Black Liberation Archives

    DRUM (Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement) "Revolutionary Union Movements” began as the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement or DRUM in May 1968 at the Chrysler Hamtramck Assembly Plant (formerly Dodge Main). It was an attempt to redress problems in working conditions, particularly employment discrimination that had blacks restricted to the most menial or dangerous jobs, and kept from moving into better paying positions in the plants, at a time when neither the unions nor the government would respond to the issues. DRUM also wanted to increase the visibility of blacks in the unions. Their tactics included wildcat strikes, demonstrations, and publications. RUMs developed in other plants and industries. They were united under the League of Revolutionary Black Workers from 1969 to 1971. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers: A Historical Study By A. Muhammad Ahmad My Notes: A distinction should be made here concerning  what was called D...

Rising Up Angry was a radical youth movement organized as a militant community organization based in working class communities in Chicago, paralleling but not part of the Weatherman Underground and Revolutionary Youth Movement currents in New Left politics at the end of the 1960s. They published a monthly newspaper also called Rising Up Angry from 1969 to 1975, describing itself as "a revolutionary organization committed to building a new man, a new woman, and a new world," with the masthead motto "To love we must fight." RUA took their name from the lyrics to the song "Shape of Things to Come" in the 1968 movie Wild in the Streets. The membership of the organization was of local blue-collar youth recruited out of the neighborhood subcultures called by the paper "greasers," a term used at the time to describe disaffected white youths stuck nostalgically in the subculture of the 1950s (see Grease). Members were mostly working class youths wi...