Race Against Liberalism: Black Workers and the UAW in Detroit

Race against Liberalism examines how black workers’ activism in Detroit shaped the racial politics of the labour movement and the white working class. Tracing substantive, long-standing disagreements between liberals and black workers who embraced autonomous race-based action, David M. Lewis-Colman shows how black autoworkers placed themselves at the center of Detroit’s working-class politics and sought to forge a kind of working-class unity that accommodated their interests as African Americans. This book covers the independent caucuses in the 1940s and the Trade Union Leadership Council in the 1950s, the black power movement and Revolutionary Union Movements of the mid- 1960s, and the independent race-based activism of the 1970s that resulted in Coleman Young becoming the city’s first black mayor in 1973.