(Darryl Mitchell had this posted on his facebook "wall" so we asked if we could archive it here, and did so, with permission. There's some insights here into the rise of a radical rank-and-file labor union movement that lasted from around 1968 with the autoworker strikes in Detroit, and lasted until around the time of the beginning of the Clinton-Gore-Bush era.)
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League of Revolutionary Black Workers - League of Revolutionary for a New America: from League to League.
Darryl Mitchell
Supplement to “Detroit I Do Mind Dying.”
Saturday October 13, 2012 Detroit’s African American museum presented a showing of the film “Finally Got The News,” with presentations by General Baker Jr. and professor John Bracey, both former members of the League. This coming Thursday October 18, 2012 Detroit’s Wayne State University will feature a Labor Conference chronicling the labor movement in Detroit from 1920 – 1970, featuring Dan Georgakas, Author/Journalist, Elizabeth Kai Hinton, Columbia University; Dara Walker, Rutgers University and Commentator: General Baker Jr. Dan Georgakas is one of the authors of “Detroit, I Do Mind Dying.”
With the reissuing of “Detroit, I Do Mind Dying” August 2012, a new generation can read an account of the struggle of revolutionaries in the late 1960’s and 1970’s Detroit. “Detroit, I Do Mind Dying” is an excellent historical recollection worthy of reading and owning as a historical text. Its limitation is that it does not convey and express “our” voice and narrative. “Our voice” is a narrative expressed and organized around the workers and student component of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) or what consolidated as a General Baker, Chuck Wooten and John Williams grouping. “Our voice” and narrative is one that connects the rise and demise of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers with a time frame from the 1965 Watts rebellion, to outbreak of “Black Power,” through the various groupings calling themselves the new communist movement in the mid-1970s to collapse of the new communist groups in the mid-1980s. The old workers-students core of the LRBW exists forty-four years late - today - in the League of Revolutionaries for a New America.
Movements don’t just happen. The spontaneous striving of the African American Liberation Movement was reaching a crescendo during the nineteen sixties. Dr. Martin Luther King’s prophetic vision, gigantic personality and immense gravity as an organic intellectual, could not contain the surge of Birmingham Alabama black steel workers, who with their backs to the wall lashed out in self-defense violence against Klansman, terrorist reactionary bombers and garden variety Southern fascist. The response of the masses increasingly supplemented by black soldiers trained in jungles of Vietnam added to the WW II and Korean War veterans’ militancy aggressive opposition and armed resistance to lynch rope violence and the second class citizenship status of blacks. Birmingham 1963 set the stage for 1965 Watts.
The individuals to lead the formation of the LBRW were profoundly influenced by the Cuban Revolution and the plight of Robert Williams (Brother Rob).
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But the figure who best embodied black traditions of armed self-defense was Robert Williams, a hero to the new wave of black internationalists whose importance almost rivaled that of Malcolm X. As a former U.S. Marine with extensive military training, Williams earned notoriety in 1957 for forming armed self-defense groups in Monroe, North Carolina, to fight the Ku Klux Klan. Two years later, Williams’s statement that black people must “meet violence with violence” as the only way to end injustice in an uncivilized South led to his suspension as president of the Monroe chapter of the NAACP.
Williams’s break with the NAACP and his open advocacy of armed self defense pushed him further Left and into the orbit of the Socialist Workers Party, the Workers World Party, and among some members of the old CPUSA. However, Williams had had contact with communists since his days as a Detroit auto worker in the 1940s. He not only read the Daily Worker but also published a story in its pages called “Some Day I Am Going Back South.” Williams was also somewhat of an intellectual dabbler and autodidact, having studied at West Virginia State College, North Carolina College, and Johnson C. Smith College. Nevertheless, his more recent Left associations led him to Cuba and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Upon returning from his first trip in 1960, he hoisted the Cuban flag in his backyard and ran a series of articles in his mimeographed publication, the Crusader, about the transformation of working peoples’ lives in Cuba as a result of the revolution. In one of his editorials published in August 1960, Williams insisted that African Americans’ fight for freedom “is related to the Africans,’ the Cubans,’ all of Latin Americans’ and the Asians’ struggles for self-determination.” http://kasamaproject.org/2010/03/01/red-china-and-black-revolution/
Further
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“Meanwhile, the Progressive Labor movement (PL) had begun sponsoring trips to Cuba and recruited several radical black students in the East Bay to go along. Among them was Ernest Allen, a UC Berkeley transfer from Merritt College who had been forced out of the Afro-American Association. A working-class kid from Oakland, Allen was part of a generation of black radicals whose dissatisfaction with the civil rights movement’s strategy of nonviolent, passive resistance drew them closer to Malcolm X and Third World liberation movements. Not surprisingly, through his trip to Cuba in 1964 he discovered the Revolutionary Action Movement. Allen’s travel companions included a contingent of black militants from Detroit: Luke Tripp, Charles (“Mao”) Johnson, Charles Simmons, and General Baker. All were members of the student group Uhuru, and all went on to play key roles in the formation of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Incredibly, the RAM leader Max Stanford was already on the island visiting Robert Williams. When it was time to go back to the states, Allen and the Detroit group were committed to building RAM. Allen stopped in Cleveland to meet with RAM members on his cross-country bus trip back to Oakland.”
http://kasamaproject.org/2010/03/01/black-like-mao-red-china-black-revolution-part-2/
While in Cuba these young men played basketball with Fidel and Che according to General Baker. During lengthy discussion by Fidel and Che Baker was won over to a communist-socialist orientation.
In the aftermath of the August 1965 Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles, a variety of black equality organizations were formed ranging from the US Organization and the Black Panther Party to Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) to Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers and Republic of New Africa (RNA). (RAM was actually organized in 1962).
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“The Black Panthers Karenga met Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in a study circle in the early 1960s. While the US Organization’s cultural nationalism emerged in Los Angeles, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale developed revolutionary nationalism as the forceful political style of the Black Panther Party in Oakland. Actually, Newton and Seale were not the first Black Panthers; there were earlier groups organized by the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) in the aftermath of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s voting rights experiment in Lowndes County, Alabama, led by Stokely Carmichael. In 1965, one year before the Black Power slogan emerged, the independent Lowndes County Freedom Organization stood up to white terror in the Deep South, using a black panther to symbolize its defiance. A number of black activists from northern cities provided material support for self-defense to the Lowndes County Black Panthers and asked Stokely Carmichael for permission to form Black Panther organizations in their urban centers. Consequently, Black Panthers developed in New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco. In New York, alongside Eddie Ellis, Ted Wilson, Donald Washington, and Walter Ricks, one of the leaders of the Harlem Panthers was Larry Neal, a cofounder of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School.
“In July 1966, with the public endorsement of Stokely Carmichael, the Harlem Party established headquarters at 2409 Seventh Avenue, near 140th Street, and a Malcolm X Liberation School. By September 1966 twelve Panthers were arrested in Harlem during a school boycott, their first direct-action campaign. The New York Times estimated their membership at one hundred. In San Francisco, the Black Panthers were in communication with Robert F. Williams, the exiled leader of RAM, in Cuba. Between the Watts uprising in August 1965 and San Francisco unrest in September 1966, Newton and Seale began discussing the need for a new kind of organization of their own in Oakland; those exchanges resulted in the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in October 1966. Although Black Panther organizations emerged in other cities before the Oakland Panthers, the revolutionary grassroots party established by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale quickly developed a militant stance that propelled its members into the forefront of the Black Revolt. The definitive political style of the legendary Oakland Black Panther Party soon eclipsed the earlier Panthers in New York and San Francisco, expanding to a base of more than sixty cities with a membership of more than two thousand people.” http://exhibitions.nypl.org/africanaage/essay-black-power.html
After Watts 1965, the Newark and Detroit Rebellions of July 1967 shook American society to its foundations. These were the greatest uprising against the state since the Civil War. Detroit surpassed Newark in scale, with at least 43 deaths and 7,000 arrested. During the first wave of unrest in the 1960s, 329 major rebellions unfolded in 257 different cities; after Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, there were another two hundred uprisings in 172 cities. Another wave of youthful activists took to the streets in five hundred (500) street confrontations in 1969.
The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) was formed in the wake of Detroit 1967 and the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The LRBW was formed based on the DRUM organization – Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement – that grew out of the May 1968 Dodge Main strike in Detroit. This strike took place during the period of formation of SDS; it’s splitting and formation of “Revolutionary Union,” apparently in homage to the Detroit Revolutionaries.
The LRBW expressed the historic struggle of “labor in the black,” as this struggle passed through all stages of development of the industrial system. In broad strokes this struggle began under slavery in the South and development of Jim Crow in the North, then Emancipation and the founding of the African American People’s Convention in the post-Civil War era. The defeat of Reconstruction set the condition for “equal rights organizations” based on the color factor and finally the various forms of African American Labor Councils, spanning from the 1920s to the opening era of “Black Power.” Specifically, the DRUM movement and the LRBW were immediately thrown into a struggle over political and ideological hegemony amongst labor in the black facing TULC – Trade Union Leadership Council. TULC was formed by black trade unionists in the wake of the House Un-American Activity Committee attack against Detroit’s African American Labor Council.
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“The National African American Labor Council (1950 - 1955) was a labor union dedicated to serving the needs and civil rights of black workers. In 1951, black workers formed the National African American Labor Council (NNLC), which was brought about to serving the needs and civil rights of black workers. This organization was there to do certain tasks that the National African American Congress could not do since its failed return after the war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Negro_Labor_Council
Black Power was an electoral movement demanding inclusion of blacks into the political superstructure. Black Power erupted as the final stage of the fight against Jim Crow and last stage of an all class movement of the black community based on the color factor. The years 1967/1968 were the time for black power, black power conventions and mass entry of blacks into the political system. Proposed during the 1967 National Black Power Conference in Newark, and organized by Gary Mayor Richard Hatcher, U.S. Representative Charles Diggs and poet Amiri Baraka the convention attracted politically engaged blacks of all persuasions, from Democrats and Republicans to socialists, Marxists and revolutionaries of all types.
More often than not, “the League” is confused with the union caucus formed as the Revolutionary Union Movement. DRUM (Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement) and ELRUM (Eldon Revolutionary Union Movement) were not the LRBW or reducible to the league. The reason RUM groups were formed primarily at Chrysler and not at Ford is bound up with the mass hiring of blacks by the Ford Motor company in the 1920s. The reason RUM’s formed at Chrysler rather than Ford was because of the early communist organizing at Ford Rouge and the role of black communists in winning the battle for unity amongst blacks and whites. This was not the case elsewhere.
Blacks always found themselves in the absurd position of advocating for unions while fighting to be allowed in them and then against being discriminated against. This circumstance was the reason for black caucuses of all kinds. Even though Ford, Chrysler, General Motors, Dodge, Packard, Hudson, and many other manufacturers had signed collective bargaining agreements many areas had yet to fully form local unions, ratify the agreements, or cease Jim Crow policies and practices. Many local unions had segregated divisions and some plants had altogether separate segregated local unions. Blacks faced “hate strikes.” On June 3, 1943 25,000 white workers went on strike at Detroit’s Packard Motors Company when three black workers were promoted to the assembly line.
Thus, the purpose of the RUM was the battle for equality on the job; for blacks to be treated as equals by the company and within the union, rather than an abstract “class struggle” or anarcho-syndicalist vision of “workers against bosses.” The RUMs organizations and the LRBW existed on a continuum whose immediate predecessors were Trade Union Unity League, National African American Labor Council, and League of Struggle for African American Rights, National African American Council.
The LRBW was a federation of diverse organizations rather than a “big” RUM caucus. This federation shared resources to aid its organization in mobilizing and fighting on various “fronts of struggle.” For instance “Parents and Students for Community Control” was formed as a league component to battle in the electoral arena to elect local black school board members, expressing the concerns of their neighborhood. North Woodward Interfaith organization, United Community (UNICOM), West Central Organization (WCO) and International Black Appeal (IPA) were incorporated into the league. The Black Student Voice and later Black Student United Front were high school students, many who would distribute literature at plants. There was a period when the Southend newspaper came under the direction of the League members.
A complex of issues is attributed to the split and disintegration of the LRBW. The LRBW was formed during the final stage of American Revolution 2.5 - the Civil Rights Movement and in a larger historical sense expressed the last phase of organizational unity between Marxism and anarcho-syndicalism. With the shattering of the wall of de jure – legal – segregation, the LRBW could no longer evolve as a revolutionary organization based exclusively on color. In a country such as America, with its huge multinational majority white working class, a majority black organization of revolutionaries, striving for a Marxist approach and method is an impossible contradiction.
The LRBW was not a Marxist or Marxist-Leninist organization, although Marxist and Marxist-Leninist were members of the league. The league would later declare itself in favor of forming a Black Marxist Leninist party. Due to the principled stand of the Communist League demanding a multinational Communist Party, all sections of the old LRBW were won over to the Communist League vision of a revolutionary Communist party.
Every single revolutionary group in American “courted” the LRBW and all of their material was read critically. One should ask why the largest grouping of the LRBW rejected the outlook of the Revolutionary Union and its Red Papers along with the October League, which grew out of the Revolution Youth Movement II.
(See Revolution in the Air pages, 70, 71, 72.)
The reason the LRBW was won over to the California Communist League (CCL) and then the Communist League (CL) is their theory basis in Marxism and living connection in the long struggle for an American Marxist narrative. The Communist League approach to the issues of the day and description of the social revolution made more sense than all the new communist groups combined, at least to a broad section of revolutionaries in Detroit. The Motor City Labor League, fragments of Detroit Organizing Committee (DOC), Revolution Per Minute (RPM), People Against Racism (PAR) and groups of independent Marxist would join CL and become part of the Communist Labor Party.
The proposition that the LRBW and others joined CL because Nelson Peery, its Chairman is African American is absurd and insulting. The LRBW did not join the CL because Peery is African American. The LRBW was recruited into the CL by a revolutionary from the Bay area sent to establish an educational forum for the workers and student component.
Nelson Peery became Chairman of CL because he was best qualified. It is a feature of our society that a revolutionary group must express a historical continuity and the salient feature of the social movement to be relevant. Peery’s history evolves through the CPUSA and the long struggle for a revolutionary position on the African American Question; against the anti-Stalin form of anti-communism, against Khrushchev revisionism and for the building of a Leninist party along the lines pioneered by Lenin. Thus, Peery (along with his wife Sue Ying who created CL’s study program and Blue Book) expressed the salient feature of the social process in the same way the Slavic workers constituted the driving core of the CPUSA during the drive for industrial unionism. The revolutionary driving core of the industrial union movement was the unskilled Slavic workers rather than the Western European English workers. In an earlier period the CPUSA was composed of various ethnic associations, which revolutionaries from the various European ethnic groups joined.
End part 1
