Organizing Your Own offers a new way of seeing Black Power’s relationship to white America. It is the first comprehensive study of white activists’ 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, I argue 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,” but rather innovated a strategy that asked white people to try a different tactic.

By focusing on Detroit from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, Organizing Your Own illuminates a wide cross-section of white activists who took direction from Black-led groups like the Northern Student Movement, the City-Wide Citizens Action Committee, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. It draws on numerous oral histories and never-before-seen archives to show that these white activists mobilized support for Black self-determination in education, policing, employment, and labor unions. 

The story that unfolds shows that racially parallel organizing was a trial-and-error effort that pushed white activists to grapple with tough questions – which white people should they organize and how, which Black-led groups should they take direction from, and when did taking Black direction become mere sycophancy. Detroit’s white fight for Black Power thus not only reveals a broader, richer movement, but it carries great insight into questions that remain relevant.