including Cedric Robinson and Ernest Allen, and the future founder of the US Organization, Maulana Karenga. In 1964, RAM members traveled to Cuba, including Luke Tripp, Charles “Mao” Johnson, Charles Simmons, and General Baker, members of the student group Uhuru who later played key roles in the formation of the Detroit Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the Detroit League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Finally, RAM boasted as mentors former communists like Harry Haywood and Harold Cruse, “Queen Mother” Audley Moore, and ex-Trotskyists James and Grace Lee Boggs, one-time collaborators with C.L.R. James in the Detroit-based group Facing Reality. 6

RAM used its theoretical organ, Black America, where “World Black Revolution” first appeared, to delineate an organizational protocol heavily indebted ideologically and tactically to Maoism and the Chinese Revolution ofwith the non-aligned countries of the Third World. RAM cadre were also nearly entirely male, masculinist, and impatient: revolution in the United States, they argued, might be won in 90 days.

The group predictably attracted national attention, and the intensity of the scrutiny severely affected its ability to operate, even clandestinely. In 1966, the year the Cultural Revolution began in China, both Life and Esquire magazines ran “exposés” identifying RAM as a China-backed internal subversive organization waging war on white America. As part of the federal government’s wider crackdown on black dissidence, RAM members were arrested and charged in 1967 with conspiracy to instigate a riot and to assassinate Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young. In 1968, in an attempt to outmaneuver the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, RAM changed its name