Reconceptualising the factory as plant-ation: Black radicalism and the politics of history in a Detroit automobile plant

In the late 1960s, Chrysler’s auto factories in Detroit were among the most regimented, fast-paced, and gruelling industrial workplaces of the United States. Their production lines employed a majority of Black workers who toiled under a racialized form of labour control, safety hazards and no leverage in the local union. In these circumstances, Black radicals, inside and outside the factory, mobilised support by crafting a discourse that drew on a repertory of notions linked to slavery and in fact reconceptualised industrial labour as slave labor, the plant as plantation, floor supervisors as overseers, and strikers as “field negroes” or rebelled slaves. The notion of the Black factory worker as a slave drew on, and in turn influenced, a new historiography on slavery that emphasized agency. It was influenced also by a tradition of radical Marxism that saw slaves as embedded in a class struggle and celebrated their “self-activity”. Radicals blended Black Power and Marxism in an, ultimately failed, attempt to gain political control of the plants and of the city administration. Through propaganda materials, interviews and self-narratives, this article explores the role of the politics of history in the mobilisation efforts of Black revolutionary groups and reconstructs the genesis and demise of a discourse that was the backdrop to the Black workers’ upheaval in the Motor City, a few years before Chrysler condemned most of its factories to closure.