Dan Georgakas (; March 1, 1938 – November 23, 2021) was an American anarchist poet and historian, who specialized in oral history and the American labor movement, best known for the publication Detroit: I do mind dying: A study in urban revolution (1975), which documents African-American radical groups in Detroit during the 1960s and 1970s.
Early life
Dan Georgakas was born March 1, 1938, to Xenophon and Sophia Georgakas in Detroit, Michigan.<!-- more to paraphrase in source -->
Career
In 1966, Georgakas and painter Ben Morea helped found the anarchist group Up Against the Wall Motherfucker affiliated with New York City's Lower East Side.
In 1967, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest," initiated by an editor of the New York Times magazine. Inspired by the civil disobedience of Henry David Thoreau, the manifesto united 528 American writers and publishers who refused to pay the 10% tax for the Vietnam War.
In 1975, Georgakas co-published with Marvin Surkin Detroit: I do mind dying: a study in urban revolution. The book traces workers' struggles of the 1970s in the car factories. It highlights: conditions of line work, corruption of union apparatus, daily racism in American society.
Georgakas had taught at New York University, Columbia University, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Queens College.
Legacy
In 1967, Georgakas and Surkin helped coin the term "New Detroit".
Georgakas has left the bulk of his papers to the Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs at Wayne State University, with writings on cinema in the Tamiment Library of New York University.
- Encyclopedia of the American Left, with Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle (1990, 1998)
- "The Films of Theo Angelopoulos" in Journal of Modern Greek Studies (2000)
- "Stella Michael Cacoyannis, Greece 1955" in The Cinema of the Balkans, London and New York (2006)
- My Detroit: Growing Up Greek and American in Motor City (2006)
- "Radical America" in New Politicas (2018)
- "This week in history: Radical feminist Voltairine de Cleyre" in People's World (2016)
Film: Georgakas' has appeared in documentaries, including:
- Detroit: Run of a City (2005)
- I'm Standin' Over Here Now (2013)
- Dan Georgakas: A Diaspora Rebel (2015)