8: Urban Realignment and Labor Retrenchment
An End to Detroit’s War at Home
Detroit was the future in terms of Black politics.1
Whites walked away from this city, literally abandoning all that they had built, rather than make reasonable accommodation.2
Instead of harnessing the groundswell of radicalism to strengthen unionism, International officers made common cause with management to suppress it.3
While James Johnson’s vindication within the workman’s compensation system meant a great deal to auto workers, to Johnson, inside the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, it meant very little. After May 26, 1971, Johnson was bounced between three mental institutions: the Center for Forensic Psychiatry (CFP), Ionia, and the Ypsilanti State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Although he connected with the outside world for a moment when his compensation award was announced, by and large, he remained removed from society.4 But while little changed in Johnson’s life after his fifteen minutes of fame in 1973, the city that he had migrated to back in 1953, and the auto industry where he began working in 1968, each underwent a dramatic, and ultimately quite costly, transformation that same year.
By mid-August 1973, Detroit city and labor liberals felt more optimistic about the future than they had in almost a decade. These leaders sensed that they were well on their way to eliminating the most serious barrier to their ability to take Detroit and its labor movement forward. When civic liberals allowed Motor City radicals to push the legal system to its most progressive limits between 1969 and 1973, and when in turn these liberals took credit for every radical courtroom victory, the black community’s faith in both liberalism and change “through the system” was renewed. Accordingly, the power of the Detroit’s Left began to wither. And, when labor liberals successfully defeated shop-floor black radicals in the electoral arena and then beat back biracial and politically diverse worker dissent in the summer wildcats of 1973, the most serious challenge to their authority and leadership agenda was also similarly on the wane.
In time, however, it became clear that these liberal victories were less conclusive than they first may have appeared. Even without a Left presence in the 1973 mayoral election, civic liberals still faced a serious challenge from conservatives mobilizing on a massive scale to take political control. To defeat this bold challenge, white civic liberals had to accede control of Detroit’s liberal coalition to African Americans. And although a black liberal mayor emerged victorious in the 1973 election, the continuous attacks that he endured from racially and politically conservative whites, now residing primarily in the suburbs, made his triumph bittersweet. African Americans finally had real power in Detroit, and liberalism had survived a conservative attack. But because the national conservative war against liberal, and particularly African American, power never ended, Detroit was doomed to experience severe economic distress and social isolation.
Despite the quite different way that they handled their challengers from the Left, labor and civic liberals faced a long-term fate that was similar in key respects. Although labor leaders successfully mounted yet another assault on shop-floor dissent to secure their leadership position in August 1973, their victory soon rang hollow as well. Labor liberals hoped to use their newly secured power to win greater gains from auto companies, but this did not happen. In fact, after 1973, auto companies mounted their own increasingly aggressive attack on the bargaining prerogatives of the UAW, and, having already killed off much of its militant base, the union leadership was in no position to resist this assault. As a result of leadership decisions in the tumultuous period between 1967 and 1973, between 1973 and 1985, Detroit’s labor movement suffered a tremendous setback at the hands of management for which workers paid dearly.
* * * *
Without question, Motor City radicals found themselves in a very difficult position by 1973. Because civic liberals, both black and white, were trying to capitalize on their post-1967 victories, the Detroit Left had to decide what position it would take in the upcoming mayoral election. Some leftists argued for entering the electoral process in order to remain a force in shaping the city’s future. And because Kenneth Cockrel’s courtroom successes had made him a public figure, as well as had amassed him quite a following in the black community, there were serious discussions about a possible Cockrel candidacy for mayor in 1973.5 The hope among black Detroiters that Cockrel would replace Gribbs as mayor manifested itself in a “Draft Cockrel for Mayor Committee” effort among those who believed that “no other candidate announced or unannounced ... has displayed the kind of courage, honesty, and dedication to the people of Detroit than Ken Cockrel symbolizes.”6 Accompanying this organized call for Cockrel to enter the race was a stream of letters from ordinary black citizens.7
The decision of whether or not to run for mayor was a very difficult one for Cockrel. On the one hand, he genuinely felt that a strong mayor could effect substantive change for the black community and felt as well that it would be much better for Detroit if the future mayor was a leftist, not a liberal. On the other hand, as a revolutionary, Cockrel questioned whether entering the electoral arena might force him to compromise his beliefs and thus preclude his agitation for even more substantial long-term and overarching change. That there was much community support for his candidacy did not alleviate Cockrel’s concerns about running for mayor, because the very idea of him running also appalled many black radicals whose views Cockrel respected.8 An even more important factor to Cockrel was that one of his closest friends, Justin Ravitz, expressed concerns about him entering the race. As Ravitz wrote to Cockrel, “I think this is real—you would run well—and that obviously we would learn a lot thru the entire process too. We’ve never really measured our support. In a sense the last few years have taught us that in terms of supportive personnel we are sorta thin qualitatively; at the same time I suspect that quantitatively we are some bad motherfuckers. . . . [Nevertheless,] until we have more substantive cadre and programs dispersed thruout the strategic sectors of this city . . . someone would have a helluva burden in persuading me that we have the capacity to do it in a way that makes objective, political sense.”9 In the end, Cockrel agreed with Ravitz’s analysis and decided not to run. But while Motor City radicals intensely debated the problems and possibilities of entering a candidate in the upcoming mayoral election, black middle-class liberals wasted no time in trying to capitalize on the renewed community faith in the ballot box.
Determined by 1973 that Detroit would be governed not only by a liberal mayor but specifically by an African American, the black middle class in the city chose its candidate carefully. Sensing the desire in the larger black community for a political figure more daring than Austin had been, black leaders decided that Coleman Alexander Young would fit the bill perfectly. Indeed Young had been in the public eye throughout the 1950s and 1960s but he, unlike Austin, had been a highly controversial figure for most of these years. For example in 1937, when the UAW was engaged in its most bitter battles for union recognition, Young was an organizer for this militant labor organization. And, though he then served in the Air Corps during WWII, his outspoken criticism of racial discrimination in the military, as well as his vocal support of Henry Wallace by 1948, netted him the reputation of troublemaker.
Throughout the decade of the 1950s Young’s choice of friends and his organizational affiliations caused many to view him not only as a rabble rouser but, more seriously, as a subversive. And Young certainly did have close relationships with several politically controversial figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson. During these years he also lent his hearty support to groups such as the National Negro Labor Council which, by 1951, had been deemed a subversive organization by none other than U.S. Attorney Herbert Bromwell.10 Although Young stated publicly on numerous occasions, that ”I am not now and never have been a member of any organization that was subversive or whose design was to overthrow the United States in any way,” many nevertheless considered him to be far on the left of the political spectrum. In 1954, for example, the head of the Detroit office of the FBI wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, noting that ”this man is a dangerous individual and should be one of the first to be picked up in an emergency and one of the first to be considered for future prosecution.”11
But as the 1950s drew to a close Young’s political reputation began to change. In 1959 he decided to run for a seat on Detroit’s City Council and, though he lost, during his candidacy he became a popular figure among many working-class black Detroiters on the East side of the city. In Young they saw a man with whom they could relate. Never a member of the black bourgeoisie in Detroit, Young was familiar as one who worked numerous menial jobs and thus could understand the needs of ordinary city residents. Grass roots admiration of Young eventually translated into votes, and in 1961 Detroiters elected him as a Democratic candidate for the state constitutional convention. Three years later he won a seat in the Michigan State Senate representing the East Side district of Detroit, and in 1968 he became one of the first black members of the Democratic National Committee. Throughout the 1960s Young also played a prominent role in the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union and he worked aggressively to secure a state open housing law as well as to create the Michigan Civil Rights Commission.
Because Young and Jerome Cavanagh shared a deep commitment to civil rights, Young stood firmly behind this white liberal when Detroiters elected him mayor in 1961. But, by 1968, Young’s support of the Cavanagh administration had become qualified. As Young put it, ”I’ve been for Jerry [Cavanagh] until recently. . . . But the one thing I’ve got against him is he has been capitulating to the police.”12 Needless to say, as white liberals geared up for the election of 1969, such pointed remarks made Young less attractive than Austin as a potential candidate.
But Young was not to be deterred from speaking out critically. Indeed as the Cavanagh administration gave way to the Gribbs administration, and as police brutality escalated, state senator Young became even more vocal about the need to rein in the police department. By the early 1970s Young was not only speaking out against police power but he also was arguing publicly that blacks needed a stronger voice within the local liberal coalition. As he saw it, the Democratic Party of Detroit was dependent upon the votes of white and black city residents alike, yet blacks were still second-class citizens within the party. Specifically Young shared the frustration of Detroit’s black community that racial discrimination continued to flourish under the aegis of liberal coalition politics in the Democratic Party. When black civil rights leaders in Detroit began looking for a candidate whom they trusted to keep the struggle for racial equality at the fore, who was firmly within the liberal Democratic fold, who was committed to reforming the police department, and whose passion would inspire black voters, Coleman Young was an obvious choice. Young had assured them that he was “a Negro first and a Democrat second.”13
But as middle-class black liberals mobilized the poor and working-class African American community to support Young, Detroit’s white racial conservatives were initiating their own dramatic effort to keep a law enforcement advocate in the mayor’s office. Soon they approached none other than Detroit’s own police commissioner, John F. Nichols, to run for office. White racial conservatives appreciated Nichols’s aggressive stance against crime as well as his staunch defense of the police department’s independence. Notably, after the 1967 riot while state senator Young spoke in favor of establishing a civilian review board for the police department, then-superintendent Nichols argued vehemently that the department must have the right to oversee its own affairs.14 Indeed it was Nichols’s vocal protection of the police department in the face of mounting community criticism that made him a natural to become the city police commissioner in 1969. And in turn, Nichols’s no-nonsense approach to the maintenance of law and order led him, personally, to create the highly controversial STRESS unit in January 1971. Even though Nichols had never run for political office, and despite the widespread unpopularity of his STRESS unit with the black community of the city, the Detroit News opined on October 8,1973 that “if white voters follow their usual pattern of higher turnout than black voters . .. Nichols will be the next tenant in the Manoogian Mansion.”15 In fact, the Detroit media overestimated how easy a Nichols victory would be, as the well-liked white liberal president of Detroit’s City Council, Mel Ravitz, was a top mayoral contender as well.16
In August 1973, the Detroit News reported that Nichols and Ravitz, not Young, were leading in the mayoral field.17 Ravitz was very popular, particularly with white liberals from the Cavanagh days, because his election strategy was to “put together a coalition of white and black votes” rather than appeal to one or the other.18 According to Ravitz, “if this election brings us a mayor who is supportive of only a segment of the community—any segment—then heaven help Detroit. . . because the next four years will be spent in further polarization.”19 This message resonated loudly within powerful liberal institutions, such as the Detroit AFL-CIO, the Detroit Association of Fire Fighters, and AFSCME Council 77, each of which chose to endorse Ravitz in the primary.
Surprising many, however, Ravitz came in third, behind Nichols and Young in the September primary, despite the labor endorsements.20 As the Detroit News put it, “Ravitz’s popularity is straining under the weight of the uncertainty and the desire by voters to elect a black candidate.”21 In rejecting Ravitz, black voters made it clear that they still were highly suspicious of white liberals, as they had so recently lost faith in whites’ ability to represent them in the Democratic party. In voting for Young, however, black Detroiters had sent the equally strong message that they had not rejected liberalism per se but would now insist that a black liberal mayor be at the helm. In this primary, the conservative white voters had made it just as clear that they still opposed a liberal mayor of any color running their city.
Indicating the complex intersections of race and politics in the Motor City by 1973, according to a Detroit News poll, Young received 77 percent of the black vote and 15 percent of the white, while Nichols received 13 percent of the black vote and 75 percent of the white. In yet another Detroit News poll, Young received 80 percent of the black vote and 21 percent of the white, while Nichols received 9 percent of the black vote and 69 percent of the white.22 In the primary itself, Nichols received 96,655 votes to Young’s 68,075. In citing such figures, however, Detroit’s media had overlooked the fact that Ravitz also had done quite well in the primary, receiving 52,527 votes.23 By turning out in large numbers for Ravitz, white liberals made it clear that they were still committed to running the city in the Cavanagh tradition. Indeed, after their candidate was defeated in the primary, Ravitz voters swung into the Young camp, as their only alternative at that point was Nichols, whom they considered out of the question.
As the Young and Nichols campaigns unfolded after the September primary, it was Young who most defined the election issues. Although Young campaigned for housing reform, educational reform, and other issues that long had been central to blacks and progressive whites alike, his primary pledge to Detroiters was that he would create a “people’s police department.”24 According to the Detroit Commission on Community Relations (CCR), so little progress had been made in reforming the DPD because of “evasions in the communication of information by police,” and Young was determined to rid the city of such recalcitrant law enforcement personnel.25
As a result of Young going public with his police-reform message, before long, police-community relations in Detroit had become the central issue for both candidates. By making law enforcement a campaign focus, Young ran the risk that Nichols would use the bogeyman of escalating “black crime” and would exploit the pervasive argument that such crime must be combated by a stronger police force. In a surprising move, however, it was Young who went on the offensive with regard to crime, leaving Nichols in the curious position of having to argue that Detroit really was not that dangerous. Young challenged Nichols to explain why the level of crime in Detroit was so high, which forced Nichols to defend his own track record as police commissioner. In response, Nichols maintained that “Detroit had been controlling crime and that it had dropped over the last years,”26 which, ironically, meant that the law enforcement candidate was the one arguing against the popular conservative preoccupation with urban crime. As Nichols told voters, “most of the murders recorded in Detroit are of the type—justifiable homicide and violence among families and friends inside their homes—that could not have been prevented by police, regardless of what they did.”27 When Young pointed to Detroit’s high crime figures to argue that the existing law enforcement system was ineffective, he stole Nichols’s thunder.28 Again ironically, Young had capitalized on crime statistics that had been artificially inflated by the police department itself during a vigorous bid, years earlier, for more federal funding.29 Nevertheless, armed with these figures, Young persuaded many voters on the fence that, while STRESS had contributed immeasurably to the city’s racial tensions, it had not solved its crime problem.30
Still as election day approached, the outcome remained quite difficult to predict. Both Young’s and Nichols’ chances depended on how many blacks turned out to vote, on how many liberal whites would in fact vote for Young, and on how many black votes Nichols could win from Young. Significantly, in the September primary, Young had won fewer white votes than had black candidate Austin in the 1969 race which did not bode very well for his chances. On the other hand, Nichols could not rely solely on there being more registered white voters in the city than black to secure his bid for power as his predecessor Gribbs had done. In fact, by election day, the city had 79,624 more registered voters than in 1969 when voters put Gribbs into office and the bulk of these new registrants were African American.31
On November 7, 1973, tensions ran high as voters went to the polls. Detroiters waited anxiously for the votes to be tabulated because they knew that this election would change the city forever. When the final ballots were tallied, Young became Detroit’s first black mayor, with 233,674 votes to Nichols’s 216,933.32 Significantly, however, because Young had won by a very slim margin, he would face many critics from the moment he took office.
Although Young was victorious because he had put “together a coalition of blacks, unions, and white liberals,” the fact remained that the city’s racially conservative whites had backed Nichols and were vehemently against a liberal, let alone a black liberal, mayor.33 Even many pro-Young voters soon found his victory bittersweet. According to radical Detroiters like Gene Cunningham, while Young had needed their support to win office, thereafter “the more radical elements were told ‘thanks for your help in getting us here, but we don’t need you now.’ A lot of us were jettisoned.”34 And even some of the white liberals who had thrown their support behind Young came to feel slighted when he took office. Overnight, white liberals lost the bulk of civic power to the black leaders within the liberal coalition.
But of all Young’s critics, white conservatives would prove to be the most troublesome for his administration. As Young prepared to take office on January 6, 1973, he issued “a warning to all dope pushers, rip-off artists and muggers [that] it’s time to leave Detroit. Hit the road!... I don’t give a damn if they’re black or white, if they wear super fly suits or blue suits with silver badges.”35 The city’s criminal element, of course, did not take Young’s victory as its cue to abandon the city, but the city’s white racial conservatives did—at least those with the economic means to flee. And for those financially unable to participate in the post-1973 exodus, “There remain[ed] a virulent racial bias that many believe[d] [to be Young’s] biggest challenge.”36 As one of Nichols’s campaign workers told reporters after Nichols read his concession speech, “The city will go to hell now.”37
Any blame or credit for Young’s victory could not be laid at the doorstep of the UAW. Indeed, the UAW had failed to endorse both Young and Ravitz in the primary as it was expected to do in the summer of 1973. On August 9, at a UAW-CAP (Community Action Program) meeting “marked with controversy” and at which fifty delegates stormed out, the UAW chose to endorse only Ravitz. As Young’s campaign manager, Rob Millender, remarked bitterly, “Changing the Union’s rules had permitted non-Detroit residents to help endorse Detroit’s candidates . . . [and] I think this action tonight was a severe blow to the labor-black coalition we’ve worked for years to build. . . . [T]he UAW seems to think that endorsing five blacks for the [City] council races (out of nine candidates) is some kind of trade for not endorsing Coleman Young.”38
But the reality was that in August 1973, the UAW was far more concerned with events taking place on the shop floors than in defending its decision to endorse Ravitz. No sooner had the dust settled at Chrysler’s Forge plant than the UAW leadership was faced with yet another unauthorized strike at Chrysler’s Mack Avenue stamping plant. But whereas the UAW had been caught offguard in the Jefferson wildcat and had been firm but calm during the Forge wildcat, the Mack strike of August 14 touched a raw nerve in the union leadership, prompting its decision to end work stoppages like this once and for all. By the time the Mack wildcat erupted, union officials had lost any desire they might still have had at Forge to understand the cause of this rash of illegal strikes. And in the Mack wildcat, the union was blinded more than ever by its notion that the dissent in the plant was part of a left-wing conspiracy.
And yet, of the three plants that had recently been plagued by severe labor trouble—Jefferson, Forge, and Mack—Mack was the oldest, dirtiest, and most dangerous plant with the highest number of work-related injuries, and it also had the largest UNC presence. Trouble had been brewing at Mack since at least September 1972, when a die-setter was killed after a bolster plate blew off of a faulty machine, cutting off the top of his head. Then, in early 1973, a woman on the cab-back line had her fingers severed because the machine she was operating had a broken protective guard. On August 4, 1973, a worker in the pressroom lost four fingers because “the automation device that was supposed to remove stock from the press had never been repaired.”39 As had happened in the other auto plants, Mack workers first took their grievances to the union, hoping that it would pressure the company into making their jobs safer. When the grievance procedure did not force management to correct the safety hazards in the plant, however, many on the line turned to UNC publications like the Mack Safety Watchdog, which attacked both the company and the union on the issue of safety and educated workers about the plant’s unsafe conditions.
But workers did not just read the Mack Safety Watchdog and file grievances; they also were willing to initiate work stoppages in areas of the plant that were particularly hazardous or where the speedup was inhumane. In June 1973, just such a walkout occurred after union steward Malcolm Woods had been fired for standing by his worker constituents in a speedup dispute. But even after this wildcat in June, and even with all of the pressure from the UNC, the Mack plant still was known around Detroit as a “hell hole.” On August 10, a group of workers from Mack actually picketed leaders at their Local 212 union hall to let them know that, as union members, they wanted a strike vote to be authorized over safety. Because this also netted them little result, on August 14, workers once again decided to take matters into their own hands.
On that day, shortly after the first shift began at 5 a.m., white autoworker Bill Gilbreth and black autoworker Clinton Smith went into the stubs framewelding department, sat down on the conveyor belt, and deliberately halted production. These two men were members of a tiny leftist organization called the Workers’ Action Movement (WAM). Gilbreth had been fired in an earlier seventeen-person walkout over poor ventilation, and, in shutting down the plant on August 14, he and Smith hoped to demand his reinstatement as well as to call attention to the poor working conditions and intolerable speedup at Mack.40 Even though the political organization that Gilbreth and Smith belonged to had virtually no following in the plant, when they began their sit-down, workers flocked to support them and to protect them from Chrysler’s security guards. Shortly after the sit-down began, two plant guards managed to break through the crowd, and a bloody fight began. Security guards Paul DeVito and Gene Prince ended up in the hospital with their injuries. Captain Prince needed 16 stitches to close a head wound and Captain DeVito sustained bruises to the head, neck and shoulder.41 Meanwhile, the sit-in continued.
By 7 a.m., Chrysler sent home the 2,650 workers from its second shift and called the DPD to come and arrest Gilbreth and Smith. By the time the police arrived, however, so many workers had crowded around the duo that the police were forced to withdraw. One hour later, Gilbreth, Smith, and forty-two other workers, almost all of whom were either members or supporters of the UNC, went to the plant cafeteria to discuss their wildcat strategy. Because many of these striking workers felt that WAM was nothing but an opportunistic group that did not represent them politically, they granted this organization very little role in the strike when the wildcat moved to the cafeteria.42
As the wildcatters gathered in the cafeteria, other Mack workers crowded outside the plant gates. And before long, representatives from the International UAW also arrived on the scene. Doug Fraser told the growing crowd of workers outside the plant that the strikers were simply “agitators” who “represent only a very tiny fraction of the total Chrysler workers in the Detroit area and I advocate a policy of no surrender.”43 He then told reporters that the union had “agreed that these people were not going to take our union and the plants where we represent workers.”44 Because two members of WAM had initiated the wildcat, it was easy for the UAW to discount the protest. Fraser truly believed that “an overwhelming majority of the rank and file just won’t put up with this nonsense.”45
But as some workers remained on strike in the cafeteria, workers outside the plant circulated a leaflet informing the UAW that “it was not WAM or any other organization that caused the struggle, but rather the anger of Mack workers at our unsafe and inhumane working conditions.”46 These workers recognized the danger of the UAW insisting that the strike was the work of a few radicals: “we know why our enemies try to say the whole thing was caused by a few troublemakers. They do this to discredit us. They are trying to hide the fact that it was a genuine worker’s protest against the unbearable conditions in the plant.”47 They reminded those at both Chrysler and UAW headquarters that:
Time and again workers have come to union officials and asked for help with our problems. All we ever hear in return is that we should go back to work and let the officials take care of things. People have been getting fired; conditions have been getting worse—and nobody feels they have anywhere to turn for help. This is what caused the situation at Mack and not a few outside “trouble-makers. ”48
But these words fell on deaf ears. The union leadership had been watching WAM for a while, and it was not inclined to shift its focus now. On June 12, 1973, for example, UAW leader E. J. Morgan had given Irving Bluestone, Ken Bannon, and Doug Fraser a report on WAM, along with copies of their literature.49 During the Mack wildcat, the union refused to concede that, had it not been for conditions in the plant, WAM could not have initiated anything. Indeed, the union did not recognize the significance of the fact that, even more than at Jefferson and Forge, Mack was a UNC stronghold, and thus dissent there was both indigenous and broad-based. But even if it had recognized that the UNC, not WAM or a RUM, held sway at Mack, it would have mattered very little, for UAW officials consistently refused to believe the UNC’s vehement claim that “we are not a political group, nor are we a substitute for a political party.”50 To the horror of Mack workers, the union did not object when the company decided to call in sixty Detroit police officers in full riot gear to forcibly evict the wildcatters from the plant. By the time the police stormed the plant, in a battalion led by Commissioner Nichols himself, there were only fourteen strikers still in the cafeteria. Twenty-eight others had already gone outside to generate support.51 When the DPD set upon the strikers remaining inside the cafeteria, sheer chaos ensued.52 Within minutes, the police had succeeded in evicting the wildcatters, but only a few hours later, they were shocked to see that even though the cafeteria sit-in was over, the Mack wildcat was not.
As Detroit police officers began to leave the scene of the wildcat, the many Mack workers who had been outside the plant descended on their union hall. Once there, a stormy meeting unfolded between union officers and the Mack rank and file. The president of the local, Hank Ghant, pleaded with workers to go back to their jobs and let the union deal with the company on the question of safety. But according to the Detroit News, “during the meeting dissidents and their sympathizers shouted down local and International officers who urged them to return to work, and [they] voted to continue their unauthorized walkout.”53 The meeting ended with the workers vowing to picket the plant the next morning despite the refusal of their union leaders to support them. To UAW officials, the Mack workers were out of control. Because they suspected the political motives of these workers, and because they saw worker actions as part of a conspiracy to disrupt plants all over the city and unseat the UAW, union leaders believed it was now time to end this kind of dissent once and for all.
After the August 15 meeting between the union leaders and the rank and file of Local 212, the UAW International decided to contact union officials from locals all over Detroit to assist in its efforts to end the strike at Mack. The next morning, at 4:30 a.m., one thousand union officials met at the Local 212 union hall and began to map out their strategy for ending the wildcat. With baseball bats, pipes, and an assortment of other weapons in hand, union leaders listened to many an inflammatory speech by their International leaders. For example, Emil Mazey, UAW secretary-treasurer, reportedly told the crowd, “they [the strikers] are a bunch of punks, [and] we are not going to let them destroy everything we’ve built.”54 Then, as dawn broke, the assembled union officials marched in groups of 250 to each of the four Mack gates and began to attack the picketing workers there. Within minutes, the Mack plant became the scene of a bloody fight between UAW leaders and UAW members.55 These union leaders “reportedly chased Gilbreth from the Canfield gate to the parking lot [where they] tackled him and punched him repeatedly until some of his supporters arrived.”56
By early morning on August 16, the UAW had successfully broken the Mack wildcat. The irony that the union itself had physically ended the strike was lost on no one. Editors of the radical paper the Black Voice noted that a UAW “goonsquad” had broken the strike at Mack.57 And Bill Bonds, a newscaster from WXYZ Channel 7, commented publicly that this had been “the first time in the history of the UAW [that] the union mobilized to keep a plant open.”58 After the melee at Mack, the commander of the DPD’s Fifth Precinct was heard telling UAW officials, “I’m glad we’re on the same side.”59 UAW leaders proudly told reporters that they were on call twentyfour hours a day to go to any other auto plant that workers might decide to disrupt.60
Although the events at Mack had greatly shaken the UAW leadership, union leaders were certain that they had acted appropriately. At a September 5 meeting of the UAW’s International Executive Board, Ken Morris spoke directly about the wisdom of the UAW’s decision to keep the Mack plant open.61 A UAW leaflet circulated after the wildcat also made it clear that officials stood firmly behind their actions, and that they were thoroughly persuaded firmly that members of WAM had been behind the entire debacle. As UAW leaders Doug Fraser, Ken Morris, Hank Ghant, Joe Zappa, Bill Marshall, and Steve Despot wrote, “only the strong showing of support by over 1,000 UAW members put a stop to WAMs picketing so [that] any workers who wanted to go to work could do [so]—and they did.”62
Just as the UAW leadership was unapologetic about its victory in 1973, so was the Young administration. Indeed, the tremendous hostility of white racial conservatives that he often endured did not cause Young to waver from the political agenda that he had outlined in his campaign. Young continued to embrace the programmatic agenda of the Great Society while infusing it with even more deliberate measures to promote racial equality. Young knew that voters had elected him precisely because he had long supported many key liberal initiatives. With regard to public aid, for example, Young had gone on record saying that “all welfare assistance should be extended and received AS A MATTER OF SOCIAL RIGHT. I am opposed to any and all efforts to degrade the recipients of public assistance and to their use as forced labor.”63 Indeed while he was a state senator Young was an outspoken supporter of a controversial bill designed to raise benefits to families on ADC.64 Likewise he had made his support of broad-scale integration initiatives equally clear early on in his career. When he supported a Fair Housing Ordinance in Detroit Young argued forcefully that “segregation in the schools can never be eliminated while segregated housing is allowed to exist.”65 Young also played a vital role in enacting Michigan’s abortion law while in the state senate. And, to his critics’ dismay, Young did not waiver from these sixties-style liberal views even when the national political context in which he was trying to promote them grew increasingly inhospitable. Indeed he actively argued that the programmatic agenda of the Great Society, infused with far more deliberate measures to promote racial equality, was still a viable means to improve Detroit.
True to this perspective, once in office, Young decided to tackle the issue most burning among his constituents—deteriorating police-community relations—first by dismantling STRESS and restructuring the force in a more citizen-friendly direction and then by wielding the weapon of integration even when affirmative action was coming under severe attack elsewhere in the country. Young was as angered as his constituents that the DPD’s STRESS unit had initiated four hundred warrantless raids within its previous thirty-three months of operation and had killed twenty-two citizens.66 The fact that STRESS’s most recent violence was aimed at fourteen-year-old Glenn Smith, fifteen-year-old Anthony Moorer, and a woman named Jewel Denice Gant only made Young more determined to put an end to the DPD’s undercover decoy operations.67 Young, whose office now wielded more power as a result of a recent revision of the City Charter, not only eliminated STRESS, but he also called for the establishment of fifty police mini-stations intended to be “open seven days a week, and will have one police officer, one police reservist, an officer trainee, and a citizen on duty [and] . . . each station will have a marked, equipped police car for emergency neighborhood response.”68
By including citizens in his new initiatives to improve police efforts to serve the community, Young was deliberately embracing a liberal strategy for structuring law enforcement that heralded back to the days of Cavanagh’s reformer police commissioner, George Edwards. By 1974, however, Young was well aware that such citizen-oriented law enforcement reforms would only work if the DPD itself was comprised equally of both black and white Detroiters. Thus, immediately after taking office, Young began the process of fully integrating the police force with his Executive Order number 2.69 The mayor justified his integration efforts by noting that, as late as 1972, the 5,558-member force still was only 15 percent nonwhite, and he believed that “when the police department is fully integrated, all segments of the community will have a chance to feel more directly involved in the department because their sons and friends will be a part of the force.”70 Although Young retained white police chief Phillip Tannian, he quickly appointed a new body of police commissioners, three out of four of whom were African American, and eventually Detroit boasted a black police chief as well. Gradually, Young achieved a far more race- and gender-integrated police department than had any mayor before him. By 1981, 1,126 out of 5,013 police officers were African American, and 10 of the 20 police commanders were black as well. Whereas women comprised only 2 percent of the department in 1967, by 1987 they made up a full 20 percent of the force and, in addition, there were three female commanders and a female deputy chief.71
But Young did not rest with integrating the DPD alone. He also paved the way for countless African Americans to become heads of key city agencies and to staff these units in unprecedented numbers. He eventually would also “set a national record for awarding contracts to minority firms.”72 The fact that Young largely succeeded in his attempts to integrate Detroit, and also to bolster several Great Society initiatives for the city’s poor, only affirmed his supporters’ belief that liberalism was a sound political philosophy. Even though the federal government was busily dismantling Great Society programs like Model Cities throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Detroiters’ voting behavior indicates that they still were optimistic about the possibilities embedded within LBJ’s Great Society vision.73
Such optimism was only fueled as Young also embarked on several new projects designed to revitalize the city’s economy and improve its image during his first and second terms. Not only did he build many new parks and recreation centers, and erected both low-income housing units and even a downtown Civic Center, in 1976 he also proudly unveiled a huge hotel, office, and shopping complex on the city’s riverfront. This massive project, architecturally similar to the Peachtree Center in Atlanta, was appropriately named the Renaissance Center. Young intended it to draw both tourists and new businesses into Detroit. He also hoped to make Detroit thrive when, in 1977, he built the Joe Louis Arena and managed to keep Detroit’s hockey team from moving to the suburbs. That same year, Young also purchased Tiger Stadium so that Detroit’s major league baseball team would remain in the inner city.
Unfortunately for the Young administration, and thus for Detroit, the mayor’s ambitious urban renewal projects did not offset the hostility of racially conservative whites. As Wilbur Rich has noted, many such whites “believed that Young would treat them like second-class citizens. This misconception among whites came from the belief that a black mayor cannot be even-handed in his approach to racial issues.”74 Clearly, Young did not remove all whites from positions of power. Not only did whites continue to comprise the majority of the DPD, but in Detroit’s fire department, whites still made up to 90 percent of the highest-ranking uniformed officers and 51 percent of the 1,697 firefighters by the close of the 1980s.75
But as Young’s mayoralty unfolded, conservative white hostility to him and to Detroit only grew. Perhaps not surprisingly, the city’s white police officers were most vocal about their disgust with Young. In May 1975, “close to 1,000 white officers picketed the federal building” when Young’s affirmative action plans for the city were being announced.76 In addition to engaging in such protests, Young’s police officers routinely lampooned and criticized him in the Detroit Police Officers Association publication Tuebor. Even though 90 out of 170 police promotions in 1976 had gone to white officers, the police still despised Young.77 As officers Ron Jones and Ron Sexton had put it even before Young took office, “four years of Coleman Young and the animals would eat the buildings down to their foundations.”78 And when Young did become mayor and then insisted that all Detroit police officers actually live in the city that they policed, Officer Carl Parsell wrote, “I guess what the ol’ boy means is that if you work in a sewer, you have to ‘reside’ in a sewer.”79
But these white police officers were not the only ones hostile to living in Detroit after it came under black leadership. As Young began a second term as mayor, whites’ hostility to his rule had escalated to such a degree that their ongoing exodus from the city that had begun slowly in the 1950s became a virtual stampede in the 1970s and early 1980s.80 According to data collected by the city, whereas Detroit had 891,000 whites in 1969, by 1976, when Young was proudly unveiling his Renaissance Center, only 543,000 remained.81 Reflecting the sentiments behind such flight, Theodore J. Popwitz argued in a letter to the Detroit Free Press that “Mayor Young has polarized the city to a greater degree of racism than was displayed in the two race riots the city has experienced.”82 As a result of the massive out-migration of urban whites, between 1970 and 1990, the percentage of blacks in Detroit rose from 44.5 percent to 78.4 percent, giving the Motor City one of the largest African American populations in the urban North.83
In time, the conservative whites who remained in Detroit, and the many more who had left, came to blame Young for every city problem and to accuse him of everything from reverse discrimination to corruption to downright poor manners and slovenly behavior. He soon tired of such criticism, which to him was clearly born of racist stereotyping. One popular charge was that Young was uncivilized and could not even keep the mayor’s mansion presentable. This rumor particularly rankled Young, and he decided to defend himself publicly. In an interview with the Detroit Free Press, Young referred directly to the Manoogian Mansion comment and said, “I do resent though the implications that I didn’t keep that place up. We spent over one million on it in that last couple of years.”84 When the local media later implied that Young was a corrupt mayor, he pointed out that the FBI had continuously kept close tabs on him, and, if he was doing anything illegal, they would more than happily have exposed that fact. The most prevalent criticism that Young faced, however, was that he was a reverse racist. To this, he always responded that his attempts to improve opportunities for urban blacks clearly had not altered the fact that whites still held the bulk of economic power in Detroit. Thus, he maintained, the charge of reverse racism was nothing short of absurd: “I view racism not as a two-way street. I think racism is a system of oppression. I don’t [think] Black folks are oppressive to anybody, so I don’t consider that Blacks are capable of racism.”85 Young’s retorts, however, peppered as they often were with four-letter words and direct jabs at the suburbs, did not help his cause.
In fact, nothing Young ever said could stem the tide of white flight, and the effect of this exodus was to bring severe economic distress to Detroit. When Detroit lost much of its white population, it also lost a significant portion of its economic base. Ironically, the city’s poorest whites, those who had voted in record numbers for Nichols, were not always able to flee. As a researcher of Detroit’s 1973 election, Michael Soules, found, “indeed, the only areas that seem to be resistant to white flight were the most pro-Nichols neighborhoods, like the old Italian Precincts of District 4, district 6 on the Northeast side, and, interestingly, the poorer pro-Nichols areas of Southwest Detroit (Districts 25 and 26).”86 Just as ironically, many middle-class whites who had originally supported Young chose to leave the city within his first or second term in office. While some of these whites decided to leave because they grew uncomfortable with living in an increasingly black city, others left when it became clear how badly Detroit was suffering economically as compared with its suburban neighbors.
But whatever motivated middle-class whites to flee, their exodus only contributed to Detroit’s economic malaise. As urban planning scholar June Manning Thomas has argued, “a white family did not have to be ‘racist’ to participate in a racist process.”87 According to social geographers Bryan Thompson and Robert Sinclair, when white Detroiters left the inner city, for whatever reason, they took with them “the majority of the important service, professional, and leadership activities of the Detroit Metropolitan system.”88 Soon it was no longer inner-city Detroit, but the surrounding suburbs, that housed the core of the region’s auto industry. And, in time, industry foremen, supervisors, inspectors, and white workers no longer called Detroit their home. Increasingly, they moved to metro-area suburbs with few, if any, black residents.89
Whereas Detroit became more impoverished after 1973, neighboring Oakland County had become “the county with the nation’s highest average household-effective buying income.”90 And by 1980, the median income in Detroit was $17,033, whereas in the bordering Wayne County suburb of Grosse Pointe Woods it was $35,673.91 That same year, 27 percent of blacks and 6.8 percent of whites in the city were receiving some type of public assistance, and 25 percent of blacks and 7 percent of whites lived below the poverty level.92 By 1983, “the $11,685 gap in average household income between the overall region of Metropolitan Detroit ($33,241) and Detroit City ($21,556) ... was the widest of the 33 largest metropolitan areas in the United States.”93
To be sure, the urban renaissance of which Mayor Young and his supporters had dreamed was not thwarted simply by white flight. The fact that the nation as a whole was heading into a major economic recession when Young took office also took its toll on Detroit’s long-term economic health. As a result of this national downturn, in 1975 Detroit experienced “its worst fiscal crisis since the Great Depression.”94 That year, the city had to lay off more than 4,000 employees, and, in time, Chrysler’s Jefferson Avenue plant (one of the city’s largest factories) closed its doors. By 1977, the city had lost 56,400 jobs, and Detroiters clearly were suffering.95 As Young put it, “no city in America has been harder hit by the national economic recession. Detroit’s unemployment rate is three times the national average.”96 Indeed, black unemployment had reached a full 25 percent as Young began his third term.97 Young wondered time and again, as labor scholar Martin Glaberman has also questioned, “how could a mayor prevent all the Chrysler plants in the city from going down, the economy from going down, the auto industry from going down?”98
But, of course, how Young chose to address the city’s economic downturn was vitally important. Whereas city radicals had succeeded in pushing liberals toward adopting more aggressive and uncompromising approaches to achieving greater racial equality during the previous decade, they had not persuaded these liberals that the structural roots of economic inequality also indicated the need for more radical corrective measures. With the ascendancy of black liberals in Detroit, any voice suggesting serious limitations of a War on Poverty approach to eliminating economic inequality was drowned out by a renewed commitment to this liberal strategy for addressing economic problems. Detroit’s problem, however, was that with dwindling federal dollars, even an intense commitment to a liberal War on Poverty was difficult to act on. As Mel Ravitz argued years later, “we never really had a War on Poverty; it was more of a skirmish.”99
Ultimately, when faced with the exodus of capital from his city, Mayor Young did not actively question the power that capital wielded over the wellbeing of Detroit’s citizenry. Rather, he tried to woo industry leaders back to the Motor City with many corporate welfare enticements that cost Detroiters dearly. In 1980-81, for example, he offered $200 million in tax abatements and other relocation incentives to General Motors so that it would build a new plant in Detroit’s Poletown neighborhood. He offered Chrysler a similar incentive package so that it would build a new Jefferson Avenue plant.
The problem for Detroiters, however, was that these new facilities provided but a fraction of the jobs the companies had promised. Of the 6,000 jobs GM promised at its new Poletown plant, only 3,700 materialized. Ironically, even if the Poletown plant would have hired the 6,000 workers expected, given the debt that the city had gone into to attract these jobs, each position effectively would have cost the city between $40,000 and $50,000.100 And to add insult to injury, after GM opened the Poletown facility, it then went on to close two other local plants, thus throwing “thousands of other workers” out of a job.101 As Mel Ravitz commented in 1988, “the large corporations have directly benefited from these economic subsidies and political strokings and have eliminated over 50,000 jobs.”102
But while Young’s traditionally liberal approach to economic crisis may not have been the medicine needed to cure Detroit’s ills, neither his Keynesian strategy of jump-starting capitalism nor the continuing national economic downturn can fully explain the devastation that befell the Motor City.103 In no American city did urban politicians question the fundamental tenets of capitalism, and, of course, every major industrial city experienced the recession of the 1970s. But few urban centers became as economically distressed as Detroit. Clearly, it was when Detroit lost its white population, tax base, and political support, that its future was doomed.104 As Manning Thomas has noted, it was “racial estrangement [that] kept the region fragmented and alienated. This context of alienation counteracted whatever improvement programs the city initiated.”105 Not coincidentally, while Detroit had lost 56,400 jobs by 1977, the suburbs had gained 36,500 jobs.106 As the city grew poorer, its social deterioration escalated, setting in motion a vicious cycle of greater white antipathy toward the inner city and, in turn, greater social malaise. As the longtime NAACP leader and former deputy superintendent of the Detroit public schools system, Arthur Johnson, complained bitterly in 1990, “whites don’t know a god damned thing about what’s gone wrong here. ... It’s Apartheid. They rape the city and then they come and say, ‘look what these niggers did to the city’ as if they were guiltless.”107
Not all whites, of course, fit this profile. Just as white Detroit had been divided politically before Young took office, so it was after his election. As Detroit Free Press reporter Bill McGraw has noted, “white Detroiters are impossible to pigeon hole. . .. [S]ome are rich, some are poor. Some white Detroiters hate the city, seethe at the perceived insults of the black majority and would leave if they could. But many other whites are among the city’s biggest supporters and could not imagine living anywhere else.”108 Even Arthur Johnson had to concede in 1994 that “as much as people want to communicate the image of Detroit as a Black city, there are more whites living in Detroit than any other city in Michigan . . . and most of them are here Lecause they want to be here, just like the middle-class Black people.”109 And indeed, this was the case. While numbers of whites still lived in the city because they felt economically imprisoned there, other whites who stayed did so either because they remained loyal to Young or because they at least remained committed to the dream of biracial coexistence. As white Detroiter Morris Gleicher put it, “I had greater hopes, as did all my friends, for what [Young] would do in this city.... He would generate activity.... [H]e would raise the level of understanding, not only of the Black community, but of the whole city.”110 Whereas to white Detroiter Moira Kennedy, living in the Motor City “was almost a political statement. I did not want to live and raise my kids in white suburbia.”111 And to white city resident Mary Sue Shottenfels, “it was such a warm, wonderful experience ... to live in an integrated neighborhood, trying to make it work here, trying to be a part of the city, trying not to walk away.” As she felt compelled to note, “this is not an all-black city.”112
Detroit was, however, a mostly black city by 1985, and despite the social and economic deterioration it suffered between 1974 and 1985, the black community there remained fiercely loyal to Young. Although the Motor City was clearly losing ground in its War on Poverty every year that Young held office, Detroit’s blacks and progressive whites could point to genuine gains in racial equality. In the end, Detroiters gauged the success of their black-led liberal leadership primarily in racial, rather than economic, terms. The mayor’s real appeal was best summed up by the Detroit chapter of the National Negro Labor Council (NNLC) when it placed him firmly in the context of a broader struggle for African American equality. According to the NNLC, Young “‘damned the odds,’ he took up the cudgels, the causes, and the confrontations of those martyred souls of the past... . The torch that they carried to guide us through the dark tunnels of slavery and injustice has been taken from their fallen hands by Coleman A. Young to guide us to freedom and equality.”113
Coleman A. Young giving his second inaugural speech, January 1, 1978. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.
Detroit’s liberals and even some of its radicals, such as Ken Cockrel, benefited from the mayor’s determination to place blacks in positions of civic authority. In 1977, Cockrel won a seat on the City Council, running as a Marxist. By that year, Cockrel was still critical of black liberals like Young, but he had concluded that they must be challenged in their own arenas of power. As he put it in 1980, “the municipal corporation, as a legal entity established to represent people, exercises decisive control over the allocation of a substantial amount of money and human resources ... and that’s objectively a piece of power that we perceive as being of great value to those concerned about transforming the relations of production in society.”114
The leadership presence of advocates like Young and Cockrel in post-1973 Detroit made blacks and progressive whites hopeful about their future. Specifically it raised the expectation that even past civic injustices might now be rectified. And Detroiters were not disappointed on this score. In 1974, for example, city officials finally began to investigate the rumor that the DPD had for years been directly involved in the city’s drug trade. Although such a possibility had been discounted in 1972, when the issue was raised by events such as the Rochester Street massacre and by men like Hayward Brown, two years later, Detroit’s newly elected and appointed officials actually did begin to look into the allegation that STRESS officers were paid hush money by local drug dealers to the tune of $1,500 per month, which they then would give to officers higher up in the DPD.115 Also, in 1975, the family of Clarence Manning Jr., the young man who had been killed by STRESS officers in 1971, won damages totaling $180,000 from the city. And, in the following year, the family of Durwood Foshee, who had been killed in his bed during the DPD manhunt of 1973, was awarded $1.4 million for pain and suffering.116
Sadly, for Detroit’s autoworkers, finding such a silver lining in the cloud of economic devastation that soon also engulfed their industry was much more difficult. The fact was that Detroit’s workers wielded very little power after their 1973 showdown with the UAW. It was telling, for example, that in the last bargaining session between the UAW and Chrysler before the national recession hit the auto industry full scale, workers were appalled by the contract that their union ultimately presented to them but felt powerless to reject it. According to the UNC, “Chrysler workers did not win a single improvement on working conditions. . . . [W]e won no protection on speed up ... [and] the new contract has no new provisions which will end racial harassment and discrimination in upgrading and hiring.”117 But when UNC leaders advised workers to “vote NO on this contract” and tried to organize “mass picketing at Solidarity House to protest the sell-out 1973 agreement,” few joined their protest.118
Although the UNC still agitated on the shop floors well into the next decade, by 1974, its power base had eroded noticeably. Workers in Detroit had been taught in the most graphic way that shop-floor dissent now would be met not only with serious opposition from the company, but also from their union—even when that dissent was broad-based and clearly fueled by plant problems not politics. And from 1974 to 1980, while labor relations in Detroit were indeed peaceful, workers watched helplessly as their labor movement weakened dramatically.
Detroit’s liberal labor leaders were slow to comprehend their worsening situation. When the UAW leadership had gone to the bargaining table in 1973 with Chrysler, it was so relieved that workplace dissent was finally in check, that it once again had firm control over its inner-city members, and that labor-management relations finally had stabilized, it could see little else.119 The union hoped, of course, that, with order restored on the shop floor, the 1970s could be a decade of greater membership gains, and thus that labor’s power in the American economy would rise accordingly. But not only had the contract of 1973 turned out to be a disappointment; when the brewing national recession finally hit Detroit with a vengeance in 1974, the UAW found itself scrambling merely to maintain what it had already won for its constituency. The idea of expanding postwar benefits soon seemed absurd, because, in addition to the barrier created by the economic downturn, in many ways the union had become management’s “partner.” Certainly the UAW had moved dangerously close to the company years earlier when it broke the back of shop-floor dissent. But some workers actually accused labor leaders of also having made backroom deals with company officials in order to cement their new cooperative alliance. Specifically it was a lawsuit filed by workers against both the company and the union regarding their actions after the 1973 Forge wildcat that made this charge.
During the 1973 Forge wildcat, Chrysler had fired fifteen workers. At the bargaining table that fall, the company agreed to rehire twelve of the fifteen in exchange for the UAW’s ratification of the local bargaining agreement. Before the agreement was ratified, however, the three Forge workers who remained jobless—Karl Williams, Jerome Scott, and Thomas Stepanski—had already filed grievances for reinstatement with their committeeman, Thornton Jackson. Jackson dutifully wrote grievances demanding that the trio “be reinstated and paid all lost time and to be made whole,”120 but the company denied them. As part of its justification for keeping Williams out, Chrysler argued that, “On 8/9/73, at approximately 6:50am, Karl Williams was observed at the Fluber West Gate with another employee diverting any traffic which attempted to enter. When he was approached by a process server of the World Investigations and Security, Inc., Karl Williams assaulted the server by striking him with his fist.”121 And regarding Thomas Stepanski, Chrysler maintained that, “On 8/8/73, T. Stepanski was observed at the main entrance to the Detroit Forge plant blocking traffic and telling other employees not to go into the plant because ‘it is a pig pen and it was an unsafe plant to work in.’”122
After Chrysler denied the worker grievances, their fate was placed into the hands of labor arbitrator Gabriel Alexander.123 In the arbitration hearing that followed, workers hoped that Alexander would see that “the grievants did not cause the plant to be shut down. ... Rather the stoppage that did occur was a spontaneous reaction on the part of employees to the unhealthy and unsafe conditions in the plant.”124 Chrysler, on the other hand, forcefully alleged that the three fired workers, with Scott as the primary spokesman, had started the illegal wildcat when they told workers to “‘Go Home, there is no work today, we are on a wildcat. We are closing the fucking place down.’ ”125
Ultimately, Alexander sided with Chrysler in this matter. He wrote in his decision that he was “constrained to deny the grievances [because] I am satisfied that grievants were active leaders of the stoppage, and were not mere participants.”126 After Alexander ruled against their reinstatement, Williams, Scott, and Stepanski formed a defense committee that pressured the union to take up their cause again. When it became clear that union leaders considered the matter closed, the fired workers went to civil court, where they filed a lawsuit against both Chrysler and the UAW leadership for allegedly engaging in a “conspiracy, agreement, understanding, plan, design, or scheme,” which resulted in the permanent firing based on their race and political convictions.127 Because all of them had been members of the Forge plant RUM, Williams, Scott, and Stepanski suspected that this was the real reason why each remained fired. Even though the UAW had taken their case all the way to the arbitration level, the trio nevertheless felt that union leaders had not argued their discharge case strenuously enough. Specifically, the fired workers felt that if the union was truly committed to their case, it would have tried to secure their reinstatement by invoking Section 502 of the National Labor Relations Act regarding a worker’s right to refuse unsafe work.128
As the civic trial unfolded, deposition and trial testimony only fueled these workers’ conviction that UAW officials had betrayed them. As they found out, Chrysler’s original informal offer to the UAW leadership had actually been to reinstate the twelve fired Forge workers “plus plaintiff Karl Williams, if the union would drop its grievances of plaintiffs Scott and Stepanski.”129 And after Chrysler made this offer to the UAW, top union leaders met on October 9, 1973, to discuss the proposal in the conference room of the Detroit Forge plant. Present at this meeting was a mix of both International and local union leaders, including Anthony Canole, George Merrelli, Wally Wallers, Evans Ray, Dennis Baliki, A1 Howe, Raymond Turner, and Thorton Jackson.130 According to the testimony of Local 47’s recording secretary, Dennis Baliki, Canole reported that he had agreed with Virgil Anderson of Chrysler’s Corporate Labor Relations Division that ten of the fifteen workers fired should return after the ratification of the local agreement, three of the fifteen should return two weeks later, and that the union should withdraw the grievances of Scott and Stepanski.131 At this point, Canole’s statement was greeted with shouts of “no!”132 According to Baliki, “ A1 Howe starts mentioning that: Not Carl Williams. We don’t want that Communist back,” and “A1 Howe said he’s not going to have his kids growing up under Communism.”133 Because it soon became clear that there was serious disagreement about whether the union should accept the company’s proposal to let Williams come back to work, those present decided that a vote should be taken. As Baliki testified, “Raymond Turner, Thornton Jackson and Al Howe voted no, Carl Williams shouldn’t return to work. Evens Ray, Sr., Robert Evans, myself Dennis Baliki voted he should be returned to work. That left it a split vote. Leon Klea [president of Local 47] says, well, it’s my place to break the tie, And he voted no, Carl Williams shouldn’t be returned to work.”134
Although the plaintiffs did not win their case, the incidents reported during the course of it were nevertheless extraordinary. Of course, as with any of the trials that took place in postwar Detroit, one cannot ascertain the veracity of the testimony given. But if what deponent Baliki said under oath was truthful, then the UAW leadership consciously had chosen not to bring one of its own members back into the plant, even after the company had agreed to do so. In effect, the UAW leaders’ desire to gain control of its constituency, to save the union from “outside” destructive elements like the black nationalist and communist Left, and to reinstate peace on the shop floor rendered them even more determined than the company to keep black militant workers out of the plant. As Baliki put it when questioned why the union leadership had acted as it did,
A: I felt they thought he [Williams] would have been a political threat, if he was to come back to work and probably be held in high esteem . . . and possibly have been a political threat to one of the committeemen.
Q: By running for office?
A:Yes.135
In time, however, the UAW found that management was a far greater threat to its power than militant workers like Williams. Only two years after the three workers’ lawsuit, and only six years after the ugly events at Mack, the UAW and Chrysler once again were hammering out an agreement. In November 1979, Chrysler forced the UAW to agree to $203 million in wage and benefits concessions and another $100 million in deferred pension plan payments. In these negotiations, the union also agreed to a six-month wage freeze and surrendered six paid holidays.136 The following year, the UAW was forced to give up more paid holidays, and by 1981, the union accepted Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca’s demand of an additional spate of concessions totaling $673 million, including a wage cut of $1.15 per hour and a loss of three more paid days off.137 By December 1982, the UAW had nearly 350,000 fewer production workers to represent than it had in December 1978, owing to a series of inner-city plant closings and company layoffs.138 The union did get something in return for its concessions to the company—a plethora of joint union-management committees and shop-floor programs—but in the end it paid dearly for this new, less combative moment in labor relations.139
Like the woes that befell the Young administration between 1973 and 1980, the problems faced by the UAW leadership obviously had much to do with the economic recession that was plaguing the entire country. The oil price increases of 1973 (which sparked an economic downturn in 1974), as well as a noticeable rise in foreign competition, had a devastating impact on auto companies. By 1980, the Big Three automakers (Chrysler, General Motors, and Ford) had posted staggering combined losses, and by 1989, their share of the world’s car market had declined to 24 percent.140 While Chrysler finally made money in 1976 and 1977, it still was recovering from its tremendous losses in 1974 and 1975, and then it suffered another economic plunge in 1978 and 1979. Chrysler’s financial troubles were so severe in 1979 that, with the help of President Jimmy Carter, Congress, and the UAW, it received $1.5 billion in credits from the U.S. government and secured passage of the Chrysler Loan Guarantee Act. The Chrysler bailout of 1979-80 (and the fact that foreign producers were gaining ever larger share of the car market) in turn justified management’s call for even more concessions from the UAW.
In many respects, the UAW had little choice but to agree to cuts in wages and benefits as the 1980s dawned. But it is vital to recognize that the union had begun to cooperate with Chrysler long before the company fell on hard times, and thus it had severely undermined its long-term bargaining strength. When the UAW leadership chose to side with Chrysler during the tumultuous days of 1973, it raised the company’s expectation of even greater labor-management cooperation thereafter. In addition, because the UAW leadership had actively squelched the militancy of its own membership in 1973, by the time labor-management “cooperation” began to mean management’s encroachment on union power, the UAW was in no position to resist the onslaught. As historian Steve Jefferys has argued, “by 1981 it was clear that the International Union would no longer place other than consultative restraints on companywide managerial authority,” and by that year, the UAW had abandoned “any pretense that it could harness whatever radical energy the late 1960s and early 1970s had possessed to a revival of unionism.”141
In lieu of trying to resurrect such militancy, UAW leaders instead tried to reverse the hardship that labor was enduring in their own legislative way. Union leader Mark Stepp, for example, testified before the House Committee on Labor Standards to encourage passage of “comprehensive legislation that would stop ‘the injustice of making workers and communities the victims’ of economic dislocation that came from factory shut downs.”142 As the 1980s began, however, scores of union members already had lost their jobs, and all the legislation in the world could not change this. According to the UAW’s public relations staff, by the spring of 1979, the total union membership of the Big Three automakers was 840,000, as compared with its high of 1,530,870 members in 1969.143 By December 17, 1979, 115,000 Big Three employees were on indefinite layoff, and 70,000 were on temporary layoff, while by February 8, 1980, 174,000 were on indefinite lay off, with 37,325 on temporary layoff.144 By April 4,1980, a total of 211,000 Big Three workers were laid off, and by May 2, 1980, that number had climbed to 266,582.145 By May 16,1980, 304,144 workers at Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors were unemployed.146 Amazingly, by 1982 the UAW had only 477,000 auto members—a shocking low for this vital American union.147 And even for those workers still in the UAW, life was hardly rosy. By the mid-1980s, it wasn’t just the economically troubled Chrysler that had taken advantage of the UAW’s new cooperative posture and weakened bargaining position; Ford and General Motors had forced the union to grant sweeping concessions as well.
By 1985, Detroit’s auto plants were calmer than they had been during any period in their history. Union leaders remained glad that the political crisis that had engulfed shop floors between 1967 and 1973 was over, but as workers well knew, the price leaders had paid for labor movement control was extremely high. Labor liberals were firmly in control of the UAW, but that union now was but a shadow of its former self. Likewise, by 1985, the Motor City itself was also calmer than it had been in decades. And civic liberals were pleased that the crisis that had engulfed city streets between 1967 and 1973 had been resolved in their favor. But, of course, the price that they had paid for political control was high as well. To be sure, liberals were now firmly in charge of the inner city and, since they were overwhelmingly African American, this was indeed an historic accomplishment. But sadly these black liberals had come to lead a city that was increasingly isolated and economically eviscerated.