4 chapters across the catalog
The film "The Great Debaters," produced by Oprah Winfrey, features a character played by Denzel Washington who organizes sharecroppers. The hosts highlight the film's open embrace of radicalism and unionization, linking it to real-world historical efforts to organize black farmers in the South.
In the 1930s, the Communist Party organized approximately 12,000 Black sharecroppers in Alabama's "Black Belt" by promising self-determination and land. The hosts argue that the failure of the U.S. to provide atonement for slavery created a "hotbed" for Marxist ideologies to take root within Black communities. They draw a direct line from these historical movements to modern organizations like Black Lives Matter Inc., which they describe as being led by "trained Marxists" exploiting unresolved racial grievances.
Professor Robin Kelly discusses his book "Hammer and Hoe," which documents the activities of the Communist Party in Alabama during the Great Depression. He describes a vibrant movement of 12,000 black sharecroppers who joined the party, seeing the white communists as "Yankees" returning to finish the work of Reconstruction. The hosts argue that this history has been intentionally suppressed by media and academia.
The ADOS movement focuses on specific lineage tracing back to American chattel slavery and sharecropping rather than broad racial categories. The mantra "cut the check" emphasizes that reparations are a debt for services rendered, not a social program subject to government oversight on how the money is spent. The hashtag #Tangibles2020 represents a growing segment of voters who refuse to participate in elections unless specific, tangible benefits are offered to the ADOS community.
