with a culture to generate bold class organization.

Most scholarship that has offered a defense of the Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s (a period known as the party's Popular Front) has tended to emphasize its attempts to draw on democratic political traditions, and to enter meaningful political alliances with liberal political forces. While this is an understandable viewpoint among historians searching for models of unity between radicals and liberals, Kelley's interest is in African-American organizing. From that point of view the Popular Front appears as much less of a blessing.

Indeed Kelley argues that the wild, often sectarian Third Period that preceded the Popular Front better undergirded organization among African-American farmers and industrial workers. The extreme rhetoric of the Third Period communists was not taken seriously by African-American party members, who avoided posturing and confrontation whenever possible. But on another level, rhetoric regarding a "new world" resonated among African Americans, whose traditions emphasized both a struggle for survival and the transcendent hope of deliverance. Help from a powerful ally, even one as far away as Moscow, seemed a source of power and possibility. The worldwide efforts of the communist-led International Labor Defense in mobilizing against lynch law in the United States helped to establish the party's image as such an ally.

The Popular Front saw African-American participation in the Communist Party decline. A retreat from attacks on white chauvinism and a tendency to de-emphasize, however slightly, involvement in local African-American issue–oriented politics made the party seem less an instrument of deliverance. The party's increasing cautiousness, born of a desire to appeal to moderates, doubtless made it a less attractive alternative in interracial conflicts.

Even so, Kelley is far from claiming that the change to a Popular Front line was the sole reason for the decline of African-American communism. The Popular Front initially appealed to African-American communists because it seemed to open new strategies for blunting repression. Kelley's rounded portrait of the decline emphasizes not the absence of a "correct line" but the presence of factional battles and of transformations in the agriculture industry caused by market changes and U.S. federal government intervention.