Pie Down Here: Listening Back—Alabama Sharecroppers and Communist Organizers, 1930s

Pie Down Here — Produced by Signal Hill

In the 1980s, when Robin D.G. Kelley was 24 years old, he took a bus trip to the Deep South. He was researching and recording oral histories with farmworkers and Communist Party members who had organized a sharecroppers union in Alabama during the Great Depression.

Kelly used those oral histories to write his award winning book, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression.

Recently Kelley listened back to those early recordings with Signal Hill contributor Conor Gillies. He hadn’t heard some of the recordings in decades. Memories came flooding back as Kelley reflected on the people, the story and the power of oral history.

Robin Davis Gibran Kelley is an American historian and academic, and the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. His books include the prize-winning Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, 2009); Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002, new ed. 2022. His essays have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Nation, the New York Times, the New Yorker, New York Review of Books and more.

Pie Down Here was produced by Conor Gillies and edited by Liza Yeager and Omar Etman, with help from the Signal Hill team: Jackson Roach, Annie Rosenthal, and Lio Wong. Music by Nathan Bowles. You can listen to the entire first issue of Signal Hill — eight original stories — on their website at signalhill.fm, or wherever you get podcasts.

The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of independent producers.