Abstract
In the shadow of civil rights legislation, as the children of Southern-born parents came of age in Northern cities and assumed new roles in the manufacturing and public service sectors, groups founded upon revolutionary and black nationalist discourses reached extraordinary levels of visibility. Major unions soon confronted workers organized around Black Power’s self-determination principle in Chicago’s Black Federation of Labor, Newark’s United Black Workers, and Black Panther-led caucuses in the East Bay. After the July 1967 Detroit riot, a small group of Wayne State University students organized black autoworkers at Chrysler’s Hamtramck Assembly plant, or Dodge Main, as the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM). Founders General Gordon Baker, Luke Tripp, John Watson, Mike Hamlin, and Kenneth Cockrel synthesized the socialist and separatist strains at the core of Black Power ideology to ground DRUM’s political platform.1 The movement they launched remains the most substantive attempt to put revolutionary nationalism, long theorized by black radical intellectuals, into action.
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Notes
Heather Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004) and
David Lewis-Colman, Race Against Liberalism: Black Workers and the UAW in Detroit (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008) situate DRUM within the history of black independent caucuses and A. Phillip Randolph’s Trade Union Leadership Council. Black power literature tends to focus on the League and the internal divisions contributing to the organization’s ultimate dissolution while equivocating on the ways in which DRUM operated on the shop floor.
James Geschwender and Judson L. Jeffries Black Power in the Belly of the Beast (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006) contextualizes the League’s ideology in Black Power but roots the organization in 1930s Detroit labor activism.
See also James A. Geschwender, Class, Race and Worker Lnsurgency: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s, 1975, 1998).
Literature that emphasizes the connections between students and Black Power includes Martha Biondi, “Student Protests, ‘Law and Order,’ and the Origins of African American Studies in California,” in Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race, and Power in American History, eds. Manisha Sinha and Penny Von Eschen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007)
Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007)
and Joy Ann Williamson, Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois, 1965–75 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003).
Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘Till the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 59
Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cavanaugh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), 137
Thomas R Brooks, “DRUMBeats in Detroit,” Dissent 17, no. 1 (January 2007): 16–25, 17.
Jim Jacobs and David Wellman, “Fight on to Victory: An Interview with Mike Hamlin and Ken Cockrel,” in Our Thing Is DRUM!; reprinted from Leviathan 2, no. 2 (June 1970): 12
See also Charles Denby, “Black Caucuses in the Unions,” New Politics 7 (1968): 12.
Baker, interview; Luke Tripp, “D.RU.M.–Vanguard of the Black Revolution,” The South End 27, no. 62 (1969).
William Van De Burg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 95.
The strike is also mentioned in Rod Bush, We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 206.
Martin Glaberman, “Survey: Detroit,” International Socialism 1, no. 36 (April/May 1969).
Reynolds Farley, Sheldon Danziger, and Harry J. Holzer, Detroit Divided: Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000), 9.
Most recently, David Goldberg and Trevor Griffey, ed., Black Power at Work: Community Control Affirmative Action, and the Construction Industry (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 2010) takes up issues of black nationalism in the workplace during the 1970s with respect to the larger goal of community control.
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© 2011 Manning Marable and Elizabeth Kai Hinton
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Hinton, E.K. (2011). The Black Bolsheviks. In: Marable, M., Hinton, E.K. (eds) The New Black History. The Critical Black Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230338043_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230338043_13
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