Book Review: “Motown and the Making of Black Revolutionaries”

“Too often, our standards for evaluating social movements pivot around whether or not they “succeeded” in realizing their visions rather than on the merits or power of the visions themselves. By such a measure, virtually every radical movement failed because the basic power relations they sought to change remained pretty much intact. And yet it is precisely these alternative visions and dreams that inspire new generations to struggle for change.”

–Robin D.G. Kelley

The various organizations that have made up the Left in the United States can be described as a cluster of experiments. Experiments that might catalyze a part of society into action against racism and capitalist exploitation. Despite the efforts of some of the finest organizers, the basic power relationship has remained intact. This makes Motown and the Making of Black Revolutionaries: The Story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers a critical read.

It is rare that Left organizations offer the next generations an honest summation of their efforts. When they don’t young organizers are deprived of a chance to learn from the past and forced to reinvent radical organizing. This work, featuring extensive interviews with participants in Detroit’s late 1960s/early 1970s Black worker upsurge, offers dialogue and insight about what they did right and areas where they fell short. 

These fighters don’t romanticize their past experience; they recount and analyze it. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers organized Black workers in Detroit’s auto plants. The group’s roots lay in a 1968 wildcat strike at the Dodge Main plant of the Chrysler Corporation. The wildcatters formed the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) inspiring a collection of other “RUM” groups at auto planets across Detroit. A consolidated League distinguished itself through autonomous, Black-led direct action and, while not advocating “dual unionism,” clashed as frequently with officials of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union as it did with management.

The League centered workplace activity but also brought student and community-based groups under its umbrella. It promoted Marxist analysis and political education. The League played a unique role in the bouquet of radical political experiments born in the late 1960s., At a time when many activists forged in the period’s “New Left” were skeptical of or hostile to working-class politics, the League played a pathbreaking role in drawing many radicals toward them. Spurring what became a wide range of projects and organizations focused on point-of-production organizing, the League stood out in the depth of its roots in the Black working class. An organic internationalism accompanied the League’s centering the lives of Black workers in the US; ties were built with activists rooted in other communities of color and also with white radicals who took up working-class organizing. At a time when solidarity with Palestine was rare on the US Left, connections between the League and the many Arab workers in the Detroit area were an important factor in the League seeing the Palestinian struggle as an integral part of the global rising of that period against white supremacy and Western imperialism.

Voices from within the League

Readers of Left history may have been first exposed to the League through the important books Detroit, I Mind Dying by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin or Class, Race & Worker Insurgency by James Geschwender. This book expands our perspective by telling the League story via the voices of those who were members.   Nearly every League veteran alive and willing to share their experience was interviewed and is quoted in the volume.. 

The interviews are sandwiched with context-setting analysis from authors Scott and Katz-Fishman. The result is a collective effort coordinated and edited by two movement veterans. Part oral history, part participatory action research. Scott and Katz-Fishman handle the challenges presented by being both participants and authors well, gently leaving contradictions on the table for the reader to consider. 

Confronting race on the factory floor

Many of the struggles engaged by the League should resonate with today’s radical labor organizers. Throughout the book, speakers describe how the UAW leadership consistently sabotaged Black-led organizing.  In the words of League organizer General Baker:

“Out of this history, we had to fight the company and the union. The union was so bad that we developed a slogan–-the UAW means ‘you ain’t white.” We had picketlines around the Solidarity House (UAW headquarters). We tried to talk with them about discrimination. We couldn’t even get a conversation with UAW leadership. They said, “that the only discrimination in the union is what you started.”

Today’s labor movement has made some advances in terms of racial justice, but  labor’s uneven responses to the Trump regime’s white supremacy and the movements against police terror expose different expressions of the same dilemmas. For the League, the answer was to create an organization outside of the union’s control that could take independent initiative, including the capacity to directly confront the auto companies with wildcat strikes when the union that was supposed to be defending workers’ health, safety, and workplace rights was MIA.

Motown and the Making of Black Revolutionaries tackles some of the contradictions of the League, particularly in regard to sexism. Like the majority of Left organizations of the time, sexism hampered the League’s growth. The reflections contained in the volume lay out the problem and the practical ways that the group tried to deal with it. The League required men to share in collective childcare labor and developed interventions to support women’s leadership.

A major theme in the book is the importance of Marxist political education in equipping people to stay in the revolutionary movement for the long haul. The book itself is a work of political education, offering a “usable past” to the new generations taking up the revolutionary torch today. It is a concrete example of the way working-class organizers simultaneously can be, and should be, memory workers.