A retreat from attacks on white chauvinism and a tendency to de-emphasize, however slightly, involvement in local African-American issue-oriented politics made the party seem less an instrument of deliverance.
The Popular Front saw African-American participation in the Communist Party decline. The worldwide efforts of the communist-led International Labor Defense in mobilizing against lynch law in the United States helped to establish the party's image as such an ally. Help from a powerful ally, even one as far away as Moscow, seemed a source of power and possibility. But on another level, rhetoric regarding a "new world" resonated among African-Americans, whose traditions emphasized both a struggle for survival and the transcendent hope of deliverance. The extreme rhetoric of the Third Period communists was not taken seriously by African-American party members, who avoided posturing and confrontation whenever possible. Indeed Kelley argues that the wild, often sectarian Third Period that preceded the Popular Front better undergirded organization among African-American farmers and industrial workers. From that point of view the Popular Front appears as much less of a blessing.
While this is an understandable viewpoint among historians searching for models of unity between radicals and liberals, Kelley's interest is in African-American organizing. Most scholarship that has offered a defense of the Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s (a period known as the party's Popular Front) has tended to emphasize its attempts to draw on democratic political traditions, and to enter meaningful political alliances with liberal political forces. He insists on measuring communism not by its abstract tenets but by its ability to interact with a culture to generate bold class organization. Kelley asks not whether the Communist Party was ideologically correct, but how it came to attract a substantial number of African-American workers and how these workers could embrace and use the Communist Party as a vehicle for organizing themselves. Kelley's book Hammer and Hoe explores the history of communism in the U.S.
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