Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution

Citation

Georgakas, D., & Surkin, M. (2012). Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution (updated ed.). Haymarket Books. First published 1975.

Chapter Summary

Context and Argument

The book is a movement history of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Black-led organisations that grew out of Detroit's auto plants and neighbourhoods between 1967 and the mid-1970s. Marvin Surkin worked at the centre of the League, so the account is written by participants as well as historians. The authors argue that the League combined workplace struggle with a critique of racism and capitalism in the city at large, and that its experience shows both the strength and the limits of a revolutionary, grassroots alternative to the established unions.

The 2012 edition carries a foreword, prefaces to the second and third editions and the original 1975 introduction, which belongs to its moment in mid-1970s radicalism. A short prologue precedes the twelve chapters. The last two chapters, "Thirty Years Later" and "The Legacy of DRUM: Four Histories", were added in the 1998 edition; the body of the 1975 study was otherwise left largely as it was.

Chapter 1: Inner City Voice

The newspaper Inner City Voice, begun by radical Black activists after Detroit's 1967 rebellion, is the starting point. It aimed to give an agenda for revolutionary action and political education, not only to expose injustice, and it served as a meeting place and a link to organisers inside the plants.

Chapter 2: Our Thing Is DRUM

The chapter traces the formation of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement at the Hamtramck (Dodge Main) plant. DRUM took up unsafe conditions, speed-up and racist treatment that the United Auto Workers' grievance machinery had not resolved, and it connected those complaints to Black workers' position in the wider city. The May 1968 wildcat strike marks its high point.

Chapter 3: We Will Take the Hard Line

The chapter follows the movement's more militant turn and its confrontations with management and with union leadership, both resistant to its demands.

Chapter 4: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers

Successes at Dodge encouraged similar organisations in other plants, and the League was set up to coordinate them. The chapter describes its structure, aims and leading figures, and its attempt to bring the plant-based groups under one organisation.

Chapter 5: Niggermation at Eldon

The chapter centres on the Eldon Avenue Gear and Axle plant, where the title's coined word named the treatment of Black employees on the line, and on the League's direct actions against discriminatory practices there.

Chapter 6: Finally Got the News

The League's use of film to carry its message is the subject, in particular the documentary Finally Got the News, made as part of its effort to publicise conditions in the plants and win support.

Chapter 7: Black Workers Congress

Disagreement over whether to concentrate on in-plant organising or on broader community work led to a split in 1971, with one faction forming the Communist League and the other the Black Workers' Congress. The chapter covers the attempt to take the movement nationwide.

Chapter 8: Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets: STRESS

Here the League's concerns outside the factory come into view, chiefly its opposition to the Detroit police unit known as STRESS, which it saw as racially targeted violence.

Chapter 9: Mr. Justin Ravitz, Marxist Judge of Recorder's Court

The chapter profiles Justin Ravitz, a radical judge, and asks what allies inside the legal system could and could not do for a movement of this kind.

Chapter 10: The 54-Hour Week

Long working hours and harsh conditions in the plants, and the movement's demands for better terms, are the subject of this chapter.

Chapter 11: Thirty Years Later

Written for the 1998 edition, this chapter looks at what had become of Detroit, the auto industry and the League's veterans. Its tone is more sober than the 1975 text, and it argues that the League's analysis applies increasingly to the nation as a whole.

Chapter 12: The Legacy of DRUM: Four Histories

Four Detroiters, two of them women, reflect on their relationship to the League and on its legacy in their own lives and in the city. The authors end with a note of hope from one of them.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–4: Origins and Organisation

• Revolutionary unionism: organising workers around plant conditions while treating the union bureaucracy and the company as parts of one system to be challenged.
• Race and class together: the claim, central to DRUM, that racism in the city and exploitation in the plant cannot be fought separately.
• Caucus to league: the path from a single-plant movement to a coordinating organisation of revolutionary union movements.

Chapters 5–10: Campaigns and Allies

• Direct action in the plants: wildcat strikes and pressure on specific plant practices as the movement's main tactic.
• Media as organising: a newspaper and a documentary film used to educate and recruit.
• Community fronts: the League's work beyond the factory gate, including opposition to STRESS.

Chapters 11–12: Legacy

• Reformism versus revolution: the authors' recurring question of what separates a revolutionary organisation from one that wins reforms.
• Afterlife of the movement: the later lives of its members and the changed city.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A participant's insight into a neglected movement. The authors describe in detail how the League's projects fitted together: newspaper, plant organisations, a film company and community campaigns. Karen Miller's review in H-Net's H-Labor (1999) calls it one of the few monographs to take Black labor radicalism seriously.
• Close attention to ideas as well as events. Miller notes that the authors spend considerable time on the League's theoretical debates and on the difference between reformist and revolutionary activism, and that they push that question further than most historians.
• A record of the aftermath. The two chapters added in 1998 and the later prefaces place the 1975 narrative in a longer view, including the fates of its participants.

Limitations

• A partisan account. Miller observes that the authors take sides in the League's internal disputes and present it as a model revolutionary organisation. Readers should set it beside independent scholarship.
• A male-centred picture. According to the same review, women appear rarely and often as wives of activists; the commentaries in the last chapter partly correct this.
• Hard to follow at times. The loosely chronological, interlocking chapters can make the sequence of events difficult to hold, and the distinction between reform and revolution stays somewhat unclear.
• A 1970s outlook. The introduction expects mass disillusionment with capitalism that did not materialise; the 1998 chapters acknowledge a changed situation.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within the American history course, most books survey the whole national story: Give Me Liberty!, The American Yawp and Boyer's short introduction cover the full sweep, McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom treats the Civil War era in depth, and American History Now surveys recent scholarship. This book is the one focused study of a single twentieth-century social movement, and it works as a case study to read after a survey chapter on the 1960s and 1970s, or on labor and civil rights.

It adds the viewpoint of Black industrial workers, which general surveys can only sketch. The narrative can be read next to chapters on the civil rights and Black Power movements and the history of the auto industry in whichever survey the course uses.

How to Use This Book

The book suits undergraduates who already have the outline of 1960s American history and want a detailed, movement-level account of labor, race and radical politics. No specialist background is required, though some familiarity with the United Auto Workers, the 1967 Detroit rebellion and Black Power helps.

For a short reading, take the introduction and Chapters 1, 2, 4, 7 and 11, which carry the main arc from the newspaper through DRUM and the League to the split and the later assessment. Chapters 5, 6, 8, 9 and 10 are self-contained case studies and can be assigned individually. Read Chapter 12 last for the retrospective voices, and read the 1975 text alongside Miller's review or other scholarship to keep the authors' position in view.

Useful questions while reading: how does the League define a revolutionary organisation, what held the plant-based and community-based wings together, and why did the movement divide in 1971?