On this day, 11 December 1968, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), a group of radical Black car factory workers in Detroit, issued an attack on the spectacle of the Chrysler Corporation’s “milestone agreement” to invest $1 million in Black-owned banks in Detroit, Atlanta and LA.
DRUM declared that it was merely a milestone “in bullshit and nonsense - since the combined population of those three communities is, roughly, two million Black people. This means that even if the $1m were to be divided equally among the Black people of the three communities, each person would get just 50c. If they should ever really want to do some good, perhaps some of the mini-brained executive pigs of Chrysler Corporation will devote some of their not-too-valuable time to correcting racist practices in their plants in Detroit and elsewhere, instead of using it to devise bullshit pacification programs that are nothing but rank insults to the Black community.”
At the same time, Chrysler donated two vehicles to the Detroit police department. DRUM highlighted the Detroit police had been used to “harass and intimidate the Black workers in general and DRUM members in particular in recent walkouts and demonstrations; to write unjustified parking tickets; and last but not least to physically attack DRUM members and other Black workers on the street and inside the Union Hall with mace and even ax handles during the election of union trustees.”
The group condemned Chrysler’s “‘carrot and stick’ policy whereby [they] offers a carrot ($1m) to the oppressed Black community with one hand, while the other hand threatens the community with a stick (the police). The Chrysler version of the “carrot and stick” idea is doomed to fail as all other versions have failed, most notably the attempt to use it in Vietnam.“
Learn more about DRUM and its wider organisation in episodes 61-62 of our podcast: https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e61-the-league-of-revolutionary-black-workers-in-detroit/https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2158017997716672/?type=3
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