League of Revolutionary Black Workers - The Communist League

The Communist League

According to the book "Detroit, I Do Mind Dying" by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, the split within the Detroit based League of Revolutionary Workers became public on June 12, 1971. "By the first of the year, those who remained in the League were making plans to affiliate what was left of the organization with a group called the Communist League. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers had become history." (page 164).

With the merging of the Communist League and a section of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Communist League acquired a large grouping of black industrial workers familiar with the writings of Marx, Lenin and Mao. Elbaum speculates that the Communist League may have had more blacks, Chicanos and women in its leadership than perhaps any communist group in American history. (page 103)

In Detroit the Communist League formed a working relations with the Motor City Labor League (MCLL), which had also experienced a political split similar to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, with one section combining with the Communist League in launching itself nationally as the Communist Labor Party in 1974. Interestingly, one section of the MCLL merged with the Communist League and another sector merged with the grouping split from the old League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW). The former was expressed as activists like the anti-war veteran Frank Joyce and the later by Shelia Murphy who would later win numerous elections as Councilperson in Detroit and marry Kenneth Cockrel, a leader of the faction within the LRBW than did not join the Communist League.

The Communist League and then the Communist Labor Party viewed its distinguishing political and theoretical feature as its presentation of what it called "The Negro National Colonial Question," by Nelson Peery, first edition published by the Communist League, 1972. In 1976 and again in 1978 the Communist Labor Party conducted "Vote Communist" campaigns running General Baker Jr. for State Representative in the Michigan House. They continued to work with the CPUSA, while opposing much of their ideology, until 1993 when they disbanded and refounded their group as the League of Revolutionaries for a New America.