On February 28, 2026, Pilsen Community Books in Chicago held a lively discussion and book signing with authors Walda Katz-Fishman and Jerome Scott for their new book, Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries: The Story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. The event brought together readers, organizers, and community members to talk about the history of Black autoworker organizing in Detroit and what it can teach today’s labor movements.
Tribuno del Pueblo was glad to take part in this event, with our co-editor Ada Marys helping to facilitate the discussion and connecting the conversation through questions about working-class struggle, labor, and women during the movement. The book shows how everyday workers in Detroit’s auto plants stood up to corporate power and racial injustice through wildcat strikes, political education, and grassroots union organizing. These stories share the same values celebrated each May Day, or International Workers’ Day. May Day honors collective action for fair working conditions and dignity, with roots in the 19th-century labor movement, including the Haymarket Affair in Chicago. The protests for the eight-hour day helped inspire the global tradition of May 1 as a day of labor solidarity. Connecting that tradition to the Detroit League’s struggles reminds us that the fight for workers’ rights is both part of history and still happening today, supported by community spaces like the Pilsen bookstore and continued by today’s organizers and journalists.
Jerome Scott is a former autoworker from Detroit who became a labor organizer and was directly involved in the League of Revolutionary Black Workers when it formed in the late 1960s. His work is based on firsthand experience in the auto plants, where Black workers organized against racism, unsafe conditions, and exploitation. He later continued his activism through worker education and organizing.
Walda Katz-Fishman is a sociologist and scholar-activist at Howard University. She has worked for many years in popular education and social justice movements, focusing on race, class, and labor struggles. Her work helps place worker movements like the League in a wider historical and political context.
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