About this Event
We are delighted to host Say for Organizing Your Own!! We are so happy that Say is celebrating with us in Detroit with wonderful community partners. We look forward to the rich conversation and a fun booksigning. We enjoy celebrating books about Detroit and this one has a unique history and worthly of a rich conversation.
Save your seat with with ticket at this link!!!! Books will be for sale at the event.
A special thanks for the support and partnership from:
- Change is the Point
- Michigan Roundtable
- Suburban Connections for Collective Libersation
- Michigan Coalition for Human Rights.
About the book
The fascinating history of white solidarity with the Black Power movement
In the mid-1960s, as the politics of Black self-determination gained steam, Black activists had a new message for white activists: Go into your own communities and organize white people against racism. While much of the media at the time and many historians since have regarded this directive as a “white purge” from the Black freedom movement
By focusing on Detroit from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, this volume illuminates a wide cross-section of white activists who took direction from Black-led groups like the Northern Student Movement, the City-Wide Citizens Action Committee, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Organizing Your Own draws on numerous oral histories and heretofore unseen archives to show that these white activists mobilized support for Black self-determination in education, policing, employment, and labor unions. The story of Detroit’s white fight for Black Power thus not only reveals a broader, richer movement, but it carries great insight into questions that remain relevant.
Say Burgin is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Dickinson College.
Review
"For anyone interested in Northern liberalism and the Black freedom struggle, this is a must-read. Burgin's study of white anti-racist organizing in Detroit shows how groups of white Detroiters took up the Black Power imperative and challenged the structures of job discrimination, media bias, political power, and policing in the city. In the process, they denaturalized the racial prerogatives of Northern liberalism, showing it as set of personal and policy choices." -Jeanne Theoharis, author of A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Jam Handy, 2900 East Grand Boulevard, Detroit, United States
USD 0.00