Organizing Your Own : The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit by Say Burgin

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, Say Burgin argues that it heralded a new strategy, racially parallel organizing, which people experimented with all over the country. Organizing Your Own shows that the Black freedom movement never experienced a “white purge,” and it offers a new way of understanding Black Power’s relationship to white America.

"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