Indignant Heart: A Black Worker’s Journal

Description

Indignant Heart: A Black Worker’s Journal

By Charles Denby

Expanded edition, Wayne State Univ. Press, 1989. 303 pgs.

This autobiography begins with Denby’s youth in a Black sharecropping family in Lowndes County, Alabama. It moves to his workplace struggles in Detroit’s auto industry and to his decades-long thought and activity as a Marxist-Humanist and colleague of Raya Dunayevskaya.

This expanded edition includes Dunayevskaya’s “In Memoriam” to Denby and an introduction by William H. Harris.

“As literature, as a historical document, and as a political document, Indignant Heart is a classic …. A few themes shine out from the book …. Perhaps most fundamental is his belief in the power of self-initiated and self-directed action …. Second, he opposes the idea that there is ‘no Black question outside the class question.’ This argument is used to keep Black struggles under the control of the trade union officialdom. A third theme is the development of workers’ activities independent of the union officialdom.”
–Jeremy Brecher, In These Times

“The 75 years of Charles Denby’s life are so full of class struggles, Black revolts, freedom movements that they illuminate not only the present but cast a light even on the future …. [T]he genius of Charles Denby lies in the fact that the story of his life—Indignant Heart: A Black Worker’s Journal—is the story of workers’ struggles for freedom, his and all others the world over.”
–Raya Dunayevskaya, from the Afterword