Although Henry Ford had been a hero to Detroit’s Black community for employing Black workers in skilled positions, the Great Depression marked a serious turning point in Black Detroit’s relationship to Henry Ford and started Black Detroiters on new courses to achieve equality. As the city’s most industrial city, the depression was experienced especially hard in Detroit. From 1929-1931, more than 200,000 Detroiters lost their jobs. No one was immune from the depression related cutbacks as teachers, factory workers, lawyers, engineers, mechanics, journalists, and even lawyers stood together in breadlines. By 1931, public relief was the sole source of income for over 210,000 people, more than half of whom were Black. A year later, thousands of these people were cut from relief rolls as the city sought ways to deal with its steadily increasing debt of $278 million. As increasing numbers of people went without jobs and relief, Detroit’s public works department received more than seven thousand calls per day about evictions. 

Because Henry Ford and Ford Motor Company had been seen as benevolent, unemployed workers turned to him for help and then turned on him. Although he laid off workers during the early years of the depression, he also proposed raises and promised to not cut wages. Building on these promises, Ford declared that despite the depression, No For worker will starve.” Edsel Ford, Henry Ford’s son was on record saying, “If any unemployed Ford worker needs relief, he knows where to get it.” These statements held weight because, unlike most corporations where a long managerial chain of command makes it difficult to understand who makes decisions, Henry Ford himself was the face of Ford Motor Company and workers felt like they actually knew him. 

To test Ford’s sincerity, unemployed workers in Detroit organized the Ford Hunger March in 1932. In response to layoffs, cuts to government relief, breadlines, and evictions, 3,000-5,000 people marched from Detroit to the River Rouge employment office on March 7, 1932. Made up of Black and white workers, marches carried signs demanding an end to discrimination against Black workers, end of the deadly assembly line speed-up, the use of war funds from the government for relief rolls, and jobs for laid-off workers. Led by a mixture of communists and non-communists, the leadership of the march pled with marchers to be nonviolent. 

Following the leadership’s orders, when the nonviolent march crossed the line from Detroit into Dearborn where the Rouge employment office was located, Dearborn police ordered them to stop. Continuing to march, the police then threw tear gas at the peaceful demonstrators. As the march approached the gates of the hiring center, police threw more tear gas and sprayed them with icy water. Tired of this treatment, marches began throwing stones at police and Ford security. Ford security and police then began shooting at marchers, killing two and injuring another twenty-two. Two more demonstrators were killed later in the day as the battle ensued.  

Ford’s choice to kill nonviolent marchers turned him from a hero into an adversary and politicized Blacks in new ways. In the wake of the Ford Hunger March Black Detroiters organized against evictions and police brutality. In October, Black postal workers created the Federation of Negro Labor. In addition to these activities, increasing numbers of Black Detroiters began to join Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, the Nation of Islam, and the Communist Party. Many also became interested in labor unions. Black Detroiters also increasingly took an active role in the Democratic Party and formed new organizations like the Civil Rights Commission.

Black Detroiters increasing openness to the Communist Party stemmed partially from the organization of unemployed councils by the Party and by their role in the case of the Scottsboro Boys. Although the Communist Party had tried for many years to spread a vision of Black and white workers fighting together on equal terms against employers, only after the massive unemployment increase of the Depression did they make inroads. In March 1930 they held a demonstration for the unemployed attended by thousands, which, within the year resulted in the creation of fifteen unemployed councils in Detroit. The growth of an interracial movement was strengthened by the Party’s promotion and defense of nine young Black men who were accused of raping two white women on a train in Scottsboro, Alabama. Since white Party members exhibited a sincere commitment to the rights of the “Scottsboro Boys” as well as their Black co-workers, the Party’s commitment to the case earned them new Black members. For those who did not join the Communist Party, the role of the Party in the Scottsboro case opened their minds to new methods of struggling for equality.

One of the most visible of these new methods was the Detroit Civil Rights Commission. Formed as a working class alternative to the NAACP in 1933 by Snow Grigsby, the CRC was initially devoted to securing jobs for Black people in municipal jobs but expanded later to cover all jobs. Also engaged in political education, the CRC produced a ten-page pamphlet called An X-ray Picture of Detroit analyzing the activism of Black organizations. Distributing the pamphlet on doorsteps, porches and church pews, it was widely read and even used in Sunday school classes. Grigsby, the author of the pamphlet, accused the NAACP of being lazy and challenged them to become more militant so that they might gain the support of the Black working classes. The CRC also organized a successful campaign to get Black workers hired at Detroit Edison, the municipal electric company.  

Beth Bates, The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2012

Matthew Birkhold, “Doing for Our Time What Marx Did for His: The Boggsian Challenge to Marxist Praxis,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 13, No. 3, 2011