DETROIT'S REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY
How ex-students linked up with Black workers
By Debbie Johnson
& Jerry Goldberg
Detroit
This is excerpted from talks to a Workers World Party
meeting in Detroit on the 30th anniversary of the party branch
there. It examines the revolutionary heritage of the
working-class struggle in that city, which of course is ignored
in the official
tri-centennial celebrations.
In 1970, the student movement, especially in opposition to
the U.S. imperialist war in Vietnam, was at its peak. In May of
that year, when the U.S. invaded Cambodia, strikes and
demonstrations shut down universities nationwide.
Students at the University of Michigan were in the forefront
of that movement. The leading group was Students for a
Democratic Society.
While SDS had originally begun as a left liberal
organization, based on participatory democracy, it had been
transformed into a revolutionary formation with diverse
ideological currents by the late 1960s.
The Ann Arbor SDS chapter was one of the strongest in the
country, with units in every dorm on campus. In 1969 and 1970
it led many thousands of students in shutting down military
recruiting, opposing the conspiracy trial of the Chicago 8,
defending the Black Panthers and Brown Berets, and lending
active support to Black students on strike for affirmative
action.
It was a period of intense struggle. The SDS members were
constantly studying Marxism and debating revolutionary
ideology. By the spring of 1970, a consensus had developed
among the leadership that to be a serious revolutionary you had
to leave the campus and move to cities where the working class,
the only class that could overthrow capitalism, was
concentrated.
In the spring of 1970, a group of 35 activists left Ann
Arbor and moved to Detroit to become revolutionary
working-class organizers.
This group was not ideologically cohesive. It ended up
dividing into various political currents.
While in SDS, a number of the student leaders had gotten to
know Workers World Party. Among the established left parties,
this party and its youth arm, Youth Against War and Fascism,
were unique in their willingness and ability to link up with
the most militant sectors of the student movement. They were
respected for their organization and discipline in the many
street battles taking place.
The cutting-edge question in that period, as today, was the
defense of the right of oppressed nations to
self-determination, especially the internal colonies of U.S.
imperialism--the Black, Chicano, Puerto Rican and Native
nations. No group defended the Black Panthers, the Young Lords
and the other revolutionary formations of the oppressed nations
with more vigor and determination than Workers World Party.
As a result, shortly after moving to Detroit, a group that
had formerly been the leadership of Ann Arbor SDS affiliated
with Workers World Party.
When the comrades came into Detroit in the spring of 1970,
the city was a center of revolutionary activity, especially in
the Black community. Detroit had experienced one of the largest
Black rebellions of the late 1960s, triggered by police
brutality. The Black community fought the cops and National
Guard for six days and nights in 1967, suffering 43 deaths.
National liberation
and class struggle
In the late 1960s the auto industry was booming in Detroit.
Unlike today, many of the plants, particularly Chrysler plants,
were located right in the city where the workforce was
predominantly African American. Young Black workers just out of
high school could get jobs in the plants. The benefits and
wages were pretty decent, as long as you were willing to put up
with miserable working conditions.
Detroit was unique in the Black struggle because of the
dominant position and concentration of African American workers
in the auto plants. Here the struggle for national liberation
tended to merge with the working class struggle.
In the rest of the country, because of high unemployment and
generally oppressive conditions in the Black community, the
Black Panthers reached out to the lumpen-proletariat, the most
oppressed and unemployed sectors of the community, as the base
for building their organization. However, as Huey Newton
explained, the Panthers studied Marxist ideology and understood
the historic role of the working class in overthrowing
capitalism.
Detroit's auto industry was then the largest industry in the
country, as it continues to be today on a lesser scale. Because
of the concentration of Black workers, particularly in the
inner-city Chrysler plants, revolutionary leaders in the Black
community saw a unique opportunity to directly merge their
liberation struggle with the working class struggle to
overthrow capitalism.
The formation that reflected this ideological view, and was
unique to Detroit, was the League of Revolutionary Black
Workers.
The base of this political party was among Black workers
organized into caucuses in most of the Chrysler plants. In
Dodge Main, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement was
extremely strong and led many job actions. Another powerful
group was the Eldon Avenue Revolutionary Union Movement at the
Eldon Avenue axle plant.
The league also recruited the revolutionary intelligentsia
in the Black community. Among its leaders were attorney Ken
Cockrel and John Watson, who while a student at Wayne State
University became editor of the South End newspaper, turning it
into an organ of the league. The masthead of the South End
read: "One class-conscious worker is worth 1,000 students."
The league struggled to free James Johnson, a Black worker
who, fed up with racism at the Eldon Avenue plant, shot a
couple of supervisors and a labor relations representative. The
league's newspaper ran a famous poem about him that concluded,
"Whenever Black workers are under attack, there will be
thousands of Johnsons back to back. James Johnson needed a
Thompson." Because of the legal and political struggle on his
behalf, Johnson was found not guilty by reason of temporary
insanity and even won workers' compensation benefits.
Even after the League of Revolutionary Black Workers began
declining organizationally in the 1970s, the link between the
Black liberation and working class struggle continued. In the
summer of 1972, two Black workers took over the power plant and
shut down the Jefferson Assembly Plant in Detroit to demand the
firing of a racist foreman.
Some 5,000 workers surrounded the power plant to defend
them. They won.
This was followed by other wildcats, or unsanctioned,
strikes.
The movement began impacting white workers, who recognized
the Black workers in the union as the militant force.
In 1971, at the Michigan Truck Plant in Wayne, Mich., where
only about 15 percent of the workers were African American and
the union leadership had been virtually all white and very
racist, Jerry Goldberg of Workers World Party and another
radical worker were instrumental in forming a multi-national
rank-and-file caucus and newsletter. The caucus got a shop
committee elected of five African Americans and two whites.
Even though there was still plenty of racism among the white
workers, they knew they were exploited every day on the
assembly line and needed representatives who would fight for
them. They saw the strength and militancy of the Black workers
in Detroit who were constantly battling the bosses. And they
wanted some of that fight in their plant as well.
This was a sign of the dynamic developing in Detroit at that
time. Revolutionary Black leadership in the auto plants was
becoming a pole of attraction to white workers looking to fight
their oppressive conditions as well.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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