On this day, 23 July 1967, one of the biggest rebellions in US history occurred in Detroit, following a police raid on a bar in a poor, majority Black area in the early hours of the morning.
Black and white residents fought police in the streets and looted goods while snipers took potshots at officers from windows. Police, National Guard and US troops retaliated with outright brutality and intense violence. By the time it was over, more than 40 people were dead, 7,000 arrested and over 2,000 buildings destroyed.
General Baker, a Black auto worker at the Dodge Main assembly plant in Hamtramck said that he and his colleagues "learnt from the Detroit Rebellion… When the Detroit Rebellion took place, and the National Guard and 101st Airborne was sent in, and they imposed curfew, if you got sick, you couldn’t go to the doctor. If you got hungry, you couldn’t get no food. But if you had a badge from Chrysler, Ford or General Motors, you could get to the police line, the National Guard line, the army line, all of them to take your butt to work. The conclusion we draw from that was that the only place in this society that Black people had any value was at a point of production. That’s why after the rebellion, we turned all our efforts into organising inside the plants."
The following year, Baker and others formed the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), part of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.
Learn more about the group in episodes 61-62 of our podcast: https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e61-the-league-of-revolutionary-black-workers-in-detroit/
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