The Black community’s relationship to Ford and the racism of white workers meant that Black migrants to Detroit had little interest in organized labor through the late 1930s. However, due to several developments in the 1930s, by 1941 Black workers were central to the successful unionization of Detroit’s auto plants. By the 1950s, many of Detroit’s unionized Black workers had become more radical than the union they belonged to.

Thousands of Black Detroiters moved to Detroit before and during the depression in hopes of securing a $5 a day job at Ford Motor Company. However, after arriving, very few secured those jobs. Far more common were stories of Black migrants taking jobs as porters on intercity railroads, as bellhops, as busboys, or in barbershops. With many of these jobs far less fulfilling and paying far less money than migrants thought they would make, many left Detroit to try their luck elsewhere. After the creation of the Works Progress Administration, many migrants were able to secure WPA jobs and stay in Detroit permanently.

Black workers were stuck in these other jobs or at Ford because other auto manufacturers hired very few Black workers. As late as 1941, Ford was the largest employer of Blacks in Detroit yet only 5 percent of Blacks in the city worked there. 95 percent of these workers worked at Ford’s River Rouge Plant. Unlike other factories where Black workers had the worst jobs, at River Rouge Black workers held skilled as well as unskilled positions and had the potential to be promoted.

These jobs were typically secured through the recommendation of preachers who had relationships with Henry Ford and with the company. However, Ford’s relationship with Black preachers were contingent upon them sharing Ford’s Republican and anti-union stances. Therefore, in order to have a chance at being hired by the only company in Detroit with the potential for promotion—and to keep a job if hired—the great majority of Black workers were not interested in joining the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, even if they sympathized. With the emergence of the National Negro Congress during the Depression, this began to change.

The National Negro Congress (NNC) was a national organization committed to “protest war and fascism; build a more powerful civil rights organization among Blacks; improve the conditions of sharecroppers and tenant farmers; draw Blacks into the labor movement; build a consumers’ union among Blacks; and develop an independent working-class political party.” At its heart was a belief that the lives of Black people could be improved by seeing the struggle against racism as an economic struggle as well, and that the labor movement was a strong place to wage that struggle.

The Detroit branch of the NNC was formed by the Detroit Civil Rights Commission (CRC), an organization started and led by Snow Grigsby in 1933 to secure jobs for Black Detroiters. Understanding that Ford’s relationship to Black people and churches made their support for unions and the labor movement difficult to support, Grigsby developed a three-phase strategy to shift support in the Black community for unions.

During phase one, the NNC and CRC recruited Black Detroiters and broadened its base by holding events that challenged Black Detroiters to understand a connection between civil rights and labor issues. For example, one of the first events the NNC organized in Detroit was a conference on the connections between Black Americans, Ethiopians, and fascism, during which Ford’s support for Italian fascism in Ethiopia was made visible.

During the second phase, the NNC established formal relationships with the UAW to establish a favorable position for Black workers within the union. Establishing a place for Black workers within the union was necessary because Black workers were not convinced that the UAW would fight hard enough against racism that breaking their allegiance to Ford made sense. Black workers held this suspicion for good reason. White members regularly voted to bar Black workers, including UAW members, from attending UAW social events. While the policy of the UAW opposed racism, in practice this policy was hard to enforce. Unable to trust white workers within the UAW to oppose racism and unable to trust UAW leadership to oppose the racism of its members, the NNCs struggle to draw Black into the labor movement was especially hard.

The third phase of the NNC’s strategy was assisted in part by a leadership change within the UAW. As Walter Reuther assumed leadership of the union, Black organizers were hired and Black membership increased at General Motors and Chrysler factories. At the same time, the national leadership of the AFL-CIO took control from the UAW local over the campaign to organize Ford’s River Rouge plant. This drive towards paid Black organizers and the AFL-CIOs willingness to frame the drive for unionization as a civil rights struggle overlapped with the work the NNC had been doing for the last three years. Consequently, the NNC was able to break down Black workers’ remaining fears of opposing Ford and joining the UAW. Consequently, Ford became a union shop on April 2, 1941, largely because Black workers joined the union.

Shortly after the unionization of Ford, Black workers in Detroit embraced the union as a catalyst to drive the struggle for civil rights forward. For example, in 1946, the UAW established a fair employment practices committee which combated discrimination in factories. Within a year Black workers had taken the fair practices committee out of the plant and used it to organize sit-ins at restaurants that denied service to Blacks. Several Black workers also began to believe that the UAW was of limited use to the struggle for civil rights not because of its members’ racism but because it was not interested in acquiring political power over the country. For these Black workers in Detroit, the union was also a vehicle to introduce them to revolutionary organizations like the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the International Workers of the World, and the Socialist Workers Party.

References:

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

Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998

Rod Bush, We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century, New York, NYU Press, 1999