Toward a Black Radical Critique of Political Economy (Report)

THE YEAR 1967 marked a sea change in black consciousness, beginning with black labor. The long hot summer of '67 saw unprecedented black mass revolt, first in Newark, New Jersey, followed by Detroit, Michigan where the white working class joined in. Not only tension-filled black inner cities, but rural Black Belts were in a state of mass uprising and organization. Tent cities in Lowndes County, Alabama, Greenville, Mississippi, and other battle fronts of the Civil Rights Movement across the South spontaneously sprang up. They provided the original impetus behind Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign. King had come to a June 1966 rally at Detroit's Cobo Hall to help organize mass working-class support for displaced Alabama farmers and their families, raising funds for food, clothing, shelter, and importantly, land. He returned again to Cobo Hall in 1967, this time from his and SCLC's (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) Chicago campaign. Chicago was King's initial foray into the urban North. Unlike Chicago, which was riven with conflicting political agendas of the city's black leadership and run by an intransigent and wily mayoral boss, Richard J. Daley, the power and political savvy of black organized labor in Detroit gave King a new appreciation of the importance of unionization for black working people. It would influence his decision to participate in his last freedom struggle with striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee in the spring of 1968.