This event will premiere on ESFL’s Facebook page and YouTube channel

On the second Friday evening of each month, ESFL screens a labor history film. We often connect it with that month’s Labor History Reading Group, which meets on the third Tuesday evening. This February, marking Black History Month, we are focusing on the experiences of African American auto workers in Detroit in the 1960s-1970s. On February 16, our reading group will read a chapter from Jordan Camp’s Incarcerating the Crisis (2016), entitled “Finally Got the News: Urban Insurgency, Counterinsurgency, and the Crisis of Hegemony in Detroit,” and Jordan will be joining us. Our film is the rarely seen documentary, Finally Got the News.

This film traces the activities of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers inside and outside the auto factories of Detroit. Through interviews with the members of the movement, footage shot in the auto plants, and footage of leafleting and picketing actions, the film documents their efforts to build an independent black labor organization that, unlike the UAW, will respond to worker’s problems, such as the assembly line speed-up and inadequate wages faced by both black and white workers in the industry. It provides a rare opportunity for African American industrial workers to represent themselves on film and for a self-identified revolutionary organization to provide their own perspective on the past, the present, and the future.

The late historian Manning Marable wrote: “The League [of Revolutionary Black Workers] was in many respects the most significant expression of black radical thought and activism in the 1960s. The League took the impetus for Black Power and translated it into a fighting program focusing on industrial workers.”

Oral historian and filmmaker Dan Georgakas (author of Detroit: I Do Mind Dying) wrote: “Ideological in the best sense: it is a film about ideas [and] presents a serious strategy for mass working class action… It speaks of a specific time and specific experiences in terms that will remain relevant as long as working people are not able to control their own lives.”

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