Race against Liberalism examines how black worker activism in Detroit shaped the racial politics of the labor movement and the white working class. David M. Lewis-Colman traces the substantive, long-standing disagreements between liberals and the black workers who embraced autonomous race-based action. As he shows, 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. The 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's 1973 election as the city's first black mayor.
An in-depth chronicle of the black labor movement in Detroit
Lewis-Colman's book sheds light on just how entrenched racism was in American society and suggests that any glimmer of interracial liberalism may have been fool's gold. --
The Journal of American History“Race against Liberalismis a well-written narrative that provides readers with a greater sense of the complexities of racial politics within the labor movement in postwar Detroit. Lewis-Colman’s book is a welcome addition to the literature on the UAW, but it also has broader significance for the study of Detroit, race, and race relations generally within the twentieth-century United States.”--Michigan Historical Review
"Much more than a simple institutional history of the UAW and its black members, this work deftly moves beyond this theme to other crucial issues connected to the workplace, the Detroit community, the Cold War against labor, and to the civil rights and Black Nationalist movements."--Stephen Meyer, author of"Stalin over Wisconsin": The Making and Unmakl™
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