Re: Organization/Vote Communist- some history

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Marian Kramer - full interview: 
http://www.utoledo.edu/colleges/as/africana/poverty/marian.html

An interview conducted in 1991 and published in Detroit Lives, a collection 
of interviews compiled and edited by Robert H. Mast, Temple University Press, 
1994. 


Marian Kramer is the president of the National Welfare Rights Union and 
co-president of the national Up and Out of Poverty Now! campaign. She's a 
Louisiana 
native with a long history of activism in the civil rights struggles in the 
South. 
__________

In the late '60s I worked for the West Central Organization [WCO] in Detroit. 
It was a community-based organization modeled after the Alinsky style of 
organizing. It was in the Wayne State University area, around Grand River and 
Trumbull, where urban renewal was happening. I was one of the people who was 
heavily involved in the fight to save that community, and make sure that the 
city, 
state, and federal governments respected the community's plans. It taught me 
how to be a community organizer. 

Around 1967, folks like General Baker and Glanton Dowdell who worked at Dodge 
Main started coming around to WCO. Dowdell painted the Black Madonna, that 
beautiful picture that hangs in Reverend Cleage's Shrine of the Black Madonna 
on 
Linwood. They were putting out leaflets from DRUM [Dodge Revolutionary Union 
Movement]. 

We also had started to read The Inner City Voice [ICV]. I got recruited to 
help type up articles for the paper and started hanging out at the ICV office 
on 
Grand River across from the Trade Union Leadership Conference. The printers 
in the city refused to print the ICV. They'd get the "blue flu." So a decision 
was made to take over The South End, Wayne State's student newspaper, and 
continue to get the word out concerning the situation at the plants, the 
communities, and the students in the inner city of Detroit. Some of our people 
enrolled 
at school and became staff of the paper. People all around wanted to read the 
paper. Women like Cassandra Smith, Edna Watson, Dorothy Duberry, Diane 
Bernard, and Gracie Wooten played tremendous roles in the paper. We were 
forceful, 
but we were played down. 

We were not the typical women in the NOW movement. A lot of us got pulled 
into the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and we were its backbone. But 
male 
supremacy was rampant and we never got proper credit. We were always in the 
streets, fighting urban renewal, organizing against slum landlords, forming 
tenants' unions, protecting people against police brutality, and so forth. 

A lot of the men in DRUM were catching hell from their wives for 
participating in the struggles. The wives were concerned about their husbands 
being fired. 
General Baker and others formed a committee to politicize and get the wives 
involved in the fight. There were people like Arleen, Gracie, Cass Smith, 
myself, Edna Watson. We endured a lot of name calling and had to fight male 
supremacy. Some would call us the IWW: âIgnorant Women of the World.â I was 
thought 
of as one of the grouchiest women. In meetings we attended to form a Black 
liberation party, there was debate [as to] where the struggle had to be. One 
faction said that the focus should be in the plants, at the point of 
production. I 
said, "Yes, but all those men got to come back into the community; they live 
somewhere. We've got to be organizing in both places." 

A lot of social struggles were right there in the community. Women had 
developed a lot of skills and were becoming central in the organizations. We 
asked, 
"Why is it that we always get the work and get shit upon in the process?" 
Also, a lot of Black women were getting into the plants and into the union. We 
thought that women should have been on the executive board of the League of 
Revolutionary Black Workers. 

The city of Detroit was increasing the rent of people in public housing. In 
1969 some people in the Jeffries projects came to my house and asked me to help 
organize the tenants against rent increases. On a Sunday we had a big meeting 
and we decided to do a rent strike. We forged a unity between the seniors and 
youth. Ron Scott, who was in the Panthers, lived in the projects. We set up a 
picket line and used the young people from the Panthers and the League to 
help man it. We spread to Brewster. The city gave some concessions. It did not 
raise the rent and it formed tenants' councils in the projects. They still have 
those councils, but they've been co-opted. Some people who serve on the 
councils are nothing but lackeys for [Mayor] Coleman Young. Some people who 
were 
active in the housing struggles of that time now have been coopted into city 
government and are people we had to confront last year [1991] when we pitched 
Tent 
City. They get bribed. 

I love my history in the sense that I had the opportunity to participate in 
the development of a Marxist-Leninist party in the '70s. It came off from 
lessons I learned from my involvement in the community, in welfare rights, and 
all 
that stuff. I treasure thal I was asked to sit on the preparatory committee to 
struggle out the party's line. I had never studied like that before in my 
life. I never learned to read real good in school. But I have learned to read 
real good in dealing with the "science" and dealing with my community 
involvement. In those preparatory groups you could see a lot of those people 
were all 
armchair revolutionaries, just studying the stuff so they could be popular at 
the 
time. But this was life and death for me. I wanted a future for the child I 
had birthed and for the many kids that we were taking care of at the time. 


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