Book ReviewsNew History of Detroit LRBW Challenges Us To Think Ahead
Published on Rally! Voice of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America A new history of the Detroit League of Revolutionary Black Workers challenges revolutionaries to assess the 1960s and ’70s and determine what is different today and how to respond. In September 2025, the University of Georgia Press published “Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries: The Story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers” by Jerome Scott and Walda Katz-Fishman. Scott was a leader of the LRBW fired from the Chrysler Detroit Forge plant after helping lead a wildcat strike against unsafe conditions in 1973. Katz-Fishman is a scholar-activist and professor of sociology at Howard University who has worked closely with former members of the LRBW since she attended Wayne State University in Detroit in the 1970s. The publishers say “Motown” offers “a fresh perspective on class, race and revolution in the United States.” The book is both a collective oral history and a deeply researched examination of the rise and decline of the Detroit auto industry and its consequences. Scott and Katz-Fishman have assembled interviews with 40 people who took part in an LRBW oral history project begun in 2016. Many were LRBW activists. Others helped the LRBW members in some way – lawyers, student activists, and revolutionaries from outside Detroit who worked with former LRBW members in other revolutionary formations after the LRBW’s end.... Read more Review from New Worker
This is a moving account of one of the most important organisations in the United States during the late 1960s written by Jerome Scott and Walda Katz-Fishman. Scott was a leader of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) who helped organise a walk-out to protest unsafe conditions at Chrysler Corporation’s Detroit Forge plant. That wildcat strike at a strategic factory shut down Chrysler production throughout the entire world for one week. Walda Katz-Fishman is a revolutionary and scholar who received her Ph.D. in sociology from Wayne State University in Detroit. Since the late 1970s she has worked closely with veterans of the LRBW and she helped coordinate the League’s oral history project.
Read More Bachmann on Scott and Katz-Fishman, 'Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries: The Story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers'
Reviewed by Richard A. Bachmann (University of Michigan, History Department)
Published on H-Socialisms (January, 2026) Commissioned by Philipp Reick (TU Berlin, Center for Metropolitan Studies) Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=62293 Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries is a valuable contribution to the small but growing literature on the history and legacy of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW). The LRBW was a Detroit, Michigan-based organization of Black workers, students, and “working-class intellectuals” which existed from 1969 to 1971. Despite its short lifespan and limited size, the LRBW had a lasting impact on left radical organizations in Detroit and beyond. The League’s efforts to empower Black and other marginalized workers to organize themselves at their workplaces and in their communities, and the organization’s dedication to working-class education through the study of Marxism and the creation of community news sources served as a model for similar endeavors during the 1970s and after. Since it was first published in 1975, Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin’s Detroit: I Do Mind Dying has been regarded as the standard reference work on the history and legacy of the LRBW. The 1970 film Finally Got the News, which was coproduced by some of the members of the LRBW, has played a similarly foundational role for the conventional framing of the story of the League. Previous histories of the LRBW have largely been based on the recollections of John Watson, Mike Hamlin, General Baker, Kenneth Cockrel, Luke Tripp, Chuck Wooten, and John Williams, the seven men who made up the League’s executive board. As a result, our conventional understanding of the politics and praxis of the League and its broader impact in Detroit and beyond has been shaped mostly through the perspectives and stories of a few actors who held leadership positions in the organization. Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries has been conceptualized as both a corrective to and an expansion of these earlier accounts of the LRBW. The book is able to deliver and, in doing so, greatly enhances our understanding of the League and the people who were involved in the organization.... Read More "Detroit’s Black worker upsurge, by those who lived it."
Book Review by James Tracy The various organizations that have made up the Left in the United States can be described as a cluster of experiments. Experiments that might catalyze a part of society into action against racism and capitalist exploitation. Despite the efforts of some of the finest organizers, the basic power relationship has remained intact. This makes Motown and the Making of Black Revolutionaries: The Story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers a critical read.
It is rare that Left organizations offer the next generations an honest summation of their efforts. When they don’t young organizers are deprived of a chance to learn from the past and forced to reinvent radical organizing. This work, featuring extensive interviews with participants in Detroit’s late 1960s/early 1970s Black worker upsurge, offers dialogue and insight about what they did right and areas where they fell short. These fighters don’t romanticize their past experience; they recount and analyze it. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers organized Black workers in Detroit’s auto plants. The group’s roots lay in a 1968 wildcat strike at the Dodge Main plant of the Chrysler Corporation... Read more on Convergence |
ConversationsCONVERSATION WITH RADICAL BOOKS AND ACTIVISTSConversation with 94.1 KPFAOn this episode, we speak with Walda Katz Fishman, longtime peace activist and writer whose work centers on anti-war organizing, Palestinian solidarity, and movements for global justice, and Jerome Scott, veteran Black liberation organizer and writer, and a founding member of the Black Power movement organization the League of Revolutionary Black Workers — about their upcoming event promoting their book Motown and the Making of Modern Revolutionaries.
They will be hosting events promoting the book on January 19th at 5 pm — Oakstop, 1721 Broadway, Oakland and on January 21st, 7 pm at Medicine for Nightmares — 3036 24th St. San Francisco LISTEN HERE: kpfa.org/area941/episode/motown-and-the-making-of-modern-revolutionaries-w-walda-katz-fishman-and-jerome-scott/ -- Subscribe to this podcast: https://plinkhq.com/i/1637968343?to=page Get in touch: [email protected] Follow us on socials @LawAndDis: https://twitter.com/LawAndDis; https://www.instagram.com/lawanddis/ Conversation with A CAN (Los Angeles Community Action Network) for KPFK
Listen at https://on.soundcloud.com/wUeblLqNsGWUz99gyx Motown voices call us to fight fascism with Island City Beat Podcast
For black history month, we interviewed two veteran activists of the 1970s Detroit black liberation struggle. In the book, "Motown and The Making of Working Class Revolutionaries", Jerome Scott and Walda Katz-Fishman describe how black industrial workers understood that gains won from corporations and racist unions would be thwarted by automation and changes in the global economy. They began to study Marxism to understand the system and reformulate their political perspective. The result was 50 years of study, struggle and the ability to anticipate the revolutionary moment we are in today. Listen to part one here: https://islandcitybeat.com/episodes/motown Listen to part two: https://islandcitybeat.com/episodes/2-nd-half-of-motown |