Title of Project
Against the Monster: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Radical Detroit and the African American Struggle for Democracy in the Workplace
Division
Humanities
Course or Program
History190Z-The Long Civil Rights Movement
Description / Abstract
In recent years, scholarship on the Civil RIghts Movement (CRM) has increased tremendously. Historians have begun reexamining the movement in an effort to expand its scope. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall argues in her essay "The Long Civil Rights Movement," for example, that the CRM found its beginnings, not in the houses of middle-class African Americans, but on the shop floor amongst the working class. This "civil rights unionism" saw issues of class and race as inseparable from one another and struggled against their exploitation on both fronts. Continuing in the spirit of Hall's piece, this essay examines a little known radical African American labor organization known as the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW). Forging together elements of Black Nationalism and radical working-class politics, the League fought for the rights of black workers in the auto-manufacturers of Detroit. Furthermore, they represented a more radical form of previously existing black caucuses within the United Auto Workers union. They also were a product of a radical unorthodox Marxist tradition in Detroit. This essay examines the LRBW's roots within this context and argues that the League was not simply a radical fringe organization, but represented the logical outcome of civil rights activism and should be situated within the larger framework of the CRM as a whole.
