Kasama

We are posting the piece, Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution by Robin D.G. Kelley and Betsy Esch, in four parts. This piece was first published in Souls, Vol. 1, No. 4, and was re-published in the book Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans. A printable PDF is available.

Due to its length, we are presenting this as four separate posts.

Go here for Part 1, Part 3 and Part 4.

Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution

By Robin D.G. Kelley and Betsy Esch

The Revolutionary Action Movement and the Coming Black Revolution

Williams’s flight to Cuba partly inspired the creation of RAM.  In Ohio around 1961, black members of Students for a Democratic Society as well as activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) met in a small group to discuss the significance of Williams’s work in Monroe and his subsequent exile.  Led by Donald Freeman, a black student at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, the group’s main core consisted of a newly formed organization, named “Challenge,” made up of Central State College students at Wilberforce.  Members of Challenge were especially taken with Harold Cruse’s essay “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American,” which was circulated widely among young black militants.  Inspired by Cruse’s interpretation of the global importance of the black freedom struggle, Freeman hoped to turn Challenge into a revolutionary nationalist movement akin to the Nation of Islam but that would adopt the direct action tactics of SNCC.  After a lengthy debate Challenge members decided to dissolve the organization in spring 1962 and form the Revolutionary Action Committee (originally called the “Reform” Action Movement so as not to scare the administration), with its primary leaders being Freeman, Max Stanford, and Wanda Marshall.  A few months later they moved their base to Philadelphia, began publishing a bi-monthly paper called Black America and a one-page newsletter called RAM Speaks, and made plans to build a national movement oriented toward revolutionary nationalism, youth organizing, and armed self-defense.

Freeman and RAM members in Cleveland continued to work publicly through the Afro-American Institute, an activist policy-oriented think tank formed in fall 1962.  Under Freeman’s directorship, its board — dubbed the Soul Circle— consisted of a small group of black men with ties to community organizations, labor, civil rights, and student groups. Board members such as Henry Glover, Arthur Evans, Nate Bryant, and Hanif Wahab gave lectures on African history and politics, organized forums to discuss the future of the civil rights movement, black participation in Cleveland politics, and the economic conditions of urban blacks.  The institute even recruited the great drummer Max Roach to help organize a panel titled “The Role of the Black Artist in the Struggle for Freedom.”  Institute members also used random leaflets and pamphlets to influence black community thinking on a number of local and international issues.  Addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” these short broadsides were intended to stimulate discussion and offer the black community a position on pressing topics such as “elections, urban renewal, black economic subservience, the ‘arms race,’ and the struggle in the South.”  Within a year, the institute graduated from printing leaflets to publishing to a full-blown newsletter titled Afropinion. Through the Afro-American Institute, RAM members in Cleveland worked with CORE activists and other community organizers to demand improvements in hospital care for black patients and to protest the exclusion of African and Afro-American history from the public school curriculum.  The institute’s most important campaign of 1963 was the defense of Mae Mallory, a black woman who was being held in the county jail in Cleveland for her association with Robert Williams in Monroe, North Carolina.  Soon after Williams’s flight to Cuba, Mallory was arrested in Ohio and awaited extradition charges.  The institute and its allies, including the Nation of Islam in Cleveland, petitioned the governor of Ohio to revoke the warrant of extradition, and they also organized a mass demonstration in front of the county jail demanding Mallory’s immediate release.

In Northern California, RAM grew primarily out of the Afro-American Association.  Founded by Donald Warden in 1962, the Afro-American Association consisted of students from the University of California at Berkeley and from Merritt College-many of whom, such as Leslie and Jim Lacy, Cedric Robinson, Ernest Allen, and Huey Newton, would go on to play important roles as radical activists and intellectuals.  In Los Angeles, the president of the Afro-American Association was a young man named Ron Everett, who later changed his name to Maulana Karenga and went on to found the U.S. organization.  The Afro-American Association quickly developed a reputation as a group of militant intellectuals willing to debate anyone. By challenging professors, debating groups such as the Young Socialist Alliance, and giving public lectures on black history and culture, these young activists left a deep impression on fellow students as well as on the black community.  In the East Bay, where the tradition of soapbox speakers died in the 1930s (with the exception of the individual campaigns by the communist-led Civil Rights Congress during the early 1950s), the Afro-American Association was walking and talking proof that a vibrant, highly visible militant intellectual culture could exist.

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.  Armed with copies of Robert Williams’s Crusader magazine and related RAM material, Allen returned to Oakland intent on establishing RAM’S presence in the East Bay.  As a result, activists such as Isaac Moore, Kenn Freeman (Mamadou Lumumba), Bobby Seale (future founder of the Black Panther Party), and Doug Allen (Ernie’s brother) established a base at Merritt College through the Soul Students Advisory Council.  Although the group never grew larger than a handful of people, its intellectual and cultural presence was broadly felt.  Allen, Freeman, and others founded a journal called Soulbook: The Revolutionary Journal of the Black World, which published prose and poetry that is best described as Left black nationalist in orientation.  Freeman, in particular, was highly respected among RAM activists and widely read.  He constantly pushed his members to think about black struggle in a global context. The editors of Soulbook also developed ties with Old Left black radicals, most notably the former communist Harry Haywood whose work they published in an early issue.

Although RAM had established itself in Northern California and in Cleveland, by 1964 Philadelphia appeared to be RAM’S “home base.”  It was in Philadelphia, after all, that RAM maintained an open existence, operating under its own name rather than a variety of “front” organizations.  The strength of the Philadelphia chapter has much to do with the fact that it was also the home of Max Stanford, RAM’S national field chairman.  It was out of Philadelphia that RAM published a bimonthly paper called Black America and a one-page newsletter called RAM Speaks; made plans to build a national movement oriented toward revolutionary nationalism, youth organizing, and armed self-defense; and recruited several Philadelphia activists to the group, including Ethel Johnson (who had also worked with Robert Williams in Monroe), Stan Daniels, and Playthell Benjamin. Subsequently, RAM recruited a group of young Philadelphia militants who would go on to play key roles in radical organizations, including Michael Simmons, one of the authors of SNCC’s famous “Black Consciousness Paper,” whose resistance to the draft resulted in his serving a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence, and Tony Monteiro, who went on to become a leading national figure in the CPUSA during the 1970s and 1980s.

The RAM organization represented the first serious and sustained attempt in the postwar period to wed Marxism, black nationalism, and Third World internationalism into a coherent revolutionary program.  In Max Stanford’s view, RAM “attempted to apply Marxism-Leninism Mao Tse-Tung thought” to the conditions of black people and “advanced the theory that the black liberation movement in the United States was part of the vanguard of the world socialist revolution.”  Young RAM militants sought political guidance from a number of former black communists who had either been expelled for “ultra-leftism” or “bourgeois nationalism,” or had left the party because of its “revisionism.” Among this group of elders were Harold Cruse, Harry Haywood, Abner Berry, and “Queen Mother” Audley Moore. Indeed, Moore would go on to become one of RAM’S most important mentors on the East Coast, offering members training in black nationalist thought and in Marxism.  The Queen Mother’s home, which she affectionately called Mount Addis Ababa, practically served as a school for a new generation of young black radicals.  Moore had founded the African-American Party of National Liberation in 1963, which formed a provisional government and elected Robert Williams as premier in exile. These young black radicals also turned to Detroit’s legendary ex-Trotskyists James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs, the former comrades of C. L. R. James whose Marxist and pan-Africanist writings greatly influenced RAM members as well as other New Left activists.

Although RAM as a movement never received the glory publicity bestowed on groups like the Black Panther Party, its influence far exceeded its numbers — not unlike the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) four decades earlier.  Indeed, like the African Blood Brotherhood RAM remained largely an underground organization that devoted more time to agitprop work than actual organizing.  Leaders such as Max Stanford identified with the Chinese peasant rebels who led the Communist Party to victory.  They seized upon Mao’s famous line — “The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue” — and they took it quite literally by advocating armed insurrection and drawing inspiration and ideas directly from Robert Williams’s theory of guerrilla warfare in the urban United States.  The leaders of RAM actually believed that such a war was not only possible but could be won in ninety days.  The combination of mass chaos and revolutionary discipline was the key to victory.  The Fall 1964 issue of Black America predicted Armageddon:

Black men and women in the Armed Forces will defect and come over to join the Black liberation forces. Whites who claim they want to help the revolution will be sent into the white communities to divide them, fight the fascists and frustrate the efforts of the counter-revolutionary forces.  Chaos will be everywhere and with the breakdown of mass communications, mutiny will occur in great numbers in all facets of the oppressors’ government.  The stock market will fall; Wall Street will stop functioning; Washington, D.C. will be tom apart by riots.  Officials everywhere will run-run for their lives.  The George Lincoln Rockwellers, Kennedys, Vanderbilts, Hunts, Johnsons, Wallaces, Barnetts, etc., will be the first to go.  The revolution will “strike by night and spare none.” … The Black Revolution will use sabotage in the cities, knocking out the electrical power first, then transportation and guerrilla warfare in the countryside in the South.  With the cities powerless, the oppressor will be helpless.

The revolution was clearly seen as a man’s job since women barely figured in the equation.  Indeed, one of the striking facts about the history of the anti-revisionist left is how male dominated it remained.  Although Wanda Marshall had been one of the founding members of RAM, she did not hold a national leadership post in 1964.  Besides promoting the creation of “women’s leagues” whose purpose would be “to organize black women who work in white homes,” RAM remained relatively silent on women’s liberation until the later 1960s, when the organization had begun to collapse.  In 1969, RAM issued a statement on the role of “Soul Sisters” in the movement.  An auxiliary of RAM, the Soul Sisters were to be trained in self-defense and work to organize the female youth, but they were also supposed to educate, care for, and positively influence potential black male revolutionaries.  Their immediate tasks included “influencing non-militant Negro men to involve themselves into organized self-defense,” promote efforts to keep “white women away from all areas of Negro political and sexual life,” report any incidents of “harassment by police or any other white men in the ghetto or the schools,” and “promote the image of Robert Williams as the international symbol of Negro freedom struggle.”  The two most telling tasks that revealed the subordinate status of women involved training “girls for taking a census of the black population” and having them “design and buy sweaters for an identity symbol.”

The masculinist orientation of RAM should not be surprising given the masculinist orientation of black nationalist (not to mention white New Left) organizations in the 1960s, whether they were advocating civil rights or some incipient version of Black Power.  The masculinism of RAM, however, was heightened by the fact that its leaders saw themselves as urban guerrillas — as members of an all-black version of Mao’s Red Army.  Not all RAM members saw themselves in this way, but those who did were deeply committed to a set of revolutionary ethics that Mao laid down for his own party cadre and for members of the People’s Army.  We see this very clearly in RAM’S “Code of Cadres,” a set of highly didactic rules of conduct that members were expected to live by.  Some examples of this code are as follows:

A Revolutionary nationalist maintains the highest respect for all authority within the party….

A Revolutionary nationalist cannot be corrupted by money, honors or any other personal gains….

A Revolutionary nationalist will unhesitatingly subordinate his personal interest to those of the vanguard [without] hesitation….

A Revolutionary nationalist will maintain the highest level of morality and will never take as much as a needle or single piece of thread from the masses-Brother and Sisters will maintain the utmost respect for one another and will never misuse or take advantage of one another for personal gain-and will never misinterpret, the doctrine of revolutionary nationalism for any reason….

The code’s similarities to the Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung are striking.  Indeed, the last example comes straight out of Mao’s “Three Main Rules of Discipline,” which urges cadre to “not take a single needle or piece of thread from the masses.”  Selflessness and total commitment to the masses is another theme that dominates Quotations. Again, the comparisons are noteworthy: “At no time and in no circumstances,” says Mao, “should a Communist place his personal interests first; he should subordinate them to the interests of the nation and of the masses.  Hence, selfishness, slacking, corruption, seeking the limelight, and so on are most contemptible, while selflessness, working with all one’s energy, whole-hearted devotion to public duty, and quiet hard work will command respect.”

Maoism’s emphasis on revolutionary ethics and moral transformation, in theory at least, resonated with black religious traditions (as well as with American Protestantism more generally), and like the Nation of Islam it preached self-restraint, order, and discipline.  It’s quite possible that in the midst of a counterculture that embodied elements of hedonism and drug use, a new wave of student and working-class radicals found Maoist ethics attractive. (Indeed, many in the New Left and in the women’s liberation movement also found Mao’s idea of revolutionary ethics attractive.)  Upon his return from China, Robert Williams — in many respects RAM’S founding father — insisted that all young black activists “undergo personal and moral transformation.  There is a need for a stringent revolutionary code of moral ethics.  Revolutionaries are instruments of righteousness.”  For black revolutionaries, the moral and ethical dimension of Mao’s thought centered on the notion of personal transformation.  It was a familiar lesson embodied in the lives of Malcolm X and (later) George Jackson — namely, the idea that one possesses the revolutionary will to transform himself.  (These narratives are almost exclusively male despite the growing number of memoirs by radical black women.)  Whether or not RAM members lived by the “Code of Cadres,” Maoist ethics ultimately served to reinforce Malcolm’s status as a revolutionary role model.

The twelve-point program created by RAM called for the development of freedom schools, national black student organizations, rifle clubs, black farmer cooperatives (not just for economic development but to keep “community and guerrilla forces going for a while”), and a liberation guerrilla army made up of youth and the unemployed.  They also placed special emphasis on internationalism — on pledging support for national liberation movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as well as the adoption of “pan-African socialism.”  In line with Cruse’s seminal essay, RAM members saw themselves as colonial subjects fighting a “colonial war at home.”  As Stanford wrote in an internal document titled “Projects and Problems of the Revolutionary Movement” (1964), “RAM’S position is that the Afro-American is not a citizen of the U.S.A., denied his rights, but rather he is a colonial subject enslaved. This position says that the black people in the U.S.A. are a captive nation suppressed and that their fight is not for integration into the white community but one of national liberation.”

As colonial subjects with a right to self-determination, RAM saw Afro-America as a de facto member of the nonaligned nations.  They even identified themselves as part of the “Bandung world,” going so far as to hold a conference in November 1964 in Nashville titled “The Black Revolution’s Relationship to the Bandung World.”  In a 1965 article published in RAM’S journal Black America, the group started to develop a theory called Bandung Humanism, or Revolutionary Black Internationalism, which argued that the battle between Western imperialism and the Third World-more than the battle between labor and capital-represented the most fundamental contradiction in our time. The organization linked the African American freedom struggle with what was happening in China, Zanzibar, Cuba, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Algeria, and it characterized its work as part of Mao’s international strategy of encircling Western capitalist countries and challenging imperialism. After 1966, however, the term Bandung Humanism was dropped entirely and replaced with Black Internationalism.

Precisely what was meant by Black Internationalism was laid out in an incredibly bold thirty-six-page pamphlet, The World Black Revolution, which was published by RAM in 1966.  Loosely patterned on the Communist Manifesto, the pamphlet identifies strongly with China against both the capitalist West and the Soviet Empire.  The “emergence of Revolutionary China began to polarize caste and class contradictions within the world, in both the bourgeoisie imperialist camp and also in the European bourgeois communist-socialist camp.”  In other words, China was the wedge that sharpened the contradictions between colonial peoples and the West.  Rejecting the idea that socialist revolution would arise in the developed countries of the West, RAM insisted that the only true revolutionary solution was the “dictatorship of the world by the Black Underclass through World Black Revolution.” In this, of course, they were working from today’s definitions: RAM used “underclass” to encompass all peoples of color in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere; the “Black Underclass” was merely a synonym for the colonial world.  China was in a bitter fight to defend its own freedom.  Now the rest of the “black” world must follow suit: “The Black Underclass has only one alternative to free itself of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism and neocolonialism; that is to completely destroy Western (bourgeois) civilization (the cities of the world) through a World Black Revolution[,] and establishing a Revolutionary World Black Dictatorship can bring about the end of exploitation of man by mankind and the new revolutionary world [can] be created.”  To coordinate this revolution, RAM called for the creation of a Black International and the creation of a “People’s Liberation Army on a world scale.”

For all of its strident nationalism, The World Black Revolution concludes that black nationalism “is really internationalism.”  Only by demolishing white nationalism and white power can liberation be achieved for everyone. Not only will national boundaries be eliminated with the “dictatorship of the Black Underclass,” but “the need for nationalism in its aggressive form will be eliminated.”  This is a pretty remarkable statement given RAM’S social and ideological roots.  But rather than represent a unified position, the statement reflects the various tensions that persisted throughout RAM’S history.  On one side were nationalists who felt that revolutionaries should fight for the black nation first and build socialism separate from the rest of the United States.  On the other side were socialists like James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs who wanted to know who would rule the “white” nation and what such a presence would mean for black freedom.  They also rejected efforts to resurrect the “Black Nation” thesis — the old communist line that people in the black-majority counties of the South (the “black belt”) have a right to secede from the union. The Boggses contended that the real source of power was in the cities and not the rural black belt.

After years as an underground organization, a series of “exposés” in Life magazine and Esquire that ran in 1966 identified RAM as one of the leading extremist groups “plotting a war on ‘whitey.”’ The “Peking-backed” group was not only considered armed and dangerous, but “impressively well read in revolutionary literature-from Marat and Lenin to Mao, Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon.”  The Harlem Branch of the Progressive Labor Party responded to the articles with a pamphlet titled The Plot Against Black America, which argued that China is not financing revolution, just setting a revolutionary example by its staunch anti-imperialism.  The real causes of black rebellion, they insisted, can be found in the conditions of ghetto life.  Not surprisingly, these highly publicized articles were followed by a series of police raids on the homes of RAM members in Philadelphia and New York City.  In June 1967, RAM members were rounded up and charged with conspiracy to instigate a riot, poison police officers with potassium cyanide, and assassinate Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young.  A year later, under the repressive atmosphere of the FBI ‘s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), RAM transformed itself into the Black Liberation Party, or the African American Party of National Liberation.  By 1969, RAM had pretty much dissolved itself, though its members opted to “melt back into the community and infiltrate existing Black organizations,” continue to push the twelve-point program, and develop study groups that focused on the “Science of Black Internationalism, and the thought of Chairman Rob [Robert Williams].”

The COlNTELPRO operations only partly explain the dissolution of RAM.  Some of its members moved on to other organizations, such as the Republic of New Africa and the Black Panther Party.  But RAM’S declining membership and ultimate demise can be partly attributed to strategic errors on its part.  Indeed, its members’ understanding of the current situation in the ghettoes and their specific strategies of mobilization suggest that they were not very good Maoists after all.  Mao’s insistence on the protracted nature of revolution was not taken to heart; at one point they suggested that the war for liberation would probably take ninety days.  And because RAM’S leaders focused their work on confronting the state head on and attacking black leaders whom they deemed reformists, they failed to build a strong base in black urban communities.  Furthermore, despite their staunch internationalism, they did not reach out to other oppressed “nationalities” in the United States.  Nevertheless, what RAM and Robert Williams did do was to elevate revolutionary black nationalism to a position of critical theoretical importance for the anti-revisionist Left in general.  They provided an organizational and practical example of what Harold Cruse, Frantz Fanon, and Malcolm X were trying to advance in their writings and speeches.  More importantly, they found theoretical justification for revolutionary black nationalism in Mao Zedong thought, especially after the launching of the Cultural Revolution in China.

“Finally Got the News”: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers

Although RAM might have been on the decline, its leaders continued to shape some of the most radical movements of the decade.  Several leading figures in the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit had been leaders in RAM, most notably Luke Tripp, General Baker, Charles (Mao) Johnson and, later, Ernie Allen.  Tripp, Baker, Johnson, and John Watson were Wayne State University students active in the nationalist collective Uhuru, which in some respects served as the public face of RAM much like Challenge had done in Ohio and the Soul Students Advisory Council had done in California.  Watson, who apparently was not in RAM, had worked with a number of organizations, including the Freedom Now Party (an all-black political party that endorsed the socialist Clifton DeBerry for president in 1964), SNCC, and the Negro Action Committee.  Upon General Baker’s return from Cuba, he moved even deeper into Detroit’s labor and Left circles, taking a job as a production worker at the Chrysler-Dodge main plant and taking classes on Marx’s Capital with Marty Glaberman, a veteran radical of the Johnson-Forest tendency (a breakaway group from the Socialist Workers Party led by C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya that included James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs).

The Inner City Voice (ICV), which Watson began editing after the Detroit riots in 1967, was conceived as a revolutionary publication that could build links between black radicals, particularly students and labor activists, with the broader black community.  Having studied the works of Lenin, and to a lesser degree Stalin and Mao, the militants who started ICV regarded the newspaper as “the focus of a permanent organization [that] could provide a bridge between the peaks of activity.”  And they tried to live up to this injunction: in 1968 Baker organized a discussion group consisting largely of Dodge main plant workers at the ICV’s office. Not long afterward — the Vday after May Day, 1968, to be exact — four thousand workers at the Dodge main plant walked out in a wildcat strike, the first in that factory in fourteen years and the first organized and led entirely by black workers.  The strike was over the speedup of the assembly line, which in the previous week had increased from forty-nine to fifty-eight cars per hour.  Black radical trade unionists characterized the speedups as part of a broader process of “niggermation,” or as one worker explained it, the practice of hiring one black worker to do the work formerly done by three white workers.  In spite of the fact that many pickets were white, the greatest company reprisals were against black workers.  General Baker, accused of leading the strike, was among those summarily fired.  In an “Open Letter to Chrysler Corporation,” Baker wrote: “In this day and age … the leadership of a wildcat strike is a badge of honor and courage…. You have made the decision to do battle with me and therefore to do battle with the entire Black community in this city, this state, this country and in this world which I am part of.  Black people of the world are united in a common struggle.”

No matter what role Baker played in the walkout, it is clear that the individuals involved in the ICV study group were at the forefront of the strike.  This core of radical workers around Baker and the ICV group gave birth to DRUM — the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement.  The spirit and militancy that DRUM represented spread to other plants: ELRUM rose out of the Eldon Avenue Gear and Axle Plant, JARUM was started at Chrysler Jefferson Avenue, MERUM at Mound Road Engine, CADRUM at Cadillac Fleetwood, FRUM at the Ford Rouge, and GRUM at General Motors.  Though most of these committees actively involved relatively small numbers of workers, the spread of the movement revealed the level of frustration and anger that black workers felt toward both the auto industry and the leadership of the United Auto Workers (UAW).

From the outset, black student radicals at Wayne State University were committed to building DRUM and the other revolutionary union movements because they saw working-class struggles as the fundamental wedge against capitalism.  Besides, at a public institution like Wayne State in which 10 percent of its student body was black, it wasn’t unusual to find part-time students in the plants or workers whose kids leapt into the revolutionary movement feet first.  During the wildcat strikes at the Dodge main and Eldon Avenue plants, students walked the picket line after court injunctions prevented the striking workers from coming near the plant gates.  Thus the distinctions between “intellectuals” and “workers” were always somewhat blurred.  As Geoffrey Jacques, a black Detroit native active in radical politics during the 1970S recalled, “I would ride the bus full of auto workers on their way to the plant and there was always somebody reading Stalin, Lenin, or Mao. It seemed like everyone was part of a study group.”

It is not an exaggeration to state that most DRUM leaders were self-identified Marxist-Leninist-Maoists or Trotskyists of some variety.  However, at the outset their main concern was unity within the revolutionary union movement.  In large measure through the work of the original core group from the ICV, but with the important additions of workers who had become active on the shop floor, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers came into being in 1969.  Its constitution called on workers to “act swiftly to organize DRUM-type organizations wherever there are black workers, be it in Lynn Townsend’s kitchen, the White House, White Castle, Ford Rouge, the Mississippi Delta, the plains of Wyoming, the mines of Bolivia, the rubber plantations of Indonesia, the oil fields of Biafra, or the Chrysler plant in South Africa.”  The organization’s belief that world revolution was immanent and that people of color throughout the world were in the vanguard reflects the Maoist-inspired vision characteristic of RAM.  Indeed, when Ernie Allen became the League’s director of political education.  He recalled that practically everyone was reading Mao and Giap (the Vietnamese theoretician on guerrilla warfare).  It wasn’t uncommon for members to use the Chinese revolution as a framework for understanding the history of the black workers’ struggles.  Besides, League activists were reading more than Mao: they were interested in some of the Italian and French New Left movements, particularly Potere Operaio, Lotta Continua, and several French “workerist” organizations. Allen brought some of these heated discussions of world events back home by introducing books and articles on African American labor history.

Despite their deep sense of internationalism and their radical vision of trade unionism, League members were divided over strategy and tactics.  One group, led by General Baker, believed that the movement should focus on shop-floor struggles, while Watson, Mike Hamlin, and Cockrel felt that the League needed to organize black communities beyond the point of production.  One outgrowth of their community-based approach was the Black Economic Development Conference (BEDC) held in spring 1969.  At the urging of the former SNCC leader James Forman, who had recently arrived in Detroit, the League became heavily involved in the planning and running of the conference.  Originally called by the Inter-religious Foundation for Community Organizations, the conference was taken over by the revolutionary left in Detroit and essentially produced a call for black socialism.  Out of BEDC came Forman’s proposal for a Black manifesto, which demanded, among other things, five hundred million dollars in reparations from white churches.

The work in BEDC led the League leadership, of which Forman was now a part. away from its local emphasis.  Their efforts led to the founding of the Black Workers Congress (BWC) in 1970.  The BWC was conceived more or less as a coalition of black revolutionary labor activists, and it attracted a number of Maoist and Left nationalist movements, including the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization (which went on to help found the Revolutionary Workers League) and the Communist Party (Marxist Leninist).  Forman was deeply influenced by Kathy Amatniek, a major theorist in the women’s liberation movement, with whom he had a relationship.  She had studied Chinese at Harvard and introduced consciousness-raising based on the “speak bitterness” campaigns in China.  And according to Rosalyn Baxandall, one of the founding members of the radical feminist group Redstockings, Amatniek was a serious anti-revisionist who appreciated Stalin and sympathized with Albania.  Eventually the Forman-led BWC became a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist organization in its own right, calling for workers’ control over the economy and the state to be brought about through cooperatives, united front groups, neighborhood centers, student organizations, and ultimately a revolutionary party.  With Forman at the helm, the BWC called for an end to all forms of racism, imperialism, speedups, and wage freezes, and it expressed its support for the South Vietnamese Provisional Revolutionary Government.

Meanwhile, the League’s local base began to disintegrate.  Several League activists, including Chuck Wooten and General Baker, had been fired and all of the revolutionary union movements were barely functional by 1972.  The “General Policy Statement” of the League. which based everything on the need for vibrant “DRUM-type” organizations, seemed to have fallen by the wayside.  Divisions between the leadership groupings were so entrenched that no one could hear criticism from “the other side” without assuming hostile motivations.  These contradictions came to a head when Cockrel, Hamlin, and Watson left the League in June 1971 to build the Black Workers Congress. In their document “The Split in the League of Revolutionary Black Workers: Three Lines and Three Headquarters” they described themselves as “the proletarian revolutionaries” and the two other tendencies as “the petty bourgeois opportunists” and “the backward reactionary nationalist lumpen proletarians.”  Not long after their departure from the League the remaining core, led by General Baker, joined the Communist League under the leadership of the veteran black Marxist Nelson Peery.  Several members of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers rose to leadership positions within the Communist Labor Party (CLP) and significantly shaped its industrial orientation.  They studied Mao and Stalin with even greater rigor and built a highly disciplined party in Detroit that concentrated on the plants and factories.  Although the League (which was to become the Communist Labor Party in 1972) opened the China-Albania Bookstore in Detroit, it never tried to operate as a mass organization or recruit on college campuses.  Baker, especially, remained committed to the Communist League through all of its manifestations — as the CLP and, most recently, as the League of Revolutionaries.

In many respects, the League’s leaders turned out to be very good Maoists — whether or not they identified with Mao. Through the newspapers and the revolutionary union movements, they always looked for ways to relate their overall political analysis to the conditions around them.  They established strategic guidelines rather than a rigid blueprint for organizing.  And they constantly struggled over the relationship of Marxist intellectuals, which they were in large part, to the workers they wanted to reach. In so doing they succeeded in creating a revolutionary language and making it available to black workers.  Yet the promise of the League was also its peril: when the phenomenon of the revolutionary union movements began to dissipate, and as struggles led by the revolutionary union movements were defeated, the League itself was called into question. As Ken Cockrel puts it, “We had to develop a concept of what to do when workers are fired for doing organizational activity, and you are not in a position to feed them, and you are not in a position to force management to take them back, and you are not in a position to relate concretely to any of their needs…. If you make no response you are in a position of having led workers out of the plant on the basis of an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist line and having the man respond and you can’t do anything.”

But this is not the whole story.  Perhaps the greatest tragedy for the League was the failure of white workers to support the revolutionary union movements.  Had the UAW used its resources to support League demands rather than lining up with the auto companies to isolate and destroy the movements, the outcome probably would have been different.  Race, once again, contributed to the downfall of a potentially transformative American labor movement. It was yet another installment of a very old (and continuing) saga.

For the whole essay: a printable PDF is available.