10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9817
The essay proposes a short history of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, a radical left-wing organization founded in Detroit in 1969. Even though the League disappeared in 1971, its role was significant, and it allows us to write a more complex history of the Black Power Movement by linking the Old Left with the New Left. Its internal quarrels were not only due to clashes of ego but, instead, reflected actual political differences.
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Olivier Maheo
USAbroad – Journal of American History and Politics
Detroit
Radical Motown, Radical Heritage: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers
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Essays
2020-03-02
2019-08-30
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Olivier Maheo
2020/03/02
10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9817
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Radical Motown, Radical Heritage: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers
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Essays – peer-reviewed                                    USAbroad – Journal of American History and Politics. Vol. 3 (2020)
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9817                                                                ISSN 2611-2752




Radical Motown, Radical Heritage: The League of Revolutionary
                                               Black Workers

                                                   Olivier Maheo

                Submitted: August 30, 2019 – Accepted: December 16, 2019 – Published: March 2, 2020



                                                          Abstract

       The essay proposes a short history of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, a radical left-
       wing organization founded in Detroit in 1969. Even though the League disappeared in 1971, its role
       was significant, and it allows us to write a more complex history of the Black Power Movement by
       linking the Old Left with the New Left. Its internal quarrels were not only due to clashes of ego but,
       instead, reflected actual political differences.
       Keywords: African American History; Black Power; Black Working Class; New Left; Detroit.




Olivier Maheo: Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle, ED 514 (France)
 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5645-2282
 olivier.maheo1@gmail.com
Olivier Maheo is Assistant Lecturer in History at University of Poitiers in France. He completed his doctoral
thesis at University Sorbonne Nouvelle under the supervision of Professor Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry. His research
focuses on the political and cultural history of African American mobilizations in the 20th century from the New
Deal to the Black Power Era.



Copyright © 2020 Olivier Maheo                                                                                   Art. #9817
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons BY License.                                                          p. 35
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Radical Motown, Radical Heritage                                                                          USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




1 Introduction
A long-standing analysis of the Black Power movement opposes the limited political successes of its
organizations with their cultural impact.1 This alleged political failure was explained by a set of three
factors: factionalism, personal conflicts and also state repression, often evoked as the main factor in
this narrative of decline.2 Furthermore, the impact of Black Power is assessed in the sociocultural
sphere for the social and educational services it provided to impoverished communities and for its
participation in the construction of a positive African American identity, as well as for the increase in
successful black businesses and the conception of Black Studies.3 Broadly speaking, the political and
organizational aspects of the Black Power era were long downplayed or they were part of a narrative
about the “evil twin that wrecked the civil rights movement.”4
    For over twenty years, however, historians have cast a light on new subjects, forgotten figures and
facts. They have participated in the renewal of the historiography of Black Power, widening their
interest to take into account new periods, before the 1960s or after Black Power’s classical era (1966–
1975), and new spaces.5 New approaches have also been used, including cultural history, a gendered
vision, and transnational studies inspired by a turn to global history as well as a new interest in political
radical margins, to name a few.6
    Moreover, for a long time, the history of the Black Power era was captured almost exclusively
through the images of the Black Panther Party (BPP), wiping out a vast array of organizations and
tendencies that were less visible or not as flamboyant as the Panthers. Peniel Joseph recently stressed
the diversity of the forms that the Black Power movement took, separating its organizations from the
iconic memory of their images.7 In this article, I propose to stress the effectiveness of the political
action of one of these Black Power organizations, which is less well-known than the BPP, the League
of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) or more simply, the League, which was the subject of the
1975 classic Detroit, I Do Mind Dying by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin. In 1977 another study, by
sociologist James A. Geschwender, Class, Race and Worker Insurgency, traced out the League’s history
from its evolution to its various splits.8 Since then, few authors have dealt with this subject, as if the
withdrawal of the Black Power movement occurred at the same time as a decrease of interest in this


1.   Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
     2004); William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975 (Chicago:
     University of Chicago Press, 1992).

2.   Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American
     Indian Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1990); Robert J. Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America: From 1870 to
     1976 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001); Akinyele O. Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi
     Freedom Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

3.   Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (Baltimore,
     MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Laura W. Hill and Julia Rabig, The Business of Black Power: Community Devel-
     opment, Capitalism, and Corporate Responsibility in Postwar America (Rochester, NY: University Rochester Press, 2012); James
     E. Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism In The 1960s And 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
     Press, 2005).

4.   Peniel E. Joseph, “Black Liberation Without Apology: Reconceptualizing the Black Power Movement,” Black Scholar,
     3/4(2001): 2.

5.   “The years between 1966 and 1975 represent the black power era’s classical period,” in Peniel E. Joseph, “The Black Power
     Movement: A State of the Field,” The Journal of American History, 3(2009): 772. See also Peniel E. Joseph, The Black Power
     Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era (New York: Routledge, 2006); Thomas J. Sugrue proposed a northern
     history of the civil rights movement: Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York:
     Random House Publishing Group, 2009).

6.   Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
     2002); Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—a New History of the Civil Rights
     Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2011); Deborah G. White, Too Heavy a Load:
     Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999); Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert
     F. Williams & the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

7.   Joseph, The Black Power Movement.

8.   James A. Geschwender, Class, Race, and Worker Insurgency: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (New York: Cambridge
     University Press, 1977).



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9817                                                                                      36
Radical Motown, Radical Heritage                                                                         USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




kind of radical organization. Nonetheless, in 2001 Heather Ann Thompson, a native from Detroit
like Sugrue, published Whose Detroit, a far reaching study of the relationship between the liberal labor
leaders of the UAW, the black nationalist radicals, liberal politicians and the rank-and-file workers
through a micro-history of James Johnson Jr.’s life, who was a black worker who moved to Detroit in
the 1960s to work at Chrysler’s Eldon Avenue plant, and ending up killing two foremen and a job-setter
on the shop-floor.9 Heather Thompson demonstrated that the simplistic dichotomy between black
and white Detroit had to be complexified, and that “the U.S. labor movement always had more power
over its destiny than its leaders imagined.”10
     Even though the League’s existence was short—founded in 1969 in Detroit, then it split in 1970—I
will demonstrate that it had a real political impact in Detroit and on the United Automobile Workers
Union (UAW).11 This short-lived organization, whose geographical development was limited to Detroit,
remained marginal. Still, it was influential in the creation of various organizations in the following
years, and it drove the UAW leadership to change its policy regarding black workers.
     I will first describe how the history of the League has been partially eclipsed by more visible groups.
Then I propose to connect class and race, as they were linked within this organization, as inherited
from radical political traditions. The LRBW is also representative of the debates that divided the black
activists at the time. Furthermore, studying smaller and marginalized tendencies and organizations
is a useful way to understand the whole picture. These political margins shed a different light on the
Black Power Movement, and inform us in an effective manner.



2 The League: An Underrated History
In 1971, when one issue of Radical America, the New Left magazine launched by members of the SDS
covered the story of urban protest in Detroit, the League was still barely known outside Detroit.12
Even nowadays the League is not as well-known as the BPP and as Nicola Pizzolato writes it “does
not fit into classical iconography.”13 Perhaps it is due to its place of birth, Detroit, which may be
perceived as a significant Black metropolis, but it is still far less mentioned in the historical narrative
than other black cities, including the intellectual and political leading Black Mecca, Harlem in New
York City. Also, Detroit had neither the political significance of San Francisco/Oakland, where the
Black Panther Party emerged and established relations with the New Left, nor the vibrant cultural
and economic dynamism of Chicago’s South Side. From a political point of view, Detroit has been
examined mainly through the 1967 riots, which are associated with sheer violence, as if this eruptive
moment had no profound and local roots, moreover, as if the riots were only a nervous response to a
national situation. Since the 1970s, Detroit has also become synonymous with decay, social problems
and urban crisis, a city where the ‘white flight’ to the suburbs, which turned downtown Detroit into a
ghetto, was followed by the black middle-class flight.14 With the closure of auto plants from the 1980s



9.    Heather A. Thompson, Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
      2001); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
      University Press, 1996). Heather Thompson analyzed in her book what has been overlooked by Thomas Sugrue in his
      urban crisis history.

10. Thompson, Whose Detroit?, 10.

11.   The official name of the UAW is: The International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement
      Workers of America. It was founded in 1935 in the wave of radical militancy that gave birth to industrial unionism. For
      more information about the UAW and Walther Reuther, the fourth leader from 1946 to 1970, see: Kevin Boyle, The UAW
      and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945–1968 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Nelson Lichtenstein, Walter
      Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).

12. Eric Perkins, “The League of Revolutionary Black Workers Introduction,” Radical America, 2(1971): 51–62; Harold M. Baron,
    “The Demand for Black Labor,” Radical America, 2(1971): 1–46.

13. Nicola Pizzolato, “Scioperi al ritmo dei tamburi: Black Power nel ‘1968’ americano,” Scienza & Politica. Per una storia delle
    dottrine, 59(2018): 62.

14. For an account on this question see: Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis; Paul Kersey, Escape from Detroit: The Collapse of
    America’s Black Metropolis (Lexington, KY: Stuff Black People Don’t Like, 2012).



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9817                                                                                     37
Radical Motown, Radical Heritage                                                                             USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




on, it became a symbol of deindustrialization.15 The historian Thomas Sugrue has greatly contributed
to stimulating new interest in Detroit history, by mirroring both the urban and racial crisis.16
    In the same vein, the Rust Belt in general is too often perceived as mostly white and working class,
and labor historians have ignored African Americans for a long time, excluding the race question from
their studies, just like the African Americans were excluded from major industries and from the best
jobs. The historian Herbert Hill, who blames his colleagues for having a serious “race problem” due to
a romantic vision of the white working class, which was influenced by Marxism, always downplayed
racism among the white workers: “either to ignore the racism of the white working class or to rational-
ize it by attributing it to manipulation by employers.”17 For his part, historian Bruce Nelson describes
how the worker is most often associated with white male representations.18 In the same manner, the
history of the radical left has largely been reduced to white radicals, with black leaders being viewed
in terms of moderation and compromise, through a distorted picture of Martin Luther King.19 Jacque-
lyn Dowd-Hall actually describes this narrow vision as “whitening the memory and historiography of
the Left.”20
    In 1988, Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein took a major step in assessing the inseparable
links between class and race through a study of what they called Civil Rights Unionism and its “lost
opportunities” in the 1930s and 1940s, this early civil rights movement being wrecked by McCarthy-
ism.21 If working-class history has often ignored race, black history has frequently forgotten class, and
also gender. In Building Bridges, Robin D. G. Kelley correctly writes that one “of the most important
and still understudied urban labor movements is the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, which
spawned the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.”22 Another factor for the relative oblivion of
the League was its own choice to remain inconspicuous, in contrast to the spectacular and provocative
demonstrations of the Panthers. DRUM, FRUM and “revolutionary union movements,” RUM, were
formed by black workers at odds with the traditional UAW.
    The League grew out of several organizations in various automotive plants, such as the Dodge Rev-
olutionary Union Movement (DRUM), founded in May 1968, and other Revolutionary Union Move-
ments in other plants.



3 Detroit in the 1950s and 1960s: Black Workers and the Unions
In the 1940s to 1950s, Detroit was a booming city which attracted more than 400,000 Southern African
Americans trying to escape a region defined by segregation, black poverty and white violence. The
black population swelled from 150,000 in 1940 to more than 660,000 in 1970, during the second wave


15. Andrew Brooks, The End of Development: A Global History of Poverty and Prosperity (London: Zedbooks, 2017), 321. See also
    Quentin R. Skrabec, The Fall of an American Rome: De-Industrialization of the American Dream (United States: Algora Publish-
    ing, 2014).

16. Thomas Sugrue and other historians like Boyle, and Pizzolato have made with Detroit’s case the study of a microcosm that
    mirrors the whole urban and racial crisis. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis; Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American
    Liberalism, 1945–1968; Joel Stone and Thomas J. Sugrue, Detroit 1967: Origins, Impacts, Legacies (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State
    University Press, 2017); Nicola Pizzolato, Challenging Global Capitalism: Labor Migration, Radical Struggle, and Urban Change
    in Detroit and Turin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Michael Hamlin and Michele Gibbs, A Black Revolutionary’s Life
    in Labor: Black Workers Power in Detroit (Detroit, Mich.: Against the Tide Books, 2013); Kersey, Escape from Detroit.

17.   Herbert Hill, The Problem of Race in American Labor History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 190.

18. Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
    Press, 2002), xxii–xxiii.

19. Sylvie Laurent, Martin Luther King: une biographie intellectuelle et politique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2015).

20. Jacquelyn D. Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal of American History,
    4(2005): 1253.

21. Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Move-
    ment,” The Journal of American History, 3(1988): 786–811.

22. Robin D.G. Kelley, “Building Bridges: The Challenge of Organized Labor in Communities of Color,” New Labor Forum,
    5(1999): 50. One notable exception is a chapter about the LRBW in Ursula McTaggart, Guerrillas in the Industrial Jungle:
    Radicalism’s Primitive and Industrial Rhetoric (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012).



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9817                                                                                      38
Radical Motown, Radical Heritage                                                                         USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




of the great migration.23 Most of them had to settle into two districts, Black Bottom and Paradise Val-
ley, because of restrictive covenants.24 Urban renewal was the focus of local political debates, but the
underlying problem was segregation. Detroit was slowly becoming an entirely black city. The au-
thorities did nothing to oppose the white flight to the suburbs. On the contrary, Black Bottom was
bulldozed and urban renewal meant black removal and even more segregation.25 Competition for
decent housing was a major cause of two riots, in 1942 and 1943: Polish-Americans were opposed to
the building of a housing project called Sojourner Truth next to their neighborhood. The clashes be-
tween white Appalachians, Polish-Americans, and Blacks were common.26 At state and federal levels,
the Whites supported the CIO-backed candidates of the Democratic Party, even though the unions
demanded desegregation. For them a union was acceptable in the shop, but in local elections most of
them voted against anyone proposing any kind of integration in their neighborhood.
     In fact, before 1940 Ford was the only company to employ black workers, regularly hiring 10%
African American workers as a systematic tool to divide the workforce in order to weaken the union
and sometimes break strikes. Chrysler and General Motors had virtually no black workers in their
plants. During World War II, however, the car industry became a main actor in the war effort and it
required a huge workforce; so it started hiring more African Americans. In 1945, for example, Chrysler
had 5,000 black workers.27 The UAW was struggling against job discrimination and, during the war, it
had become the strongest support of Black Detroit, as historians Meier and Rudwick have shown.
     But the McCarthy era changed this relationship: the liberal consensus, accepted by the unions,
implied not only that any leftist or progressive organization or policy be banned, but also that there
should be severe repression of any civil rights claim that was not moderate enough. Meier and Rud-
wick thus conclude that the balance sheet of the UAW is ambiguous.28 The union helped the blacks
to enter this industry, to have access to better jobs than the ones in the foundry where they were usu-
ally concentrated and where they were exposed to the most dangerous and exhausting positions in
the plants. Still, from the beginning, black workers protested the union’s failure to eliminate the job
bias. For example, after the war, and especially in the 1950s, massive layoffs hit black workers first. As
the phrase goes, they were “last hired and first fired.” In Dodge’s main plant in the 1960s, 95% of the
foremen and 100% of the superintendents were white. Racism was still institutional in this industry,
against blacks and also against Arab workers, mostly immigrants from the Middle East who, having
arrived last, were treated even worse than the blacks.29
     In 1957, a group of black unionists formed the TULC, an internal caucus that raised the question
of racism in the union.30 In the plants, black workers could only fill grievance papers and give them
to their union representatives. Most of the time, the answers they were given were disappointing. It
was as if the job was divided: the company looked after the production, and the union looked after
“its” workers, without questioning racism. In Dodge Main the union rank-and-file was mostly Polish-
American, who were at times prejudiced against blacks. By the late 1960s, 30% of the UAW member-
ship was black, but very few were salaried members, and amongst the 26 executives, only two were




23. United States Census Bureau. June 8, 2006, https://www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html

24. Steve Babson, Working Detroit: The Making of a Union Town. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986), 156.

25. Krysta Ryzewski, “No Home for the ‘Ordinary Gamut’: A Historical Archaeology of Community Displacement and the
    Creation of Detroit, City Beautiful,” Journal of Social Archaeology, 3(2015): 408–31.

26. Dominic J. Capeci, Race Relations in Wartime Detroit: The Sojourner Truth Housing Controversy of 1942 (Philadelphia: Temple
    University Press, 1984); Stephen Grant Meyer, As Long as They Don’t Move next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American
    Neighborhoods (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

27. Marvin Surkin and Dan Georgakas, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975),
    35.

28. Meier, Rudwick, and Rudwick, Black Detroit And the Rise of the UAW.

29. Surkin and Georgakas, Detroit, 37.

30. The TULC had a membership of around 9,000 in 1960. But soon the TULC’s main objective was to secure a few positions
    for a few members in the union bureaucracy. It had no concrete action on the ground since it was mostly an internal
    opposition to Walter Reuther.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9817                                                                                     39
Radical Motown, Radical Heritage                                                                        USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




black.31
    At the federal level, the liberal alliance between the UAW, on one hand, and the NAACP and the
civil rights activists, on the other, was highly publicized. In 1963, the Detroit Walk to Freedom, a huge
demonstration against segregation in the North to raise funds for the SCLC, gathered a crowd of an
estimated 125,000 on Woodward Avenue on the twentieth anniversary of the June 23, 1943 riot. It saw
the top executives of the UAW, with Walter Reuther leading them, walking side by side with King but
also with Detroit Mayor, Jerome P. Cavanagh.
    The mid-1960s were a turning point for the black freedom movement and provided incentives for
change in Detroit as well. After the passing of the major Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights
Act (1965), the large liberal coalition that brought together the civil rights organizations, the unions
and the liberals, began to disintegrate. The failure of the Mississippi Freedom Party to be seated at
the Democratic Party convention in 1964 was a major blow to the liberal alliance. In the eyes of many
young blacks, Malcom X was giving better answers than the moderate and more mainstream civil
rights organizations.32 In Detroit, this new nationalist mood found fertile ground, especially because
various activists had been trying for a long time to contest the moderate policy of the Civil Rights
Movement. This was the case with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.



4     Radical Roots
The League is linked with the local history of the black left in Detroit and its roots come from socialist
and radical organizations, some of them specific to Detroit. The activist and theorist C. L. R. James is
central to this political tradition.33 Deported to London in 1953, he had time to inspire the foundation
of a small organization, the group Correspondence, headed by Martin Glaberman (1918–2001), who
had been employed in various auto plants until the 1960s.34 The future leaders of the League, Luke
Tripp, John Williams, Charles “Mao” Johnson and John Watson attended Marxist classes given by Mar-



31. Surkin and Georgakas, Detroit, 39.

32. Like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People founded in 1909 by white and black intellectuals,
    and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), founded in February 1957 by Protestant pastors in the South,
    following the victory of the Montgomery Bus Boycott a year before.

33. Born in Trinidad, he went to England in 1932 where he lived in Lancashire. James had left the Trotskyist Socialist Workers
    Party (SWP) in 1940 to join a split-up named the Workers Party. He returned to the SWP in 1947, where he was one of the 2
    leaders of a small faction, called the Johnson-Forest tendency. James’s pseudonym was J.R. Johnson; Raya Dunayaveskaya
    (1910–1987) was called Freddie Forrest. She was born Raya Shpigel in Ukraine, but arrived as a child in the United States.
    In 1950, both left the SWP again to build, with Grace Lee Boggs (1915–2015), the Correspondence Publishing Committee.
    Paul Buhle, Mari Jo Buhle and Dan Georgakas, Encyclopedia of the American Left (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990),
    205–6. In 1952, James was imprisoned on Ellis Island under the McCarran Act, otherwise known as the Internal Security
    Act; it was part of the legislative arsenal against subversion voted for during McCarthyism. There he provided inspiration
    for the creation of a “Third Layer School” where rank-and-file workers, women and youth did the talking while intellectuals
    did the listening. In 1953 he was deported to Britain. About James, see: Frank Rosengarten, Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R.
    James and the Struggle for a New Society ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007); Matthieu Renault, C.L.R. James: la
    vie révolutionnaire d’un “Platon noir” (Paris: La Découverte, 2016).

34. Several autoworkers, such as James Boggs (1919–1993) and Charles Denby (1907–1983), were active members in Correspon-
    dence. Charles Denby, the author of Indignant Heart, describes his experience of moving to Detroit to work in the factories.
    Indignant Heart: Testimony of a Black American Worker (London: Pluto Press, 1979). The word “correspondence” is an allu-
    sion to the American Revolution and to the Committees of Correspondence, shadow governments funded by the Patriots
    in the thirteen colonies. For a brief history of Correspondence see: Nicola Pizzolato, “Transnational Radicals: Labour
    Dissent and Political Activism in Detroit and Turin (1950–1970),” International Review of Social History, 1(2011): 7–10. After
    another split of the group Correspondence, the 25 or so remaining members started to call themselves Facing Reality, a
    group with a small impact at Wayne State University where Glaberman taught a class on Karl Marx’s Capital. In 1953, Raya
    Dunayevskaya quit the group to form the News and Letter Committee and concurrently moved to Detroit. Grace Lee
    Boggs, a Chinese-American living in Detroit, was a life-long activist in the Trotskyist milieu. About her, see: Grace Lee
    Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Stephen M. Ward, In Love
    and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016);
    Boggs Center, http://boggscenter.org. In 1962, another split divided this small group. Boggs and James turned to some
    kind of Third-Worldism at a time when Maoism was in vogue. Martin Glaberman, “Remembering C.L.R. James,” Against
    the Current, 72( January-February 1998), https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/atc/1971.html



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9817                                                                                    40
Radical Motown, Radical Heritage                                                                           USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




tin Glaberman.35 It should be noted that for a long time the history of the New Left had been reduced
primarily to the white students in the Students for a Democratic Society, the SDS, and viewed as a
“kind of ‘anomaly’ in the history of the American Left.”36 However, in the past ten years, a new gener-
ation of historians has challenged this exceptionalist theory, in that the New Left was more typically
‘American,’ and stressed the links between the Old and the New Left as primarily an intellectual lineage,
as Anne Ollivier-Mellios wrote.37 We want to emphasize that these links were also direct, between the
older and younger activists.
    Most of the future activists of the League were enrolled at Wayne State University. There they
formed an informal student group, UHURU, meaning freedom in Swahili. General Baker (General is
his real first name), one of the two workers in the group, worked at the Dodge Main plant. Some of
them had been active in the main black students’ organization, the Student Non-violent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC).38 In 1964, they visited Cuba along with 84 student activists, and met with Che
Guevara.
    In 1965, when General Baker received his draft card to go and fight in Vietnam, the group put
out leaflets announcing that 50,000 people would show up at the Wayne County Induction Center.
Only eight arrived, but the US Army, most likely not very pleased with this potential conscript, found
Baker unsuitable for service. This small demonstration gives a better assessment of this still small and
marginal group of friends. They were all formal members of various organizations, but their main
activity took place in the small group around Uhuru. The 1967 riot changed the situation, giving them
the opportunity to expand their activities, as well as imposing a sense of urgency.



5     Our Thing is DRUM
The 1967 riot was one of the most violent, and also one of the most violently repressed. Forty-three
people were killed, most of them by the police, and 1,300 buildings were burned to ashes.39 The black
nationalists called this event the “Great Rebellion,” to stress its political character. James Geschwender
underlines that this was not a race riot, in the sense that there was no fighting between blacks and
whites. Instead, the blacks reacted to the massive arrest of 82 people in a “blind pig,” the local name for
an illegal drinking place. Provocatively, John Watson called the riot “shopping for free” and, indeed,
there was some looting, by blacks and whites, demonstrating the frustration of a large part of the
poorest sector of the population. Geschwender demonstrates that, contrary to the Kerner Report
commissioned by the government on “civil disorders” after the Detroit riot, most of the insurrection
participants were less educated than nonparticipants.40
    This outburst of anger stimulated a sense of pride and confidence in the blacks’ capacity to unite
their strengths. It gave a new impetus to the small radical groups already active in Detroit. UHURU
decided to launch a newspaper, Inner-City Voice, with the first issue published in October 1967. Its
masthead spelled “the Voice of Revolution” and its function was theorized as the vehicle for a new
political agenda and the backbone of a new political organization yet to come, in the way Lenin had
theorized that a newspaper is the building tool for an effective revolutionary party.
    Inner City Voice was open to any progressive and radical tendencies, and published everything,
from the Black Panther Party articles to contributions by white, progressive, Catholic priests’ articles.


35. They also went to SWP’s forums on Friday evenings.

36. Anne Ollivier-Mellios, “Intellectual Origins of the New Left: The Legacy of the ‘Lyrical Left’,” in Generations of Social Move-
    ments: Remembering the Left in the US and France, by Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry and Ambre Ivol (New York: Routledge, 2015),
    88–89.

37. Ollivier-Mellios, 88.

38. The SNCC was founded in April 1960 in Raleigh. Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s
    (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

39. In the recent film, Detroit, Kathryn Bigelow, (Eagle Pictures, 2017), recalls the violence at the Algiers Motel. Also see a recent
    book: Stone and Sugrue, Detroit 1967.

40. United States et al., Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders: Special Introduction by Tom Wicker of The New
    York Times; Chairman, Otto Kerner (New York: Bantam Books, 1968); Geschwender, Class, Race, and Worker Insurgency, 72–3.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9817                                                                                        41
Radical Motown, Radical Heritage                                                                    USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




It had columns by Robert F. Williams, the ex-NAACP activist from Monroe who had to flee to Cuba in
1961, and also by James Boggs, who was Grace Lee Boogs’ husband and an autoworker himself. It also
reproduced speeches by Glaberman and James. Its publication was very irregular, but they succeeded
in printing 10,000 copies for their third issue, without any support from the local left, even when their
printing office was threatened by the FBI. The paper’s key-person was John Watson, who did most of
the practical work; but he was also assisted by Mike Hamlin, Ken Cockrel, a law student, and General
Baker. Their activities expanded extraordinarily in 1968.
    Through the publication of Inner-City Voice, the activists managed to recruit a small group of young
workers at the Dodge plant. In early May 1968, Chrysler tried to speed up the assembly line at Dodge
Main. The black activists’ political activities in the direction of this plant paid off: on May 2, 1968,
more than 4.000 workers went on a wildcat strike.41 A minority of 300 black and white workers orga-
nized the striking pickets, and most of the 4,000 workers respected them.42 Chrysler’s reaction was
to try to fire seven workers, five black and two whites. In general, the blacks received the harshest
punishment. This discrimination triggered the formation of DRUM, a small group of eight members.
They published their first leaflet called DRUM to denounce the firings, and DRUM became a weekly
newsletter. It advocated hiring black foremen, superintendents and black doctors in the medical cen-
ters as well as the end of the double standard against African Americans. It denounced the way the
UAW was working hand-in-glove with Chrysler. In July, DRUM organized a demonstration, first at
the Local 3 headquarters of the union, then at the Chrysler headquarters. In September 1968, DRUM
had developed into something much larger and ran in the election for a trustee position in their UAW
Local 3. DRUM’s candidate, Ron March, was finally defeated by a vote of 2,000 to 1,300.
    In other plants similar revolutionary union movements were organized: ELRUM at the Eldon
avenue plant at the main Chrysler site; FRUM, for Ford Revolutionary Union Movement at the Ford
Rouge River Plant; MARUM at the Mack Avenue plant; MERUM etc.43 They described their fight as
being two-fold: “(1) With the union, because of its racist practices, and (2) with the corporation.”44 In
January 1969, all these groups met with more than 100 activists and formed the League, which became
legally incorporated in June 1969. In other cities the same wildcat strikes took place several months
before in the Ford plant of Mahwah, New Jersey. Five hundred workers had shut down production
for three days, after a foreman called a worker “a black bastard,” and a group called the United Black
Brothers of Mahwah had been formed.45
    In 1968, the Inner-City Voice was running out of funds. John Watson did not attend classes regularly
at Wayne State University, but in September 1968 he ran for the position of editor of the student daily,
the South End Press, and won with the support of the leftist student milieu. He turned the newspaper
into a voice for the League. Most of the newspapers were distributed in front of the plant, where many
students were also part-time workers.
    The League spread to other workplaces, such as the main hospital and some newspapers. Mem-
bership was probably around 100 activists by 1970. In a document entitled “Central Staff Retreat,” the
names of 57 members were cited.46 Contrary to the impression of rapid growth given by Georgakas

41. Martin Glaberman, “Survey: Detroit,” International Socialism, 36(1969), 8–9, https://www.marxists.org/archive/glaberman/
    1969/04/drum.htm

42. Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, “DRUM: Wildcat Strike” (DRUM, 1968), 1–3, Box 1, Folder 97. American
    Left Ephemera Collection. University of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh, https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt:
    31735059397731.

43. Eldon Ave. Revolutionary Union Movement, “Elrum” (League of Revolutionay Black Workers, 1969), Box 1, Folder 88.
    American Left Ephemera Collection. University of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh; Mound Road Engine Revolutionay Union Move-
    ment, “Me Rum Pamphlet” (League of Revolutionay Black Workers, 1969), Box 1, Folder 90. American Left Ephemera
    Collection. University of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh, https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735061656298/
    viewer#page/1/mode/2up.

44. Eldon Ave. Revolutionary Union Movement, “ELRUM, Volume 2, Number 3” (LRBW, February 1969), 3, Box 1, folder 87,
    Eldon Ave. Revolutionary Union Movement Pamphlets, Eldon Ave. Revolutionary Union Movement Pamphlets.

45. Denby, Indignant Heart, 262.

46. LRBW, “Central Staff Retreat,” December 1970, 7, Reel 1, series 2, LRBW Historical Analyses, Microfilms: The Black Power
    Movement: Part 4 the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, 1965–1976. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Cul-
    ture. New York.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9817                                                                               42
Radical Motown, Radical Heritage                                                                     USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




and Surkin, the Legue’s membership remained rather small.47 And you have to take into account the
fact that among these 57 members, and despite its buzzy title “Central Staff,” some of those attending
this meeting were only invited as observers. The League had a few people working full-time, using
the South End’s financial resources as a way to finance their activities. It owned a printing company,
Black Star Printing, Inc., and a bookshop.
     Like the Panthers, the activists in the League advocated self-defense and a socialist revolution but,
whereas the BPP tried to organize the lumpenproletariat, the League aimed at attacking the system
at its “weakest point,” “the point of production” and targeted young black workers in the automobile
industry.48 Theirs was a more classical Marxist perspective. Their analysis of the role of racism, which
they saw as coming from both the company and fellow workers, also influenced their organizational
strategy. DRUM members knew that racism limited the workers’ ability to unite, and that both white
and black workers were hurt by this. At the same time, they also argued that white workers benefited
from racism in the form of higher wages and better jobs. Unlike the Panthers, DRUM members also
felt it was better to remain rather secretive, and when they chose to reply violently to some situations,
they did not boast about it. The Panthers did exactly the opposite: they acted in a provocative way,
displaying their rifles and calling policemen pigs. As Jean Genet said, they attacked first by sight.49 Ken
Cockrel stressed than not one of the Detroit activists was ever killed by policemen, thanks to this low-
profile policy. In a speech delivered in January 1970, he declared that: “Your first responsibility is to do
all that is in your power to avoid becoming a defense organization.”50 He was strongly critical of the
Black Panther’ style: “We can stand up and raise our hands and declaim mightily about the existence
of Honkies, that Black is Beautiful, and we can hang bullets around our necks and wear all kinds of
dashikies, but that’s not going to bring about an ultimate end to oppression.”51 This difference has to
be linked with the way these activists were trying to organize workers “on the point of production,”
while the BPP defended the centrality of the lumpenproletariat.
     But the strife that riddled the League lead to its rapid explosion.



6 Divided We Fall
The in-plant activists, General Baker and Chuck Wooten, resented the little help they got from the stu-
dents. Their priority was organizing other plants with new RUMs. These groups were losing ground.
They were born out of the enthusiasm of wildcat strike action; however, they did not manage to func-
tion on a daily basis. This decline is evident in Ernie Allen’s account, in which he gives three main
reasons for it: the 1967 wave of discontent was remote in time, Chrysler had increased the number of
black foremen and the activists were kept under constant surveillance.52 The creation of the League
in 1969 was a partial answer to these difficulties, but it also raised new conflicts and debates about pri-
orities. General Baker insisted on the in-plant work, whereas others, such as Marian Kramer, stressed
the necessity to be active in the community.53 This led to what Errol Henderson recently named a
“dual strategy,” but it also led to a split very quickly.54


47. Surkin and Georgakas, Detroit.

48. Cockrel, “On Repression,” January 30, 1970, 9, Box 1, Folder 92, American Left Ephemera Collection, 1894–2008,
    AIS.2007.11, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh. 9 (This speech was made at a repression conference un-
    der the sponsorship of Newsreel in Detroit. The speakers were Robert Williams, former President of the Republic of New
    Africa; Emory Douglas, Minister of Culture of the Black Panther Party; and Kenneth V. Cockrel, Central Staff member of
    the LRBW).

49. Jean Genet, Un captif amoureux (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 291.

50. Cockrel, “On Repression,” 3.

51. Cockrel, “On Repression,” 15.

52. Ernie Allen and Dick Cluster, “Dying from the inside: The Decline of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers” (Boston:
    South End Press, 1979), 77–8.

53. Marian Kramer, “On the Split & Critical Thinking,” General Baker Institute, 2016, https://vimeo.com/149303341.

54. Errol A. Henderson, The Revolution Will Not Be Theorized: Cultural Revolution in the Black Power Era, 2019, 346–49. I would
    like to thank Errol Henderson for his help in this article, and for sharing his new book.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9817                                                                                 43
Radical Motown, Radical Heritage                                                                      USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




     The student members, John Watson and Mike Hamlin, were thinking about new coalitions, even
at a federal level, to bring together new white and black leftist groups. They also differed on the
characterization of the system in that General Baker described African American conditions in the US
as being the result of internal colonization, and stood for more nationalist ideas, whereas Watson saw
it as simply a capitalist system.55 These differences and the difficulty to “explicate a logically consistent
model” were part of the problem that finally led to a split.56
     Watson had contact with a radical film-makers’ collective from New York, the Newsreel Collective,
which made a documentary about the League in 1970, entitled, Finally got the News. But this led to new
clashes due to the fact that most of the League members opposed this method of widely publicizing
their activities, as the Panthers would.57 The Newsreel collective members, all of whom were white,
were more supportive of the Panther style, and Watson had to follow them everywhere since “Blacks
would jump on them.”58 Watson, Hamlin and James Forman, a former SNCC leader, were promot-
ing the Black Economic Development Conference (BEDC) which met in April 1969, in a conference
promoted by African-American clergymen and business people.59 This corresponded to what Robin
Kelley referred to as a “community-based strategy.”60 The BEDC was also a way to get money from
various white charities, and so money became another reason for discord with new spending: the
proliferation of LRBW offices in the Detroit area, and the financing of the documentary.61 The efforts
in the BEDC led John Watson, Mike Hamlin and others away from their local emphasis. The Black
Workers Congress, founded in 1970, was an attempt to build a large coalition of black radical labor
activists and their project was to expand the League nationally, which led to its eventual explosion.
     Some League members seized the material for the film that they had paid for. The movie has often
been described as a success and, as Henderson writes, it was “one of the most effective propaganda
vehicles produced in the Black Power Movement.”62 But it obviously has two halves, the first half being
more collective, whereas the second half consists mainly in Watson speaking alone, as if the movie
was announcing the split. In June 1971, John Watson, Mike Hamlin, Ken Cockrell and others resigned
from the League with a text in which they described what they called the three main tendencies: “the
proletarian Revolutionaries” (referring to themselves), the “Petty Bourgeois Opportunists” (referring
to Luke Tripp), and the Backward Reactionary-Nationalist Lumpen-Proletarians” (referring to General
Baker).63 Even though the split was evoked in only political terms, there were also underlying social
and cultural gaps among the members.64 The League’s Code of Conduct was often evoked because of
members getting drunk or being “unrespectful in relationships with women.”65 The League faced the


55. Geschwender explained the failure by these differences. Geschwender, Class, Race, and Worker Insurgency.

56. James A. Geschwender and Judson L. Jeffries, “The League of Revolutionary Black Workers,” in Black Power in the Belly of
    the Beast (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 151.

57. Stewart Bird et al., Finally Got the News, Documentary (Cinema Guild, 1970), http://docuseek2.com/if-fin; Dan Georgakas,
    “Finally Got The News: The Making Of A Radical Film,” Cinéaste, 4(1973): 2; Chris Robé, “Detroit Rising: The League of
    Revolutionary Black Workers, Newsreel, and the Making of Finally Got the News,” Film History: An International Journal,
    4(2017): 125–58.

58. Jack Taylor, “Revolution at the Point of Production: An Interview with Mike Hamlin of DRUM and The League of Revolu-
    tionary Black Workers,” Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men, 1(2013): 110.

59. Black Economic Development, “Black Economic Development Conference,” 1969, Box 1, Folder 3. Dan Georgakas Collec-
    tion. Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs. Wayne State University, Detroit. This conference adopted the
    famous “Black Manifesto” written by James Forman, calling for reparations for African Americans. Keith Dye, “The Black
    Manifesto for Reparations in Detroit: Challenge and Response, 1969,” Michigan Historical Review, 2(2009): 53–83.

60. Kelley, “Building Bridges: The Challenge of Organized Labor in Communities of Color.”

61. The BEDC provided considerably more money than most of the radical groups could get, through the support of the
    Inter-Religious Foundation for Community Organizations (ICFO). Allen and Cluster, “Dying from the Inside,” 78.

62. Henderson, The Revolution Will Not Be Theorized, 348; Robé, “Detroit Rising.” Regarding this movie see Chris Robé’s article.

63. John Watson, Mike Hamlin, and Kenneth V. Cockrel, “The Split in the League of Revolutionary Black Workers: Three Lines
    and Three Headquarters,” n.d., 7, Box 1, Folder 19., DRUM Collecion. Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs.
    Wayne State University, Detroit.

64. Thompson, Whose Detroit?, 173.

65. LRBW, “LRBW Code of Conduct,” n.d., Box 4, Folder 11., Dan Georgakas Papers. Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9817                                                                                  44
Radical Motown, Radical Heritage                                                                     USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




same difficulties the BPP encountered with the “lumpen.” In various interviews, women in the League
mentioned their fight in a “black women’s committee” fighting against what Marsha Music calls a “lack
of proper respect and recognition given to them.” In particular, a sixteen-year-old girl was raped in
the League’s headquarters.66 Moreover, the women in the League were not represented in the seven-
member executive committee. They denounced male activists whose behavior consisted in hitting
their partner at home, or whose attitude towards women was merely “who’s gonna bring the food at
the meeting.”67 These aspects were almost absent from the oldest studies of the League.
     The first meeting of the Black Workers Congress in September, 1971, brought 500 people to Gary,
Indiana, a large black community. It was also their last meeting. However, a few members stayed in
the League with General Baker and joined a group based in California called the Communist League
(later known as the Communist Labor Party), a small Maoist group. General Baker ran for election to
the House of Representatives in 1976. The League’s local activities were almost reduced to nothing,
especially after General Baker and Chuck Wotten had been fired from their jobs. Under Forman the
Black Worker Congress became a small Marxist-Leninist organization, the Communist Party (Marxist-
Leninist).68 The failure of the Black Power organizations, and their near collapse after 1975, is often
explained by the alleged factionalism of the radical activists. In contrast to this negative perception,
we want to stress that the split in the League opposed both community-based and plant-based concep-
tions, which mirrored the political differences and the difficulty of weaving together claims of race
and class. It was also linked to the educational gap that divided the leadership in two, as well as to the
question of money, how to raise it and how to use it.



7 Conclusion
The special social situation in Detroit, with a strong black workforce in the auto plants, gave birth to
a specific form of organization. The 1967 riots sparked its formation, as young black workers were
recently hired in the car industry. Local radical political traditions were essential to this development.
The League’s story gives a different picture of Detroit as both a Union city, vital to the Union move-
ment, and a place where original leftist political tendencies were born. Elizabeth Kai Hinton attributes
the League’s rapid disbanding to the inability of its leaders to build a strong base for the LRBW, due
to their “educational privileges” and their embrace of socialism.69 The League did not hold member
meetings until 1971, at the time when it was disbanding, and according to Ernie Allen, many RUM
members did not know that they were also members of the League.70 But Elisabeth Kai Hinton does
not take into account the UAW’s attacks on RUM organizations. Even though it was short lived, the
League had a profound impact, especially on the unions. As a response to the threat this group rep-
resented, they ended segregation in their ranks and chose several Blacks to participate in the union
leadership. The actions of DRUM and later of the League forced the UAW leadership to finally fight
for “full equity” for African Americans in the union. The UAW stopped mobilizing opposition to
Black candidates running in local elections. Within a few months of the League’s formation, Black
workers were being elected as president of several local groups, including those with a white majority




    Urban Affairs. Wayne State University, Detroit.

66. Taylor, “Revolution at the Point of Production,” 111.

67. Music Marsha, Marian Kramer, and Ilene Baker, “The Role of Women,” General Baker Institute, 2016, https://vimeo.com/
    203718111.

68. Kelley, “Building Bridges: The Challenge of Organized Labor in Communities of Color,” 51–52.

69. “But by asking potential members to jeopardize coveted production jobs and to embrace socialist politics, the type of po-
    litical education and revolutionary action DRUM founders championed isolated them from the workers they sought to
    organize.” Elizabeth K. Hinton, “The Black Bolsheviks: Detroit Revolutionary Union Movements and Shop-Floor Orga-
    nizing,” in Elisabeth K. Hinton, The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
    2011), 211–12.

70. Allen and Cluster, “Dying from the Inside,” 79, 100.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9817                                                                                45
Radical Motown, Radical Heritage                                                                           USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




workforce.71 But at the same time, the UAW was fighting hard any radical challenges in the plants and
finally suppressed them, weakening the union and the combativeness in the plants. Heather Thomp-
son, who dismissed ideas of the inevitability of labor’s decline, insisted that labor depleted its strength
through its leaders’ own choices.72 Finally, by choosing to quash the black radicals in its own ranks,
the leadership of the UAW left the union far weaker in the face of the anti-labor offensive of the 1980s.
    The historian Cedric Johnson has argued that “the hegemony of identitarianism” has prevented
Black Lives Matter from offering an efficient answer to contemporary racism.73 Analogies with the past
50 years of black mobilizations are sometimes misguiding researchers and activists into anachronism
and oversimplification. The history of the Black Freedom Movement is complicated and the Black
Power era and organizations should be studied for themselves. The legacy of the Old Left has to be
taken into account, while various generations of activists from the 1930s to the 1960s were linked to
this, whether personally or intellectually.74 This history could be part of a larger history of the Black
Left. Bringing back this history is part of what the historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall describes as “making
the movement harder.” In other words, it is “harder to celebrate as a natural progression of American
values, harder to cast as a satisfying morality tale. Most of all, harder to simplify, appropriate and
contain.”75 For his part, and in a somewhat symmetrical manner, Peniel Joseph calls for a new Black
Power history that is not restricted to a limited period from 1966 to 1974.76 The LRBW is a part of this
New Black Power history.




71.   Larry R. Salomon, “Movement History: DRUM and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers,” Third Force Magazine,
      2(1994): 33.

72. Thompson, Whose Detroit?, 110–19.

73. Cedric Johnson G., “The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now,” Catalyst, 1(2017), https://catalyst-journal.com/vol1/no1/panthers-
    cant-save-us-cedric-johnson.

74. The Old Left refers to the workers’ organizations inspired primarily by Marxism. The New Left is defined by Paul Buhle
    as “the polyglot radicalism that centered its influence on the major private or state campus and in communities heavily
    influenced by campus radicalism.” Buhle, Buhle, and Georgakas, Encyclopedia of the American Left, 516. See also Maurice
    Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).

75. Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement,” 1235. In her seminal 2005 article Jacquelyn D. Hall described how: “by confining
    the civil rights struggle to the South, to bowdlerized heroes, to a single halcyon decade, and to limited, noneconomic objec-
    tives, the master narrative simultaneously elevates and diminishes the movement [preventing it] from speaking effectively
    to the challenges of our time.” Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement,” 1234.

76. Joseph, “The Black Power Movement.”



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9817                                                                                       46
Radical Motown, Radical Heritage                                                    USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




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Radical Motown, Radical Heritage                                                    USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




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Radical Motown, Radical Heritage                                                     USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




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https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/9817                                                              50
Radical Motown, Radical Heritage                                             USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




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