Detroit: I Do
Mind Dying
Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Cambridge: South End Press
Classics, 1998
A friend of mine once told me that when he was a kid growing up in
Windsor, Ontario in the 1960's he and his friends used to go down to
the banks of the river to watch Detroit burn. Now more than thirty
years since the fires of Detroit and almost a quarter of a century
since the book was originally published, a new edition of the long
out of print classic Detroit: I Do Mind Dying has been
republished. The new edition contains the complete text of the 1975
edition, a new introduction and afterward by the authors, a preface
by Manning Marable, and comments by four of the activists who played
a role in the events described in the book. Sadly the photographs
from the original edition, which provided a visual record of this
period are absent in the new version.
In 1967 Detroit was a maelstrom of social discontent.
Detroit was the centre of the automobile industry that employed one
out of every six Americans. In addition Detroit was fast becoming a
majority black city, yet white suburbs like Dearborn (the city
created by Henry Ford) and Grosse Point maintained racist codes which
effectively denied blacks the right to live there. It was the
intersection of these two factors, race and class, that created the
explosive mixture that found expression in such formations as the
Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), and the League of
Revolutionary Black Workers. In the auto plants there existed some of
the most dangerous working conditions in America. Detroit: I Do Mind
Dying begins with the story of James Johnson, who after an argument
with a supervisor that resulted in a suspension came back with a
rifle and killed three coworkers. Thirty years since, the syndrome is
all too familiar and has even acquired a mass culture expression,
"going postal, " but in 1967, it was not new. Defence Attorney Ken
Cockrel argued at the trial that rather than Johnson, the hand of the
Chrysler corporation was on the trigger. Unnamed, but undoubtedly
co-defendants in that trial were the United Auto Workers. (UAW)
While the UAW may officially have been born in South Bend
Indiana in 1936, it was the dramatic events of 1937 in Flint,
Michigan that put the union on the map. The spontaneously-evolved
tactics such as the sit-down strike dynamically demonstrated the
power of the working class in America, but in the thirty years since
that birth, the unions had become complacent, defensive. As the
unions seemed unable or unwilling to deal with the problems of
safety, racism and exploitation in the plants, the workers themselves
began to develop their own solutions. In October 1967 a new monthly
publication appeared on the streets of Detroit, Inner City Voice
(ICV) . The core of radicals who made up the ICV collective were
not unknown in Detroit and many had worked in radical organizations
such as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student
Non-Violent Coordination Committee (SNCC). Virtually all of those
involved with ICV were later to appear as part of the
leadership of the League. Although its frequency was erratic,
ICV was an important step in the development of a more radical
opposition in Detroit. An important figure in this chain was John
Watson, the editor of ICV. The following year Watson was
appointed to the position of editor of Wayne State University's daily
student newspaper The South End and used that resource to full
advantage.
Watson argued that the paper was not simply the property of
the student population of Wayne State but instead belonged to the
community as well. With that in mind he threw open the pages of the
paper to the community and published a series of articles that
reflected matters generally considered beyond normal student
concerns. Yet, he also covered student issues and generally tried to
provide a balanced, albeit partisan coverage of events. Watson and
his supporters fell out with the rest of the editorial board the
following summer and he was replaced, but even with a less radical
editorial collective the paper was never quite the same. Rather than
assuming the role of the perpetual critic, Watson argued that
radicals had to play a positive role and make use of the
opportunities that presented themselves. By way of contrast, it is
instructive to note that the Socialist Workers Party's suggestion at
this time was to circulate an opposition newsletter on campus.
Watson's efforts to make use of available media facilities, were
duplicated a few years later when members of the League cooperated,
somewhat uneasily, with a radical film collective to produce the
documentary Finally got the News.
By the summer of 1968 the ICV group was calling
itself DRUM and had begun to distribute leaflets to workers in
Chrysler's Dodge plant. DRUM was different from other opposition
groups in the plants. It was not an opposition caucus which sought to
reform or to seize power within the union. Instead DRUM functioned
more like early radical organizations such as the Industrial Workers
of the World. DRUM's early leaflets talked of the need for direct
representation of black workers and articulated an anger which, while
alienating some workers, attracted many others. DRUM-initiated
actions and wildcats in support of their demands and workers'
grievances quickly attracted the attention and opposition of both the
Police and the UAW. At the same time the DRUM-phenomena could not be
contained within the Dodge plant and Revolutionary Union Movements
sprang up across the city and in different industries. Few achieved
the success of DRUM, ELRUM for example, polarized the workforce in
such a way that when the activists were fired by the company there
was not the base of support to mount a successful defence campaign.
As a way of trying to coordinate these actions an umbrella group was
created, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.
As the League grew and was successful, pressure came to
expand the "franchise" across America. Wary of the rapid growth and
even swifter destruction of the Black Panther Party, the League
elected to form a larger organization which would operate as a
separate organization rather than a League subsidiary. This project
became the Black Workers Congress, and was to figure as one of the
main reasons for the split in the summer of 1971. Political
differences emerged within the leadership of the league and the two
camps divided. The plant leadership of the League which included
people like General Baker and Chuck Whooten saw in the BWC and its
supporters a move away from the factory base of the League. They
criticized what they saw as an authoritarian leadership style and a
distance from the base of the organization. They also argued that
after the success of Finally Got the News, Watson and others were
becoming bourgeois. Ironically the documentary got its title from a
chant Baker used during the 1970 elections at Dodge Main. The BWC
supporters like Cockrel and Watson responded that the League could
not grow by simple member by member, plant by plant recruitment and
that a bolder initiative like the BWC was necessary. In addition they
argued that some of the ‘proletarian cadre' of the league were
little more than street criminals who did not advance the League's
programme. When they were unable to convince the rest of the
executive committee of their views, the BWC supporters withdrew from
the organization to set up their own.
The BWC was stillborn. Its founding convention attracted
almost 500 people but that was its peak. Quickly recriminations began
to flow within the new organization and most of the criticism was
centred on the person of James Forman. Forman was an organizer and
theorist with SNCC and was briefly Minister of Foreign Affairs in the
Black Panther Party. When he joined the League he brought with him
considerable experience, renown and contacts, yet the marriage did
not take. In the BWC Forman was accused of personalism and of trying
to build a leadership around himself. Without a solid base in the
membership of the organization Forman was unable to prevent his
expulsion. Ironically whereas the League had previously been compared
to the freewheeling Wobblies, now both the League and the BWC began a
similar trajectory toward a sterile Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. In a
few months the League was to re-emerge as the Detroit local of the
California based Communist League.
In the years after the break up of the League other broader
issues confronted Detroit. One was the question of electoral
politics. In 1973 former League member Ken Cockrel was seriously
considering running for Mayor of Detroit. Many on the far-left saw
electoral politics as a reformist road. The election of Justin Ravitz
to a ten year term as a Judge of the Recorder's Court in 1972 had
provoked storms of criticism from both ends of the political
spectrum: From the right wingers who saw in a self avowed Marxist
judge the coming apocalypse, and the left who despite the fairness of
some of Ravitz's rulings noted that it was the administration of a
bourgeois justice system. But ultimately it was not Cockrel who
challenged Police Commissioner and architect of the Stop The
Robberies Enjoy Safe Streets (STRESS) programme John Nichols, it was
Coleman Young. Young, , who had long since put his radical past
behind him repeated the rewards of 60's militancy and narrowly
defeated Nichols. Unlike the coalition which worked to elect Ravitz
it was the liberals who ran the show while the left stuffed
envelopes.
Thirty years later, where are we? A lot of water has flowed
under the bridge since those turbulent days. A single example will
suffice. In the 1960's it would be virtually unimaginable to see a
newspaper strike in liberal pro-union Detroit drag on for more than
three years. Yet this is what has happened. As if to add humiliation,
when the unions involved in the fight offered to return to work short
of their demands the company simply announced they would not be
rehiring all of the strikers. Testimonies by long time Detroit
activists and an after-word by the authors attempt to assess the
legacy of the League. The strengths of the League were undoubtedly a
result of the complex interplay between race and class in Detroit.
When the existing organizations and structures proved to be
inadequate new ones were created. The fact that the League and other
sections of the Detroit movement did not fulfill all of the goals
they set themselves is not the crucial issue, but the fact that the
struggle was expressed through channels created by those in struggle.
A struggle which is, if anything, more relevant today. Georgakas and
Surkin conclude their book by noting that any American cities, and I
would add not just American cities face the problems they describe,
they argue "like the Detroiters we have written about, these
Americans do not mind working, but they definitely do mind
dying."
N. F.
January 1999
Originally published in Z, April 1999
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