Interview with Say Burgin (Organizing Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit)

In April I participated in a conversation with Say Burgin (author of Organizing Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit) at Red Emma’s. Over the past few decades, beginning with Thomas Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis, there’ve been a number of white attempts to rewrite Detroit’s history and through Detroit’s history the history of the rustbelt. Sugrue’s own work represented an attempt to move the study of racism away from attitudes and towards more material practices of real estate and development. Similarly his work changed common sense understandings Detroit’s history—most thought Detroit’s population decline began after the 1967 rebellion when in fact we see significant (white, middle class) decline as early as approximately 1953. Heather Thompson’s Whose Detroit? takes another shibboleth—that black people were more or less given the city after white flight—and tears that apart. Black people weren’t given the city…black people fought for the city and won it. The remaining whites, uncomfortable with the possibility of living under black urban rule, then left.

How might we take that last point and reflect on this:

For me it’s simple. It isn’t that black people are ALLOWED to be free in Detroit. It’s that black people in Detroit fought for the right to be free, and won.

I read Burgin as part of that tradition, working to re-arrange and overturn ideas that we take for granted. In her case, she’s interested in overturning the idea that black power organizers kicked whites out of black organizations out of what could be called “reverse-racism.” This idea is attached, most notably, with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee becoming the Student National Coordinating Committee and with a vote supposedly held to purge the group. John Lewis was on one side of the vote, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure) was on the other side. 

Burgin suggests that it didn’t quite happen like this. There was a vote, that much is true. However what is closer to the truth is that a number of civil rights era organizations, including SNCC, started to argue for what she calls “racially parallel organizing.” Given the seeming intransigence of white racism and the inability of blacks to crack it, many began to argue that whites should work on organizing whites. Burgin traces the story of four different organizations in Detroit (People Against Racism, the Detroit Industrial Mission, the Ad-Hoc Organization, the Motor City Labor League) and and how they tried to take on that task. I wasn’t familiar with any of these organizations although I was familiar with some of the individuals associated with them—Sheila Murphy for example used to be involved in the Motor City Labor League, married black radical Kenneth Cockrel, and then became a member of Detroit City Council where she still sits now I think. As one might suspect, organizing communities in the late sixties and early seventies was difficult in general, but organizing whites posed a number of specific problems that Burgin identifies clearly. I appreciated the work a great deal. 

I’ve begun taping these conversations because I realize that, particularly given this moment, we need these things to be archived. Here’s a link.