The League radicals argued that the priority for Detroit auto workers was how to better working conditions, wages, and benefits, not to settle for fighting against givebacks or commiserating with corporations when their profits were temporarily down. The corporations had to give back, not the workers. The workers needed to control automation rather than be controlled by it. Automation should serve to increase the quality of cars, not profit margins. Winning support for such a perspective required extensive public education. We write at length on how the League struggled to accomplish that intellectual agenda and how it tried to set the rhetoric for discussions of race, class, finance, housing, education, and health.

The organizational focus of the League was the African American worker. But the leadership was not narrowly nationalist or separatist; it understood that fundamental change went beyond race issues. The League understood that interest rates and regulation of commerce were determined by government, but unlike entrepreneurs and bankers, the League thought economic planning should be directed to benefit the average American rather than executives, financiers, and the economic elite. Perhaps the League's most brilliant demonstration of how public resources could be used immediately was its transformation of Wayne State University's daily student newspaper from a socially marginal student organ into a dynamic community voice seeking to influence public policy. The League and its allies gained control of the paper by following the rules of the system. Moreover, their editorial work hewed to the spirit of the First Amendment's guarantee of the rights of freedom of speech, discourse, and assembly.

Unlike the movement identified with Martin Luther King Jr., the League was secular and urban. Unlike the urban movement identified with Malcolm X, the League initiated direct action to achieve racial equality whenever it thought the conditions were favorable. Unlike the Black Panthers who based themselves on youth and spoke repeatedly of white guilt, the League focused on workers and spoke repeatedly of capitalist guilt. In Finally Got the News, a film produced by the League, John Watson, one of the League's founders stated a major organizational premise: workers, unlike students or street people, had the power to shut down society in a general strike. Students and street people were not to be ignored, but they were not structurally situated to be the engine of social change.