League of Revolutionary Black Workers

LEAGUE OF REVOLUTIONARY BLACK WORKERS. Alone among Black Power organizations of the 1960s, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) mainly focused on organizing industrial workers while positing a socialist solution to the problems of black America. Although never gaining the kind of mass media exposure given to the Black Panther Party, the League had an enormous impact on black revolutionaries and on Marxist tendencies within the New Left. The League also made contact with extra-parliamentary groups in Europe, particularly in Italy. The LRBW strove to take the movements previously identified with the leadership of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X to a new stage of organization and consciousness. Its history also provides an example of how the black revolutionaries of the 1960s often had links to preceding radical movements.

The LRBW originated in a wildcat strike of black workers in May 1968 at the Detroit Dodge main plant of the Chrysler Corporation. The strike was the first in fourteen years and black radicals were its organizational core. Coming a year after the most extensive and costly radical insurrection in American history, the wildcat was a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal and was given extensive coverage in the Detroit press. The wildcatters formed an organization called DRUM (Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement), which expressed as much hostility toward the United Auto Workers (UAW) as to the company. By their actions the DRUM workers indicated they were unwilling to wait for white workers to ally with them and they would not dilute their demands for racial justice for the sake of hypothetical white support.

The anger that erupted at Dodge Main was symptomatic of the frustration felt by Detroit’s entire black working class. A series of RUMs were formed in various workplaces. Most were at auto plants (ELRUM: Chrysler’s Eldon Avenue Gear and Axle; FRUM: Ford’s River Rouge complex; CADRUM: General Motors’ Cadillac plant) but there were non-auto RUMs as well, such as those organized by United Parcel workers and health workers. RUM-like groups also began to appear in other cities, at steel mills in Birmingham, Alabama, and at auto plants in Baltimore, Maryland; Fremont, California; and Mahwah, New Jersey. The Detroit RUMs consolidated into the LRBW with the goal of first organizing the black workers of Detroit and then the black workers of the entire United States.

Although the League appeared to be a by-product of the “Great Rebellion” of 1967 to outsiders, it reflected more than a decade of agitation and education. The black radicals who came of political age in the 1950s had much more of a Marxist orientation than activists in the South and most other northern cities. This was due in part to a vibrant Detroit radicalism that had centered around the Communist party, black cultural groups, and Trotskyist publishing groups with roots in the Workers Party of the 1940s. Rather than accepting the nonviolent-resistance strategy of King, the Detroit radicals tended to be supportive of the methods of the Chinese and Cuban revolutions. When Robert Williams, head of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, clashed with King over the need for armed self-defense, a support Detroit group was formed. The supersecret Revolutionary Action Movement also had Detroit adherents. Black radicals had been influenced by the Socialist Workers Party’s Friday Night Forums; by study groups run by Marty Glaberman of Facing Reality, a local C. L. R. James support group; and by close contact with James Boggs, whose The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook (Monthly Review Press, 1963) attracted national attention. A group that joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was expelled for wishing to do more than fund-raising in the North. Radicals were also involved in the Northern High School student strike, Uhuruh (a Detroit action group), and the Freedom Now Party, an all-black political party that achieved ballot status in Michigan. Future League leaders participated in a 1964 trip to Cuba designed to challenge the State Department ban on travel to the island and met with Che Guevara when he appeared at the United Nations. There were also contacts with supporters of Malcolm X and various radical writers and graphic artists from an older generation of militants. Many of the activists took college classes at Wayne State University, but they worked in basic industry to support themselves.

Acting on Lenin’s injunction to create a political press, the Detroiters launched the Inner City Voice in 1967 with John Watson as editor. The paper was well received but became irregular due to the refusal of various printers to handle such radical material. The paper had to be produced in a Muslim shop in Chicago and trucked back to Detroit. To overcome this problem, a group of Wayne-based radicals organized to have Watson elected the first black editor of the South End, the university’s daily paper. Arguing that the paper was a community resource, Watson often put its pages at the disposal of various RUMs throughout the 1968–1969 academic year. Other radical groups were also welcomed to use the South End. Under Watson’s editorship, there was considerable agitation against the war in Vietnam, a series of articles supportive of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and a special issue criticizing the military junta in Greece from a Left perspective.

Among the radicals in the plants, the most important was General Baker. (“General” is a given name, not a rank.) Baker had been known for his revolutionary views for years, but following the Great Rebellion of 1967, he began to attract a mass following. Also playing a crucial role in creating the first RUMs in Detroit factories was Mike Hamlin. Yet another major League personality was attorney Ken Cockrel. With his white law partner, Justin Ravitz, Cockrel won a number of celebrated cases with sensationalistic racial and class aspects. He was well known throughout the city for his efforts to curb police abuses, and he often served as the public spokesperson for the League. Unlike other black organizations, the League never had to go outside its own leadership for legal defense.

One problem the organization never resolved was an exact self-definition. The founders knew what the LRBW was not. It was not a political party. It was not a caucus within the UAW. It was not an independent union. In many ways the League was like a latter-day Industrial Workers of the World, an organization willing to address immediate issues in a militant and winning fashion but with its true passion a total transformation of capitalist society.

Tactical problems stemmed directly from the vague self-definition. Should a RUM attempt to capture the UAW local or should it operate as a dual union? Should nonindustrial issues become part of the immediate agenda? RUMs were limited to nonwhites, but how should cooperating whites be handled? This last issue was complicated by the fact that many black workers attracted to the League had intense nationalist feelings. Various solutions were posed at various times at different RUMs, but the League did not survive long enough to have a consistent policy. Thousands of workers would respond to League calls, but contradictory policies and impractical methods ultimately undermined the organization’s momentum. Formal membership never ran to more than a few hundred.

The fate of the League was determined in 1969 when James Foreman, a major leader of SNCC, became associated with it. Foreman wanted the League to be transformed into a national organization with various components dealing with the full range of black community needs. In this sense Foreman set out to remold the League as the successor of SNCC just as Stokely Carmichael sought to remold the Black Panther Party to the same end.

Foreman’s immediate project was the Black Economic Development Conference (BEDC), which demanded $500 million in reparations from religious institutions to fund long-term black economic self-sufficiency. BEDC was not to be an independent organization but a conduit to action groups in the field. Foreman was partially successful and approximately $1 million passed through BEDC. Most of this sum was channeled to groups around the country with Foreman connections. A significant amount went to the components and allies of the League.

BEDC money made it possible for the League to have a modestly paid staff and to finance its own printing shop, film company, and book club. The goal of the printing component, Black Star Publishing, was to establish a newspaper and to create educational materials without being held hostage to the whims of outside printers. Black Star published a number of leaflets and posters and one book, The Political Thought of fames Foreman (1970).

The example of the League led other Detroit radicals to form the Motor City Labor League (MCLL), a mostly white organization with independent socialist goals but one supportive of and cooperative with the LRBW. Its most successful undertaking was a radical book club that involved hundreds of Detroiters who met to discuss a series of highly political books. LRBW members worked with the book club. Two radical bookstores and a second radical book club were among the MCLL’s longer-term legacies.

Detroit Newsreel was established by whites who came from New York City to make a film about the League. After a volatile relationship, the League took over the film collective as its own and retained three of the white filmmakers as creative and teaching staff. The final product of this effort was Finally Got the News (1970), a feature-length documentary designed to spread League views nationwide. Its political impact was lessened by the circumstance that it was released just as the League was going into schism. The film did get shown extensively over the years and was also screened in Europe. It remains a remarkable expression of the times and the one black radical film under editorial control of the organization it endeavored to celebrate. Black Star Productions tried to work with Jane Fonda and other Hollywood personalities on successor films, but the efforts never bore cinematic fruit.

Two factions had developed in the League by early 1970. One, composed mainly of the plant organizers, wanted to concentrate on industrial organization and to solidify the local base. The other, largely involved in outreach and mass education, felt the League could only prevail by gaining wider visibility. The dispute was fed by personal jealousies, the impact of black nationalism at the factory level, and outside radical forces who came to a Detroit they spoke of as the American Petrograd. Watson, Cockrel, and Hamlin led the League faction that allied with Foreman for a national strategy. Their vehicle was to be the Black Workers Congress (BWC), originally conceived with the League as its central hub. For most of the 1970s the BWC would seek to re-create League-type structures in various localities. It would work closely with Asian and Latino groups with a similar orientation and with Maoists who wished to build a new Marxist-Leninist party. The BWC was never able to become a viable entity and it expired with the collapse of Maoism and the new party movement.

The group that retained the League name was led by General Baker, Chuck Wooten, John Williams, and Luke Tripp. They never affiliated with the BWC and in spite of continued plant actions, the League more or less disintegrated. Contributing to the decline was the defection of some RUM leaders back to the UAW and the activities of the Communist Labor Party (CLP), which had originated as a split from the Communist Party and prided itself on its adherence to a pre-Khrushchev style of Communism. The CLP recruited a block of League cadre. The most prominent of these was General Baker, who would later run unsuccessfully for state office under the CLP banner. A split within the MCLL brought additional support for the CLP camp, including individuals active in the local National Lawyers Guild. The CLP kept most of its membership secret so any influence it might have in the plants was not easily determined. The organization also worked to establish radical bookstores in major cities, but the CLP link was not acknowledged.

The BWC forces soon suffered a split within the split. Cockrel, allied with elements of the MCLL that had not gravitated to the CLP, decided it was wisest to work in the arena of electoral politics. Justin Ravitz ran successfully for a ten-year judgeship in the criminal court (1972) as part of an effort to reform the judiciary and control the police. Two years later Coleman Young was elected Detroit’s first black mayor. Like Judge George Crockett (soon to be elected to Congress), Young was from an older generation that had been victimized by McCarthyism. Although Young was highly supportive of business, he hired a number of radicals to work in his administration, including some League personnel. He soon established himself as an unbeatable incumbent. Cockrel, who had mayoral ambitions of his own, had to settle for a seat on Detroit’s Common Council some years later but eventually chose to go back into private practice. When Cockrel died of a heart attack in 1989 at age fifty-one, the press and elected officials spoke of him as one of the city’s most gifted citizens and the man who had been most likely to succeed Coleman Young.

By the late 1980s the League was another dynamic chapter in local radical and black history, but more so than in any other major city, many of its activists and allies had achieved a measure of political power without renouncing their radical views. They remained active in the mass media, in the UAW hierarchy, in university administrations, and in public office. Hamlin and Baker remained active in grass roots organizing. The only leaders of the League who eventually wrote about their experience were Mike Hamlin and Luke Tripp. The Archives of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers have been deposited at the Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

Allen, Ernie, “Dying from the Inside: The Decline of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.” In They Should Have Served That Cup of Coffee, edited by Dick Cluster. Boston: South End Press, 1979.

Detroit Under STRESS. A pamphlet of the From the Ground Up organization, Detroit, 1973. Chapter 1. Joseph A. Labadie Collection. Special Collections Library. University of Michigan.

Georgakas, Dan, and Marvin Surkin. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. 3rd Edition. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016. (First edition: New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975.)

Hamlin, Mike and Michelle Gibbs. A Black Revolutionary’s Life in Labor: Black Workers Power in Detroit. Detroit: Against the Tide Press, 2015.

Pizzolato, Nicola. “Workers and Revolutionaries at the Twilight of Fordism: The Breakdown of Industrial Relations in the Automobile Plants of Detroit and Turin, 1967-1973. Labor Hisotry-45 November 2004. P. 419-43.

Thompson, Heather Ann. Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor and Race in a American City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2001.

Tripp, Luke. “Black Working Class Radicalism in Detroit: 1960-70.” Ethnic Working Class.

https://policing.umhistorylabs.lsa.umich.edu/s/detroitunderfire/item/522