Today in Labor History April 14, 1935: The Black Sunday dust storm swept across the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. This was one of the worst storms of the Dust Bowl. 4 years later, on this same date, John Steinbeck published his classic working-class novel, The Grapes of Wrath, about Dust Bowl refugees in California.
Hammer & Hope is a new magazine of Black politics and culture. It is a project rooted in the power of solidarity, the spirit of struggle and the generative power of debate, all of which are vital parts of our movement toward freedom.
We are inspired by the courageous #BlackCommunists in Alabama whose lives and struggles to organize against capitalism and white supremacist terror in the 1930s and 1940s are memorialized in Robin D. G. Kelley’s book “Hammer and Hoe,” from which we take our name.
We will envision collectively what a better future might look like and the strategies that could get us there. Such an undertaking compels us to deepen our knowledge of history, politics, culture and our own movements.
Our aim is to build a project whose politics and aesthetics reflects the electric spirit of the protesters who flooded the streets in 2020, a project that breathes life into the transformative ideas pointing us towards the world we deserve.