New book available on Detroit’s revolutionary Black workers

Oakland, California

A few blocks away from the Martin Luther King Jr. Day events on Jan. 19 here in Oakland, California, people gathered at OakStop to hear the authors of a new book about the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) and the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), labor organizations which were active in Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s.

Co-author Jerome Scott described his experiences in the auto plants at that time. The organizations confronted the daily disrespect shown to the workers and corrected safety and health violations.  He said, “Our most important tactic was the wildcat strike, when the workers would drop their tools and walk out, without any notice to the boss.” When a plant has thousands of workers striking, that gets the employer’s attention.

Scott had been a soldier in Vietnam during that conflict, when Vietnamese liberation fighters completely defeated the enormous power of the U.S. military and won the country’s independence. Once he went for water at a local village and saw pamphlets left for the Black GIs that asked: “Black soldiers! Why are you at the end of the line in the U.S. and first in line when fighting in Vietnam?” He remembers that to this day.

Scott also noticed how Vietnamese people were hired to do many routine tasks in U.S. Army camps, including rolling up the GI bedrolls. Yet when it turned out that the North Vietnamese knew details about U.S. military plans, U.S. officers were perplexed about how they could possibly have obtained this information.

Scott noted that the 1960s brought many youth into the Civil Rights and antiwar movements, saying, “Young people are the backbone of a movement.” He said things are similar now, with the rise in police and now ICE brutality, along with the threat of the National Guard being called in to patrol sanctuary cities. There were people of all ages and ethnicities in the overflow crowd, another indication of the vitality and dynamism still present in Oakland.

Co-author Walda Katz-Fishman grew up in the 1950s in a liberal Jewish family in New Orleans, where she witnessed the terror and violence of the segregated South. In the 1960s she moved to Detroit and became involved with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Many things came together for her then, issues of racism, sexism and class domination.

The new book, “Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries: The Story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers,” University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia, copyright 2025.