"[DRUM/LRBW] never developed alliances outside of detroit and fell apart. It cannot be proposed as a model of action unless we know why it failed."
Nonsense. Where was Rakesh while all this history was being made? Reading tracts from the 1930s and 1940s?
First, these comrades were connected to revolutionary Black networks throughout the Midwest. Each time their designated group traveled to Kankakee, Illinois, to pick up the latest issue of Inner City Voice, they met with and developed joint programs with counterparts in Chicago, Gary, and elsewhere. (Besides politics, they played chess, always modified according to their "black moves first rule.")
Second, they were an essential factor in building Black nationalism's broad insurgent strength in Detroit. For example, after the Detroit cops surrounded and shot up the Republic of New Africa gathering at Rev. Franklin's church, all the RNA people were arrested. Judge George Crockett got out of bed in the wee hours, convened Recorder's Court at the lockup, and released them all on their recognizance. The white bourgeois Detroit press (infamous again today for other reasons) demanded Judge Crockett's scalp, vitually inviting a lynching. Inner City Vice responded with the headline, "If Judge Crockett Goes, All Detroit Goes!", causing the rulers to retreat. To call this scope limited, or a defeat, insults the meaning of words.
And later, as is well known, League cadres became central figures in the 1970s Marxist-Leninist movement. While it is true that movement "failed" in the sense it did not capture, smash, and shatter the bourgeois state, it has been evident to most movement people that DRUM and the League displayed a model of political and organizational success, when contrasted to almost every alternative. (The divisions that ended the organization were competing ML affiliations of the leading figures -- RCP, CLP, and CWP are the ones I remember, but possibly others too.)
Ken Lawrence