Based on oral histories, archival sources, and previously unpublished documents of the Communist International, The History of the North Carolina Communist Party is the first comprehensive narrative account of the Tar Heel State's Communist Party during its half century of existence. Gregory S. Taylor's chronicle of the Party's sustained efforts in North Carolina draws extensively from Comintern files that, after decades of secrecy, have only recently been made available for historical examination. Although others have studied isolated moments of Communist activity within the state, Taylor ties those moments together, linking them with previously unexamined Communist efforts and demonstrating remarkable continuity of activity in North Carolina.As Taylor notes, the North Carolina Communist Party was a vibrant, socially conscious activist group as well as a political party, and the first organization of its kind in a southern state. In the 1920s North Carolina saw prolonged and violent struggles between the owner and hired protectors of industrial enterprises and the laborers who worked the mills and factories. From 1929 to 1956 the Party took a leading role to implement change: it unionized tobacco and textile industries, pushed for legislation to benefit the unemployed, demanded civil rights for the disenfranchised, called for peaceful foreign policy, sought judicial and prison reforms, and opposed segregation and what the Party considered "creeping fascism." In recounting Party activities from this era, Taylor shows that the main objective was to organize and aid the economically, politically, and culturally downtrodden through social reform rather than through Communist revolution. He reveals Party members to be conscientious North Carolinians, and by extension he challenges long-held assumptions about the Communist presence throughout the United States.
