Sept. 13, 1965: People Against Racism Founded in Detroit

By Say Burgin

On September 13, 1965, white members of the Northern Student Movement broke off to form a new group that was soon called People Against Racism. In the year leading up to this moment, NSM members around the country discussed their vision for Black Power and how white comrades fit into it. They decided that, to achieve Black self-determination, they would ask white folks to organize against racism in white communities. The idea was that Black people were best placed to organize in Black communities and that white activists could work with white communities to break down racist barriers and build support for Black Power. I call this strategy “racially parallel organizing.”

A photograph from the Detroit NSM office. Source: Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University

People Against Racism paralleled the Northern Student Movement and other Black-led groups. PAR first grounded itself in Detroit before developing chapters in Ann Arbor, Philadelphia, Boston, and elsewhere. It organized white people by creating suburban freedom schools, developing school curriculum, raising the alarm on “law and order” politics, and through other means. Black-led groups, including NSM and Detroit’s City-Wide Citizens Action Committee, also requested that PAR provide a white “presence” for various rallies, appeals, and campaigns. PAR was active as a national body until 1971.

Years later, former Northern Student Movement head Bill Strickland remembered NSM and PAR this way:

The more I have thought about our past, the more excited I have become over its significance. . . . Before the Panthers, there was NSM. Before SNCC’s Atlanta Project and before media-generated hysteria over ‘Black Power,’ there was NSM. Before all of these more recognized historical events, NSM had already initiated a race-conscious strategy to confront American racism. In fact Detroit had formed probably the first really constructive white organization to combat the monster: PAR, People Against Racism. What I’ve come to realize is that the NSM story is not just our story. (Quoted in Elizabeth Tobierre, “‘Black Power Does Not Come out of the Sky’: The Emergence of Black Power Politics in the Northern Student Movement, 1961-1969,” history honors thesis, Duke University)

Say Burgin is an associate professor of history at Dickinson College, where she researches and teaches 20th-century African American and social movement history.