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The League of Revolutionary Black WorkersIntroduction

The League of Revolutionary Black Workers emerged in Detroit in the late 1960s, a period of growing dissatisfaction with the mainstream integrationist civil rights organizationsand the failures of the Democratic Party to address the subjugation of black people in acomprehensive way. A new movement which came to be known as Black Power or Black Liberation, grew out of these failures and gave birth to a new identity and a number of new massand revolutionary organizations, one of the most advanced being the Revolutionary UnionMovement and the League.The Black Power movement also conceptualized the oppression of black peopledomestically within an international context of white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism. Itlooked toward and drew inspiration from the national liberation movements that were happeningin Cuba, Algeria, and Vietnam as well as the Cultural Revolution in China as a model for what black liberation in the United States could look like. The League was no exception in thisregard.Catalyzed by the Great Rebellion of 1967, an upheaval of Detroit’s black poor against police brutality, poor living conditions, and limited jobs, the League saw the necessity of organizing black workers. Formed by a core of organizers who worked in the auto industry, theywere also instrumental in organizing the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), in theDodge Main auto plant and which pushed for addressing atrocious workplace conditions, speed-up, and the extension of the working day as well as their racist implications. Some DRUM

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militants were a part of previous civil rights groups but were discontented with the politics andtook a more radical political stand that contextualized white supremacy through the framework of capitalist social relations.

The Failed Anti-Racism of the Civil Rights Movement

One of the central critiques of civil rights groups made by black power militants was thatit was largely beholden to the Democratic Party and Federal Government for mitigating theconditions of the black southerners. Certainly, the new mass activity that the Southern ChristianLeadership Conference (SCLC) and Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) organized around help bring new life to the civil rights struggle as they broke with the conservative politics andorganizing approaches of the NAACP. This was demonstrated by the Montgomery Bus Boycottof 1955 which saw the creation of a completely autonomous and self-organized system of masstransit. While this was not completely directed from the top, SCLC organizers were a positiveforce that fused with this self-organization and gave it a more conscious purpose.

In the long-term, they were incapable of safeguarding the self-activity of blacks as theystrove to draw all of it under the wing of the SCLC leadership. Such an orientation is the reasonthat Ella Baker left the organization and advocated for the wildcat sit-ins of 1960 by black students to remain independent. She saw the bureaucratizing effect SCLC had played on themovement and the new vitality black students brought to it with the sit-ins. This led to theformation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) which served as anorganizational bridge and transition from civil rights to black liberation.

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The influence of the federal government precipitated a split in SNCC betweendesegregation campaigns on the one hand and voter registration on the other. The KennedyAdministration refused to intervene in the brutal attacks by random whites on black and whitefreedom riders in 1961 unless SNCC shifted their focus onto voter registration and end their desegregation work. While the organizing done by SNCC around voter registration was verydynamic, it also served to buttress the Democratic Party who could parlay that organizing intovotes for their candidates.

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Ultimately, the black power movement saw that organizing in this fashion is not aneffective anti-racist strategy in that it hinders the movement from making demands that wouldchallenge white hegemony.Another major critique of the civil rights movement is that they actively sought out whiteliberal participation. This hindered the movement largely due to the fact white liberals were morehesitant to address white supremacy outside its Jim Crow manifestations and this sacrificed themore comprehensive ways black folks experienced white supremacy. This spoke to the civilrights movement predominately middle class composition. Organizing black workers aroundtheir specific concrete oppressions were not a part of the platform for these groups. SCLC andCORE viewed black freedom as having suffrage and being integrated in the same school withwhite folks. The demands that these groups organized around largely benefited just the black middle class who weren’t facing the “niggermation” of River Rouge.

The Dynamics of Race in 1960s Detroit and Urban Insurrection