Topic: Great Depression

Mo Facts reflects on the transition from being a corporate worker for 25 years to being self-employed. He shares how his parents moved the family to a college town in their 30s to seek a better life, which required Mo to live with his grandparents for a year. He recalls the shame his father felt for "sending his kids away," comparing it to the difficult choices made during the Great Depression.

Professor Robin Kelly, author of Hammer and Ho, documents how the Communist Party organized black sharecroppers in Alabama during the 1930s. The movement grew to 12,000 members in the Black Belt counties, predating the traditional civil rights movement by decades. Kelly notes that there has been a concerted effort in academia and media to tamp down the historical connection between communism and racial justice struggles.

The Communist Party utilized the 1931 Scottsboro case, involving nine falsely accused black men, to turn a local legal issue into an international cause célèbre. By focusing on unemployment, the right to vote, and the right to sit on juries, the party successfully drew black working people into its ideological orbit. The hosts compare these historical propaganda tactics to modern media exploitation of criminal cases.