'How I became a socialist'- Interview with SEP Detroit mayoral candidate D’Artagnan Collier

D’Artagnan Collier, the Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for mayor of Detroit, has deep roots in the city’s working class population and its struggles. Collier, 41, a city worker and lifelong resident of Detroit, joined the socialist movement in 1984.

His maternal grandfather, James Andrew Davis, migrated to the Motor City from Meridian, Mississippi after World War II, one of tens of thousands of African-American workers who left the poverty and racial oppression of the Deep South in search of a better life in Detroit’s many auto factories. Davis worked at Chrysler for 33 years, the majority of those years at the auto company’s massive Dodge Main complex on the city’s east side. He died at the age of 79 from neuropathy—a degeneration of the central nervous system caused by long-term exposure to lead.

D’Artagnan’s father—Malcolm J. Collier—was a materials handler at Chrysler’s Detroit Trim factory. He had grown up in the Jeffries Housing Projects, but his job at an auto plant enabled him to buy a house on the city’s northeast side, marry Diana Gail Davis, and start a family.

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/dart-j31.shtml