Dan Georgakas

Who is Dan Georgakas?

Dan Georgakas is an American anarchist poet and historian. In 1966 he was a founding member of the anarchist group Black Mask, which later became Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers.

Along with Malay Roychoudhury in India, Gordon Lasslett in Australia, Carl Weissner in Germany and Jeff Nutall in Britain, Georgakas built up a communicative group of writers and poets which he called a bunch of Creative Vandalists.

In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

His book Detroit I Do Mind Dying presents a history of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Alongside histories of the Civil Rights and Black power movements which concentrate their attention on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party, the book by Georgakas and Marvin Surkin focus on the League of Revolutionary Black Workers as a significant expression of black radical thought and activism amongst auto-workers in the 1960s. It is a text of political economy and historical sociology tempered by a passionate commitment to the struggles which were waged by its central actors.