Organizing Your Own

The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit

Say Burgin

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN:
  9781479814169
• Print ISBN:
  9781479814145
• Subtopic: African American History

The fascinating history of white solidarity with the Black Power movement

In the mid-1960s, as the politics of Black self-determination gained steam, Black activists had a new message for white activists: Go into your own communities and organize white people against racism. While much of the media at the time and many historians since have regarded this directive as a "white purge" from the Black freedom movement, Say Burgin argues that it heralded a new strategy, racially parallel organizing, which people experimented with all over the country. Organizing Your Own shows that the Black freedom movement never experienced a "white purge," and it offers a new way of understanding Black Power's relationship to white America.

By focusing on Detroit from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, this volume illuminates a wide cross-section of white activists who took direction from Black-led groups like the Northern Student Movement, the City-Wide Citizens Action Committee, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Organizing Your Own draws on numerous oral histories and heretofore unseen archives to show that these white activists mobilized support for Black self-determination in education, policing, employment, and labor unions. It was a trial-and-error effort that pushed white activists to grapple with tough questions – which white people should they organize and how, which Black-led groups should they take direction from, and when did taking Black direction become mere sycophancy. The story of Detroit's white fight for Black Power thus not only reveals a broader, richer movement, but it carries great insight into questions that remain relevant.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Rethinking Black Power’s Relationship to White People
• 1. “To begin to work in their own communities”: Creating the Strategy of Racially Parallel Organizing
• 2. “Disorient whites from their assumptions about race”: People Against Racism
• 3. “New White Consciousness”: The Detroit Industrial Mission
• 4. “We were trained to be like body cameras”: The Ad-Hoc Action Group
• 5. “It’s the struggle of little people everywhere”: The Motor City Labor League
• Conclusion: The Racially Parallel Organizing Mandate and Black Power’s Legacy
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Groups Aiming to Organize White People
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author