5: Workers, Officials, and the Escalating War for Detroit’s Labor Future

It seems kinda strange that a relatively small group of black workers can put such huge outfits as these in a dither, especially since both the companies and the UAW are thoroughly experienced infighters, but these DRUM, FRUM, ELRUM, JEFFRUM and all the rest of the RUMs have these people all shook up.1

As Detroit became increasingly conflict-ridden after its urban uprising in 1967, James Johnson Jr. was finally realizing his dream of attaining a job in an auto plant. On May 8, 1968, Johnson began working at Chrysler’s Eldon Avenue gear and axle plant, and although he had applied for the position of janitor,2 Chrysler hired him to be a conveyor loader, making $3.10 an hour.3 Chrysler was running three shifts around the clock, and it needed as many unskilled line workers as it could get.

Johnson’s main task at Eldon Avenue was to feed six brake shoes a minute into a 380-degree oven while standing no farther than six to eight feet away from the inferno.4 This was one of the most despised jobs at the plant, and once again all of the workers performing it were black.5 According to Johnson’s employee medical records, the intense heat of this work site took a toll on his health. As company doctors reported on August 20, 1968, Johnson “allege[d] nausea and chest pains from heat,” and on August 21, 1968, he again “allege[d] nausea from heat ... [and] state[d] he thinks [the] chest pain is strain from work.”6

Much to his relief, in January 1969, Chrysler moved Johnson from the oven line to the cement room, where he began making over $3.40 an hour. Johnson knew that this was a real promotion, not only because of his increase in pay, but also because his six co-workers now were white. According to Chrysler auditor Don Thomas, “the cement room was very nice and cool in the summer. . . . The cement job is the best.”7 Everything seemed to be looking up for Johnson. He was finally in a job that he could tolerate, he was able to start saving for the house that he had always wanted to buy, and he was even training in his spare time for the respected position of job setter, thanks to a skilled worker named Robert Baynes.

But despite being promoted to the cement room, things were far from ideal for Johnson. As he later alleged, his foreman, Bernard Owiesny, routinely “used abusive, insulting and degrading racial slurs toward [him] such as calling him ‘nigger’ and ‘boy’ and saying such things as ‘You niggers can’t catch on to nothing’ and ‘Do this right now boy and I mean right now boy.’”8 As a result of such treatment, Johnson was very much on edge at his workplace. Regardless of what good things happened to him, such as getting a promotion, he always had to endure racial slurs and poor treatment from management. Like other black workers on Chrysler's shop floors, he was getting more and more frustrated and eventually would rebel.

During the summer of 1967, the shop floors of Detroit’s auto plants strongly resembled the city’s riot zones. Indeed, because of the amount of violence erupting in city plants, and because the violence there was equally rooted in disappointments with the strategies of liberal leaders, Detroit’s labor arena soon experienced the same political polarization as the city. Just as city leaders felt vulnerable to grassroots frustration after 1967, so did labor leaders. Also, as had happened in the city, liberals’ legitimacy in the labor movement had eroded among both whites and blacks, which meant that the political challenge brewing in the plants had a particularly threatening character. But despite the rising crescendo of dissident voices on the shop floor, like their civic counterparts the labor liberals stuck steadfastly to their pre-1967 plans for improving plant life—which only served to fuel greater rank-and-file opposition to their rule.

But this is where the similarities between the civic and labor liberals ended. Whereas city liberals at least initially attempted to assuage the black militants gaining ground after 1967, and only became outwardly hostile to them when the power pendulum began to swing leftward, labor leaders consistently made discrediting and eliminating shop-floor revolutionaries their central and unwavering goal. And yet, just as police brutality continued to fuel revolution and counterrevolutionin the city, so did foreman abuses and the ever-deteriorating working conditions undermine any attempt on the part of these union officials to quell shop-floor dissent. Like the city proper, Detroit’s auto plants became a war zone between 1967 and 1972 as new political power bases began vying for control. In this case also no obvious victor was yet in sight.

* * * *

Ironically, the 1967 Detroit rebellion had handed union leaders a new opportunity to improve life for the city’s African American workers. After extinguishing rebellion fires, the Cavanagh administration subsequently called on urban employers to create new, better, and more numerous jobs for the discontented. Because both city and federal officials had also decided that chronic black unemployment was one of the key factors precipitating the upheaval, they, too, turned to companies like Chrysler and demanded a renewed commitment to hiring minorities. On July 21, 1970, the Detroit Chamber of Commerce reported that it “ha[d] obtained a commitment for 250 jobs in the near future with the automotive industry.”9 Chrysler not only agreed to hire more blacks, but it also participated in “the operation of a Chrysler and UAW federally supported job-training program”10 and received additional incentives from the federal government to hire minorities. Union leaders were pleased to see that such governmental pressure to hire minorities in Detroit soon resulted in many new union jobs for black Detroiters. Indeed, by 1971, 60 percent of Chrysler’s workforce at Dodge Main plant was black.11 And, by the mid-1970s, blacks represented almost 70 percent of the workers on the urban assembly lines of other auto companies as well.12

Although more union jobs was a step in a positive direction, liberal leaders in both the UAW and the TULC knew that they would have to be ever vigilant to ensure that such jobs were both safe and well-paid for black workers. Of course, this would be difficult to accomplish because, even in the city’s largely black plants, almost every person with the power to see to this remained white. Indeed, so little progress had been made in desegregating the most desirable positions within Detroit’s auto industry that, in December 1969, UAW leader Douglas Fraser noted, “after all this effort, we only had a miserable percentage of 4.4 percent blacks in [the] skilled trades.”13

By 1969, TULC officials were even more cognizant of the racial inequities still plaguing Chrysler’s plants than were UAW leaders. While the TULC was proud that there was finally a black presence on the union’s International Executive Board (IEB), and while it was gratified to see that a number of UAW locals now had blacks in leadership positions, it also had to concede that the number of African American union leaders lagged well behind the overall percentage of black workers in the UAW. But both the TULC and the UAW still believed that the way to achieve greater equality in the union and on the shop floors was to work through the existing procedures for dispute resolution—namely, the grievance procedure. Therefore, leaders dealt with racial discrimination by telling black workers to continue to file complaints when they faced offending managers, as well as to run for positions of influence within the union. TULC leaders also assured these workers that, meanwhile, they would continue to levy pressure on the International UAW to bring more African Americans into its fold.

The problem for the TULC and the UAW alike was that, by 1967, many black line workers had become too angry to follow such prescriptions for change. Not only did shop-floor violence escalate after that year, but it also increasingly stemmed from incidents of racial harassment. For example, in February 1969, African American autoworker Rushie Forge committed a particularly violent act at Chrysler’s Jefferson Avenue assembly plant that shocked even seasoned union leaders. When Forge arrived at work, he found his time card had been taken, and that his foreman, William Young, had suspended him for five days. When he asked Young why he had been suspended and received no response, “Rush managed to slap William Young back thirty feet into a stock skid where he cut his hand.”14 He went on to stab Young twice with a chisel. Then, on September 7, 1969, when plant guards attempted to examine the lunchbox of black worker Willie Brooks, yet another violent altercation ensued. After plant security guards jumped on Brooks, and Brooks chose to fight them, management called in the police. When the “police entered they were greeted by a hail of washers, bolts and cat calls thrown at them by the workers on the line.”15

In response to such racialized shop-floor violence, TULC leaders attempted once again to impress upon the UAW’s leadership the seriousness of the situation and the necessity of acting decisively. Specifically, TULC leader Robert Battle III organized the Ad Hoc Committee of Concerned Negro Autoworkers, which warned UAW President Walter Reuther that without “full equity,” the growing number of frustrated black workers would create even more chaos.16 As this committee put it bluntly to Reuther, “it is precisely because of our faith in your integrity and commitment that we seek to resolve these matters with you at the conference table, rather than, as many powerful voices have suggested, take the issue to the streets and the public press.”17

By and large, however, UAW leaders felt that the union was already taking the plight of Detroit’s blacks seriously, and that it had a commendable track record of supporting civil rights. If only Chrysler would rein in its discriminatory managers and stop running its plants without regard for workers’ safety, these leaders reasoned, the union’s civil rights efforts would be apparent to black line workers. But Chrysler did neither of these things. Not only did it continue to run its plants with little attention to safety,18 but because so many of its assembly and foundry workers were black, blacks tended to pay the highest price for abominable working conditions. One such black worker, Mamie Williams, was having such serious health problems on the job that her doctor insisted that she stay home from work. Soon after her leave began, however, Williams received a telegram from Chrysler ordering her to return to work lest her employment be terminated. She did return to work the next day and, one week later, paramedics took her from Chrysler’s Eldon plant in an ambulance. She died that night. Soon after Williams’s death, according to the UAW, another black woman, Rose Logan, “was struck in the right leg by a jitney whose vision was obstructed by an improperly loaded shoe box. . . . Eventually she developed a thrombophlebitis in her right leg. . . . [A] blood clot loosed from her leg and traveled to her heart with fatal results.”19 Like Williams, Logan had suffered physical injury while working for Chrysler, and when she died, many workers assumed that this was because the company had forced her back to work prematurely.

While workers were still reeling from the deaths of Williams and Logan, on May 26, 1970, twenty-two-year-old black worker Gary Thompson met a similar fate. Thompson was working the midnight shift at Eldon when he received a new job assignment from his foreman. The foreman wanted Gary to drive a forklift jitney to another part of the plant, rather than work his regular job as a crane operator for maintenance. According to the union, managers gave Thompson this assignment because they needed him to empty a hopper of scrap steel weighing three to five tons into a railroad car.20 It was well known by the workers in this department that the jitney Thompson was ordered to drive was faulty. But, with a baby on the way at home, when Gary was asked to drive the jitney, he knew he needed his job too much to refuse. One-half hour before Gary was supposed to end his shift, he drove the faulty forklift, and the next morning his body was discovered buried under five tons of steel that the jitney had tipped over onto him.21

As far as Thompson’s parents were concerned, “Chrysler treated [Gary] no better than a machine,” and even though the UAW filed a grievance after her son’s death, his mother Helen nevertheless believed that “the union did not give him fair representation.”22 Of course in the union’s mind, filing grievances was exactly what the union thought it was supposed to do to represent workers like Thompson. Yet filing a formal complaint brought neither the UAW nor the Thompson family any satisfaction. Chrysler denied this grievance, writing in its rebuttal that “the fact is that conditions in the plant had nothing to do with this tragic accident. . . . [Thompson] backed away from the gondola car without the mast and loaded hopper (this is contrary to rules governing the operation of jitneys),”23 and told workers to “rest assured that our continuing efforts to make our plant a safe place in which to work will be intensified.”24

By the time that Thompson died, however, many workers at Chrysler had already reached the breaking point. For years, they had followed the rules by filing grievances and by registering complaints with the Michigan Civil Rights Commission (MCRC). Other workers had protested the situation in the plants by staying home or by taking matters into their own hands with their fists and other weapons. Believing that all of these approaches were futile, numbers of workers, both black and white, had begun to form rank-and-file organizations designed to combat the safety hazards and the racism on the shop floor without the union.

The city’s grassroots organizations that became active after 1967 came from across the political spectrum and color line. Some were multiracial and relatively moderate, like the Black Polish Conference, while others were held together by a black revolutionary ideology, like the Black Student United Front and the staff of the Inner City Voice. The dissident groups that arose in the plants in the late 1960s were equally diverse. Between 1967 and 1972, groups of black and white revolutionaries, as well as a biracial group of politically moderate but UAW-critical trade unionists, all began mobilizing on shop floors, thus creating new possibilities for the plants’ future.

Just as the city rebellion encouraged many residents to expend more effort on finding better biracial solutions to the ever present urban problems, many autoworkers also believed that the violence erupting on plant floors by 1967 called for biracial solutions more aggressive than those put forth by labor leaders. In 1967, such workers gravitated toward a new in-plant organization called the United National Caucus (UNC). The UNC was originally organized by skilled tradesmen and, specifically, by Irish-born worker Pete Kelly from UAW Local 160. According to Kelly, “when I first heard Walter Reuther speak I thought that the sun shone out of his ass. He was a very impressive orator. He was probably the most progressive labor leader in the country at the time.”25 But when Kelly came to feel that the UAW was passively standing by while management tried to chip away at hard-won union gains such as its Cost of Living Allowance (COLA) benefits, and when the UAW seemed incapable of getting the auto companies to put their abusive foremen in check or make the plants safer, he got fed up. In short, Kelly formed the UNC in order to push the UAW in a more militant direction.26

According to UNC founders, their group was a “caucus” within the UAW and, as such, was not interested in overthrowing the union. Indeed, as UNC members put it, “we are not trying to split our union, but, to bring back the dignity and loyalty our great Union was built on.”27 The UNC’s commitment to reforming the UAW and making it more responsive and democratic soon attracted both black and white, skilled and unskilled workers. What appealed to many black workers, despite the UNC’s predominantly white and skilled-worker origins, was that its co-chair was an African American who made sure that the UNC took racial equality in the UAW very seriously. Owing to its growing popularity, the UNC soon had offshoot groups in many plants, including the United Justice Caucus (UJC) in the Jefferson Avenue assembly plant, the Mack Safety Watchdog in the Mack Avenue plant, Strike Back in the Hamtramck assembly plant, Shifting Gears in the Chevy gear and axle plant, and the Democratic Caucus within Local 155.28

As the UNC quietly gained a following in the plants between 1967 and 1972, the UAW leaders grew more leery of it. According to Kelly, when UNC members went to the 1970 UAW International Convention and set up a UNC headquarters “right beside the convention,” “it irritated the hell out of the union leadership.”29 Even though the UNC initially confined itself to publishing in-plant newsletters that answered worker questions about plant safety and informed them of their rights under the contract, it also challenged the UAW’s political control.30 For example, at the UAW’s Twenty-third Constitutional Convention in Atlantic City, Pete Kelly nominated black co-chair Jordan Sims for the presidency of the union, and Sims reciprocated by nominating Kelly as international secretary-treasurer of the International UAW, saying, “In going to the Caucus I found in the people there the general sentiments of the rank and file, the dreams of the rank and file. I found there a need for some meaningful form of democratic recognition within this great UAW. [Pete Kelly is] my man to help reestablish what our union is supposed to really mean and represent.”31

But the top leadership of the UAW was as yet undaunted by the UNC’s bid for power. In fact, incumbent UAW President Leonard Woodcock soundly defeated Sims, while Emil Mazey, incumbent secretary-treasurer, trounced Kelly as well.32 The fact was that between 1967 and 1972, UAW officials believed that they had a far greater threat on their hands than the UNC. Indeed, numbers of workers had been gravitating not to the politically moderate and biracial UNC but toward in-plant black nationalist organizations as well as toward those of white revolutionaries. These groups set out to challenge the UAW leadership far more aggressively than the UNC ever intended to.

The first of these groups was called the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), and it was the brainchild of several staff members of the Inner City Voice who had connections with some workers at Chrysler’s Dodge Main plant, including a particularly outspoken worker named General Baker. Baker was born to a family of sharecroppers who had migrated to Detroit from rural Georgia in 1941. As a young man in the Motor City, Baker was introduced to politics when he took classes on political theory at Wayne State University (WSU). Baker started an organization on WSU’s campus called UHURU, which means “freedom” in Swahili, and then met other black radicals at the Inner City Voice when he joined a rally to protest Detroit hosting the Olympics Games when it still had no effective open housing legislation. After the anti-Olympics protest, Baker then went to Cuba with eighty-four other Americans, eleven of whom were black. Because of his exhilarating and inspiring experience meeting freedom fighters in Cuba, including Castro himself, Baker was determined to bring black liberation politics to Detroit. He felt he could do this when he began working at Chrysler’s Dodge Main plant upon his return.33

Not only Baker but also the entire staff of the Inner City Voice wanted to organize workers within the auto plants. Their opportunity came on May 2, 1968, during a wildcat strike at Dodge Main plant that had actually been started by a group of white women frustrated with management’s intense line speedup as well as its treatment of female employees.34 On that morning in May, women in the plant’s bumper room decided to walk off the job after their lunch break. They were immediately joined by other workers in their department, including several black men. But Chrysler ultimately chose to fire only two of the white women for instigating the wildcat, while it fired five black men for doing the same. The company targeted one of these black men, Baker, in particular because it believed him to be the real provocateur. But Chrysler had misjudged this autoworker. After being fired Baker, along with autoworker Chuck Wooten and nine others, including activist Marian Kramer, decided to form DRUM. After founding DRUM, on May 29, 1968, the twenty-four-year-old Baker wrote the following warning to Chrysler: “Let it be further understood that by taking the course of disciplining the strikers you have opened that struggle to a new and higher level and for this I sincerely THANK YOU. You have made the decision to do battle with me and therefore to do battle with the entire black community. . . . You have lit the unquenchable spark.”35

Once Baker started DRUM, the staff of the Inner City Voice lent its full support to the new organization. DRUM also received support in the form of $8,000 from the city’s Black Economic Development Conference (BEDC).36 But it was the Inner City Voice staff who most consistently stood by DRUM. Indeed, many articles in the paper explicitly encouraged all Detroiters to support this in-plant organization. After 1968, the staff of the paper placed the words “The emancipation of labor is the emancipation of man and the emancipation of man is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown, and black” directly on the masthead of the Inner City Voice.37 Its support of DRUM stemmed from a larger commitment to, and long-standing practice of, supporting almost any black radical group struggling for social change. Inner City Voice staffer Mike Hamlin put his energies into the community and student activist groups the Black Student United Front; Ron March was the liaison between the Inner City Voice and DRUM; and Luke Tripp and John Watson were the links between the Inner City Voice and WSU’s student paper, the South End.

But while DRUM had key ties to the Inner City Voice, the organization soon took on a life of its own. Most of DRUM’S members saw themselves as revolutionary black nationalists whose program was rooted firmly in shop-floor politics. DRUM advocated the complete overhaul of the UAW because it felt the union had become the company’s lackey. It made unheard-of demands, such as calling for the union to directly allocate autoworkers’ dues to the black community in order to aid in black self-determination.38 DRUM also attacked the perceived union timidity toward the reviled line foremen.39 Likewise, DRUM criticized Chrysler for hiring whites “straight out of the Deep South” for its plant security force and then equipping them with “tear gas, night sticks, riot helmets, and the new untested chemical MACE which might blind you on plant property.”40

Like its counterparts in the Inner City Voice, the shop-floor revolutionaries in DRUM prided themselves on “telling it like it is.” At several other workplaces in Detroit, DRUM-like groups sprang up almost overnight: JARUM, FORUM, ELRUM, CADRUM, CHRYRUM, FRUM, and UP-RUM. The RUM message was also resonating outside Detroit as well.41 During these years, RUMs also could be found in New Jersey auto plants, in Georgia auto plants, in the New York and Chicago transit systems, in San Francisco’s Muni-Railway, in the U.S. Steelworkers union, in the Building Service Employees International union, and in the American Federation of Teachers.42

The members of the Detroit-based RUMs not only shared the original DRUM’S belief that city and plant activism must be combined (indeed, members of CHRYRUM noted their mission to tackle “not only problems that exist in the plants but problems that exist within the black community”),43 but they also felt that the attack on racism in the plants must go far beyond the TULC’s program.44 Because they were revolutionaries, the RUMs and their supporters would inject a new militancy into the familiar discussion of race and racism by insisting on a “necessary” link between capitalism and racism. Because the RUMs saw the UAW as a key structure upholding the capitalist system, they concluded that union bureaucrats were one of their most significant adversaries.45 Indeed, as DRUM’S official constitution put it, “we must gear ourselves in the days ahead toward getting rid of the racist, tyrannical, and unrepresentative U.A.W. as representation for the black workers, so that with this enemy out of the way we can deal with our main adversary, the white racist management of Chrysler Corporation.”46

The RUMs’ hostility to the UAW additionally was fueled by their belief that the collective-bargaining apparatus itself prevented autoworkers from having any real power in dealing with management, particularly in dealing with racism. As one RUM group put it, “everyone knows that our grievance procedure is a fraud. . . . And most grievances are settled the company’s way because we do not use our strike power to settle them our way.”47 And, according to the RUMs, the UAW leadership actually was perpetuating and feeding off of such shop-floor racism. Every issue of a RUM newspaper included some reference to the union leadership’s alleged complicity in in-plant racism or substandard working conditions. When both the UAW and the TULC reminded them that there were a number of African Americans in positions of union power, RUM members were not impressed. Even though eleven presidents of UAW locals were black by 1970, along with a noticeable number of local union officers and shop committeemen, black radicals on the shop floors believed that blacks still had no real power in the union.48 The RUMs felt that the few blacks who were in positions of company or union authority did very little to improve working conditions for ordinary black workers, and thus racial discrimination in Detroit’s auto plants still flourished.

Black revolutionaries on the shop floor made it clear that they were as deeply set against black union officials as white. They reviled the black leaders within the union for not using their new positions to stand up for the black rank and file strenuously enough, and they accused these black leaders of selling out to the needs of the UAW “machine.” As the RUMs saw it, “Wake up brother. Yes! A black man can be squeezing you to death too.”49 And, as members of DRUM stated more bluntly, “It seems as though every time the white power structure is shaken another grinning and shufflin Uncle Tom will come running to their rescue.”50 Over time, the RUMs were not content just to criticize black union officials for supporting the white union administration. They were determined as well to identify these “sellouts” by name and department and then to oust them from their positions.51 According to DRUM, black middle-class apologists for the union leadership were “the proven enemies of Black workers at Hamtramck assembly, and they shall be dealt with.”52

Given such RUM rhetoric, TULC and UAW leaders were equally appalled that these groups kept spreading. By the close of 1969, each of the RUMs had become more vocal and better organized and, at the end of that year, they all united with Inner City Voice staffers to form the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (or “the League,” as it was known). Black radicals legally incorporated the League in 1969 as a self-described “black Marxist-Leninist organization.”53 According to League members, their organization “emerged specifically out of the failure of the white labor movement to address itself to the racist work conditions and to the general inhumane conditions of black people.”54 The League’s seven-man executive board included Inner City Voice staffers Mike Hamlin, Luke Tripp, John Watson, General Baker, and Chuck Wooten, as well as John Williams and Kenneth Cockrel, a young black attorney. According to the League, the group was “not a cultural nationalist organization, although some people apparently think so. What the League does is to use black identity and anti-colonialism—which are legitimate concerns in the first place—as part of a more general struggle.”55

Nevertheless, just as most of Detroit’s black radicals were deeply suspicious of working with whites after having watched black liberal efforts to do so, so were many of the in-plant black revolutionaries. In its founding constitution, the League noted that its “sole objective is to break the bonds of white racist control over the lives and destiny of black workers,” and that “we must gear ourselves up in the days ahead toward getting rid of the racist, tyrannical, and unrepresentative unions as representatives of black workers.” Therefore, according to the constitution, “membership is denied to all honkies due to the fact that said honky has been the historical enemy, betrayer, and exploiter of black people. Any relationship that we enter into with honkies will be only on the basis of coalition over issues.”56 At least initially, all members of the in-plant RUMs supported this view.57

From the League’s perspective, black workers had endured white privilege in the plants for so long that it could not imagine whites ever being willing to work aggressively for black empowerment on the shop floor. Likewise, members and supporters of the RUMs believed that “a disease called racism has poisoned their stupid little pea brains beyond help,” and that as long as whites kept getting preferential treatment, they would be an enemy.58

In 1969, ELRUM at the Eldon Avenue gear and axle plant where James Johnson was employed was one of the most vocal and active RUM groups in Detroit. According to students writing about ELRUM in 1969, black revolutionaries founded this group in November 1968 after “the ELRUM people ... came to DRUM for advice and assistance in setting up an organization in their plant.”59 ELRUM held its first meeting on November 10, 1968, and it was not the only dissident group at Eldon.60 The extremely outspoken UNC co-chair, Jordan Sims, had also formed a UNC group in the plant called the Black Shop Stewards Committee. But it was ELRUM, originally started by workers Fred Holsey and James Edwards, that most captured the spotlight between 1968 and 1972.

Like all of the League units, ELRUM espoused a revolutionary critique of Chrysler and deteriorating working conditions on the shop floor. When Mamie Williams died after coming back to work at Chrysler’s insistence, ELRUM contended that “she was murdered by the racist corporation and its lackeys.”61 After Rose Logan’s death, ELRUM reported that “a few weeks ago a sister in Department 25, Rose Logan, was run over by a honkie driving a forklift.”62 And when Gary Thompson was killed on the job, ELRUM noted that “Gary Thompson a 22 year old veteran of Vietnam, who had a pregnant wife and a son, was murdered May 26, 1970 at approximately six o’clock a.m. by Chrysler Corporation. . . . Once again ELRUM says to Chrysler Corporation, ‘YOU HAVE MURDERED ANOTHER ONE OF OUR BROTHERS.’”63Members of ELRUM visited Thompson’s parents after his death, and, according to Helen Thompson, “there was a gang of them at the funeral.”64 Even though Eldon’s plant manager did come to Thompson’s funeral, he never got up to say anything because, as Thompson’s mother said, “I think that he was scared to death of these ELRUMs; he was scared to death to say anything.”65

Members of management and union alike were fearful of the RUMs, primarily because they did not just write about shop-floor problems; they had also been holding numerous demonstrations and rallies and repeatedly shut down auto plants in their attempt to force both the union and the company into action. One of the most dramatic work stoppages took place at Chrysler’s Dodge Main plant on July 8, 1968. The day before that wildcat DRUM members had marched to Local 3 headquarters where a UAW Executive Board meeting was taking place. They demanded to meet with officials in the boardroom, which they did, but these officials refused to agree to a list of ten demands that DRUM provided them. It was then that DRUM decided to call an illegal strike for the next morning. On July 8 at 5 a.m., DRUM members positioned themselves around the gates of the Dodge Main plant, and 4,000 workers walked out. Even DRUM leaders were shocked by the high turnout. In response to this wildcat, both the UAW and Chrysler got injunctions forbidding any DRUM picketing, but such legal actions only fueled RUM militancy.66

On January 27, 1969, ELRUM also initiated a plant shutdown that “centered around 19 demands. Most dealt with racism.”67 But because this protest resulted in Chrysler firing twenty-five workers and then disciplining eighty-six others on charges of misconduct, on February 10, ELRUM decided to storm UAW headquarters, Solidarity House, to protest Chrysler’s actions. Then, in 1970, after Chrysler fired black autoworker John Scott for his violent confrontation with white foreman Erwin Ashlock, who had routinely used racially discriminatory language with Scott, ELRUM once again shut the plant down. In this wildcat, several local union representatives from Eldon stood by the workers’ decision to shut down the plant, but they paid dearly for their actions. During the two-day wildcat, 700 to 800 workers walked out of departments 78, 80, and 83 alone, and as a result, Chrysler did agree to rehire Scott. But immediately thereafter the company fired the thirteen union stewards who had supported the wildcat. In response, ELRUM initiated yet another wildcat.68

On May 23, 1970, ELRUM shut down the Eldon plant once again, this time to protest the “murder” of Thompson. In fact, the energy behind this particular wildcat is what led RUM members to form the League. As Mike Hamlin remembers, “that strike taught us a lot. We knew at that point that what we had to do was to begin to organize workers in more plants and begin to organize the black community to relate to the struggles in the plants, in the city, in the state, and eventually around the country.”69 Not only did dramatic RUM wildcats inspire radicals to create the League, but it also made them even bolder toward the UAW. Between the Scott and Thompson wildcats, for example, all RUMs in the League held a highly public rally outside of Cobo Hall, where the UAW was holding a special convention. With their bullhorns, RUM members shouted, “Walter Reuther and his henchmen are a bunch of phoney bigots; Reuther shed alligator tears when Martin Luther King was assassinated.” At that point, RUM members called on Reuther to prove himself by acceding to several RUM demands, including the elimination of all health and safety hazards, speedups, and dues checkoff. The RUMs also called for a four-day work week of five hours per day, as well as an end to the Vietnam War.70

From the union leaders’ perspective, however, agreeing to any one of these demands was out of the question. As UAW leaders saw it, giving in to the RUMs not only would validate those dissident organizations, but it also might fuel the growing anti-union activism of revolutionary whites. It had not escaped the UAW that after 1967, several of the white revolutionary groups that had been agitating in the streets and on campuses began taking their agenda and ideology into the plants as well.71 As DRUM leader General Baker noted, “since the action seems to be in the auto plants, the white organizations want to be there where the ground has been made fertile.”72

Some groups within the white Left had always believed that revolution must start “at the point of production.” For others, particularly those that had focused most of their energies on organizing college campuses, this was a new strategy. A number of white leftist organizations had bitter factional fights when some of their members suggested that every effort should now be devoted to plant organizing.73 Many white radicals were not easily persuaded that, as Detroiter Rick Feldman put it, “if there was going to be a revolution it had to be among ‘real’ people, not among students anymore.”74

But a number of white leftist groups did decide to follow “the principles of Class Struggle Unionism,” and they had their members “industrialize” in order to bring their revolutionary politics into the auto plants.75 To “industrialize” meant applying for a working-class job in a place where there were known to be tensions and preexisting worker militancy. Once hired, the idea was to recruit members into one’s own group and lend active support to the struggles indigenous to the plant. As one white radical described the post-1967 workplace activism of the International Socialists (IS), “part of the IS’s political perspective was that they would send these working-class radicalized students to get jobs in the Teamsters, auto and mine workers, heavy industry.”76 In this vein, several members of the IS, for example, applied for jobs at Chrysler’s Mack Avenue stamping plant because they had heard that it was particularly militant.

Because each of the white leftist groups now in the plants had their own newspaper or newsletter, they added considerably to what was already a growing body of dissident literature. The IS distributed its paper, Workers Power, which reported on both world and local plant events; the Socialist Workers party similarly distributed The Militant; the Progressive Labor party distributed Challenge; and the Revolutionary Communist party distributed Revolution. While each of these organizations was very different politically, the bottom line was that, between 1967 and 1972, Detroit’s auto industry, like the city proper, was a magnet for white revolutionaries from around the country. As Detroiter Gene Cunningham noted, “we saw things being possible to do in Detroit that couldn’t be done anywhere in the country . . . with Detroit’s rich history of labor struggle and Detroit’s concentration of heavy industry.”77

Also as had happened in the city itself, black and white radicals in the auto plants increasingly began to work together between 1967 and 1972. Officially, of course, both RUMs and the League took the position that “we don’t believe in Black and White together,” and each was particularly vehement about not working with white line workers. But because every RUM and League member saw themselves as “Marxist-Leninists,” they did participate in class-based struggles, provided that those struggling had a true revolutionary agenda. In addition, over time, it had dawned on the RUMs that there were in fact very practical reasons to work with the white Left. In-plant black radicals were often forced to rely on both white and black student radicals to distribute their literature at plant gates, because management either suspended or dismissed them if they did it themselves.78 As RUM coordinator Mike Hamlin put it, as their battles with management and union leaders escalated, black revolutionaries “needed to mobilize some white allies.”79 While only one white worker, John Taylor, officially became a RUM member, the white revolutionary Left, and even white moderates in the UNC, both supported and contributed to many RUM and League efforts by attending rallies, walking picket lines, and reporting on black radical victories in their various publications.

Not surprisingly such an alliance between black and white revolutionaries in Detroit’s auto plants soon antagonized white conservatives on the shop floors, just as it was alienating them in their neighborhoods. In that respect, white conservatives, like black and white radicals, saw their city struggles and plant battles as inexorably linked. Some white workers became even more conservative after 1967, precisely because they equated the city’s growing radical activism with that erupting in their workplaces and vice versa. Whereas the revolutionaries at Chrysler’s Jefferson plant, for example, believed that Rushie Forge had merely “lashed out in a torrent of hatred that had been stored up in all his years in Birmingham, New York, and Detroit” when he attacked a line foreman, conservative white workers believed that black workers like Forge were simply violent and crazy.80 And as many of these workers’ fear of blacks on the assembly line increased, they refused to concede the possible legitimacy of both African American shop-floor complaints and black grievances in the city. Indeed, to Detroit’s racially conservative white workers, black “rebellion” in either the plants or on city streets was merely an excuse for engaging in racially motivated violence.

Likewise, when conservative white workers saw the proliferation of in-plant black revolutionary groups, which routinely attacked white privilege in the most vitriolic language, they were easily persuaded that black radicals were themselves racist and anti-democratic. Thus, when they simultaneously heard the pronouncements of right-wing politicians like George Wallace in their communities, they had yet another direct and personal connection to his anti-civil rights, anti-radical, and anti-black message. White support of Wallace was so noticeable on Detroit’s shop floors that this was one of the reasons why black radicals were so leery of working with shop-floor whites. As members of DRUM noted, “the white workers are not getting any better; they are getting worse. Check out the support white workers gave the peckerwood George Wallace.”81 With entire UAW locals supporting Wallace, in addition to individual white workers, auto plants were witnessing the same discriminatory rhetoric that was common across the city during this same period. As members of FRUM noted, “The UAW is beginning to expose itself from top to bottom. As you know, in Flint today they have already endorsed Mad Dog Wallace for president without opposition.”82

Just as white conservatives in the city wrote their own newsletters and printed their own leaflets in opposition to black radicals, they were equally prolific in the plants. One leaflet passed out by white workers at a plant in Local 809 exhorted other whites on the line to come to a “White Rights Rally. . . . If you are tired of sex-crazed Blacks pawing young white girls, if you are tired of terror in our schools and in our streets.”83 Other white UAW workers printed and distributed around the Dodge assembly plant a scathing parody of DRUM’S newsletter called “D.U.M.B.” as well as a similar “M.A.P.U.M.B” leaflet around the Mack Avenue plant. Not only did these leaflets ridicule the RUM demands, but they also made it very clear that conservative factory whites were persuaded that “Wayne State University types” had instigated the growing conflict in their plants.84

But despite their hostility to the presence of the in-plant black and white revolutionaries, the fact that these radicals did fight the universally hated company most aggressively did pose a dilemma for even the most conservative white workers. Indeed, because Chrysler had been driving production so relentlessly throughout the 1960s, white workers were not necessarily unsympathetic to the idea of plant shutdowns. Between 1964 and 1967, many of them had also believed that such bold actions might be necessary. But because the black radicals in Detroit’s plants were so obviously hostile to working with shop-floor whites, any alliance between mainstream or conservative white workers and militant blacks was, at least in this period, virtually impossible. As RUM member John Taylor recalls, ELRUM “would always refuse to give [its] leaflets to white workers,”85 and as UNC activist Jordan Sims noted, ELRUM’s view of whites was “‘motherfucker, we don’t want you in here’—they would alienate them, and this was ridiculous.”86

Between 1967 and 1972, as support for the RUMs, the UNC, and segregationist George Wallace was surfacing across the auto industry, liberal leaders of the UAW and TULC watched Detroit’s shop floors descend into a political crisis. But despite the very real challenges to their control initiated by both the UNC and the Wallace supporters in the plants, the UAW and TULC were most concerned about the black revolutionary threat to industry stability and their own authority. As one journalist put it, “DRUM was a panic button and both the union and the company reacted.”87

During this period, the UAW battled the RUM groups almost exclusively even while other plant dissidents, namely members of the UNC, routinely challenged the union as well. Indeed, the UNC was a real threat to union authority. As one UNC booklet (with the UAW insignia on its cover) commented, “since 1967 the United National Caucus has been busy exposing the mistakes, weaknesses, and betrayal of trust by the UAW. The UAW record is a sad and sordid one.”88 As another UNC document stated, “We intend to fight the bureaucrats who run this union and put control back into the hands of the rank and file worker.”89 And with regard to the conservative whites also mobilizing on its shop floors, the UAW was well aware that they also could pose a serious threat to union stability. On January 16, 1969, leaders at UAW Local 600 warned Walter Reuther himself that “in the recent Presidential Election activity, Wallace supporters did their bit to stir up racist’s feelings.” They assured Reuther, however, that “the Wallacites [in contrast to the RUMs] . . . used a more subtle method of whisper and hand-to-hand distribution of material.”90 Obviously, the UAW leadership did not believe white conservatives to be as threatening as the in-plant radicals. Even though “Local 600’s General Council, on Sunday, January 12, 1969, in open and frank discussion, condemned the activities of [both] white and black racists,” the UAW worked far harder to rid the plant of the latter than the former.91

In certain respects, it was easy for union leaders to justify their focus on the black revolutionaries, because these dissidents were the most open about their hostility to the UAW. Members of the Mack Avenue plant RUM, MARUM, maintained, for example, that “there are more PREJUDICES in the UAW than there are in Chrysler Corporation,” and DRUM leader Ron March unabashedly stated that “there seems to be no place you can turn for any type of restitution as far as your grievances are concerned because of this coalition between union and management.”92 But, of course, UNC affiliates also attacked the UAW leadership quite openly. As authors of the United Justice Train wrote, “we are now aware of some of our rights as UAW members. We feel that the evil features of this wicked leadership must be exposed and faced up to by the members in order to give everyone—regardless of race, creed or color—their UAW constitutional rights.”93 And yet, the UAW never expended a fraction of its efforts to dismantle the RUMS on eliminating the UNC in this period.

In addition to believing that the RUMs most seriously challenged their leadership role, union officials particularly despised the fact that the RUMs made them look so impotent in front of management. For example, between 1960 and 1974, there were 122 wildcat strikes at Chrysler, which the UAW had been powerless to prevent.94 Some of these strikes were large, like the Dodge Main plant walkout of May 1968. Others were small, like numerous “heat” walkouts that would idle a shift or two when workers refused to labor in inhumanely hot conditions. Whatever their size, wildcats had a dramatic impact on company productivity. Chrysler repeatedly made it clear to the UAW that it must prevent such work stoppages and, when the union could not do so, its leaders feared that their bargaining authority with the company was eroding.

In addition to not being able to control its membership, the UAW was humiliated when Chrysler intimated that certain UAW members—namely, black radical members—were nothing but dangerous thugs. According to Chrysler, “by the end of August, 1968, the Plant Protection Department had recorded no less than ten cases of assault when the attackers were black men,” and when the management personnel at Hamtramck assembly (DRUM’S stronghold) told the union that it had also received numerous threats, UAW leaders were thoroughly embarrassed.95 Although it was never established that such intimidation was perpetrated by members of a RUM, given the many threats that peppered RUM literature, both Chrysler and the UAW assumed that it was. About black officials in the UAW, DRUM members had written that “we must try to bring them over to our side or do them like we are going to do the white pig honky.”96 Regarding its in-plant strategy, at least one DRUM author had suggested that “it should be obvious that the correct tactic to use is the ambush thing.”97 Finally, as the RUM-affiliated Inner City Voice wrote, in addition to printing a recipe for making a bomb, “it is necessary, therefore, that every black man in the community possess at least one rifle of a high-powered caliber.”98 And when DRUM held a raffle on November 17, 1968, the first prize offered was a new M-1 rifle, the second prize was a new shotgun, while the third prize was a bag of groceries and a turkey.99

Even though League leader Mike Hamlin had publicly declared that black radicals had “no intention of destroying [the plants],”100 the UAW shared Chrysler’s conviction that the RUMs were violent. Wanting to save face with the company as well as assert its own authority, the union was soon conducting surveillance on these groups. Irving Bluestone, the director of the UAW’s General Motors Corporation department, received a letter from Don Rand on November 13, 1969, that had as an attachment RUM leaflets as well as “a listing of the license numbers of those who were driving cars and who parked n UAW property.” “You will note,” Rand wrote, “that attorney Ken Cockrel [of the League] was identified as one of the participants.”101 And correspondence from worker Jacob Przybylo sent to the offices of UAW leader Arthur Hughes indicates just how much of a tab the union was in fact keeping on the RUMs. As Przybylo wrote, “Dear Sir, I was sick with the flu and these are a week late. That man Edwards is the ELRUM Membership Chairman also of late Wayne State University West End Leftist that was ousted and came into our plant. . . . If you want any other information you can call me at home before 2:00 p.m.”102 Again, however, even though the UNC wrote articles on subjects, such as “Can a Plant Guard Put His Hands on Me, and What Can I do if One Does?,” and although this group was also behind a number of heat walkouts in the plants, the UAW never implicated the UNC in any incidents of in-plant intimidation, and it did not put this group under surveillance during these years.103

The energy that the UAW eventually came to expend on keeping the RUMs under surveillance suggests that they touched an even deeper nerve than one of embarrassment and intimidation. The simple fact was that the RUMs were the UAW’s greatest political threat on the shop floor. Indeed, far more than the UNC or the Wallace supporters, the RUMs most reminded union leaders of the Communist party-associated dissent that they had defeated in the 1940s and were determined not to let surface again.

Importantly, before it was apparent to UAW leaders that the RUMs were so politically threatening, several of them did try to find out what RUM leaders wanted, and they hoped to respond to the frustration that brought these groups into existence. For example, Walter Dorosh, president of Local 600, wrote to Walter Reuther, “Local officers, together with unit representatives, for a number of months sought out the representatives from FRUM; the purpose was a meeting of the minds on the alleged charges.”104 And when members of DRUM asked to meet with TULC leader Shelton Tappes to explain their purpose, some in the UAW leadership were glad to see them talk. Tappes did meet with DRUM leaders in early 1969, at a rally that they were holding at the United Methodist Church. For one and a half hours, Tappes listened while DRUM members spoke of “bad working conditions, the attitudes of supervisors toward Negroes in the plants, discrimination on shop upgrading and the lack of consideration of Negro employees in the skilled trades classification.”105 Even though UAW leaders insisted that Tappes attend the meeting with DRUM, he then got flack from UAW leaders for having appeared too sympathetic to the black radicals there.106 Nevertheless, Tappes dutifully submitted a report to UAW official Bill Beckham on that event. According to Beckham, “Shelton advised us that there were approximately 300 to 350 people in attendance at this meeting.”107

Despite the small numbers, Beckham encouraged Reuther to engage in a meaningful dialogue with DRUM, although he went on to concede that his view “is not shared by many, since the attitude generally expressed in the building is to crush them.”108 And Beckham wasn’t the only union leader suggesting early on that it would be prudent to keep communication lines open with the RUMs. Union official Frank Menendez also noted that “a question naturally comes to mind as to the cause of the deep-rooted discontent that is prevalent in the Hamtramck assembly plant. It is my considered opinion that supervisors must be instructed in human relations. There is an utter disregard for the feelings of the hourly workers. It makes no difference what color a person is; they are all treated badly and there is definite room for improvement.”109

By and large, however, this inquisitive and potentially sympathetic perspective on the RUMs quickly became a minority view among UAW leaders. These officials, including such figures as Irving Bluestone and George Merrelli, considered black radicals in both the city and in the plants extremely dangerous to the union and therefore did not think accommodation was the answer. In 1968, Bluestone shared this view with UAW President Walter Reuther after calling his attention to a recent television show featuring black radicals in Detroit and their “specific references to the UAW . . . including the call for a revolutionary party to destroy our current social system.”110 And, as Merrelli told student interviewers in 1969, DRUM was “carrying out the mandates of Communist China. . . . It became quite apparent, knowing and being familiar with Communist operations. . . . [T]his happens when they worm themselves into positions of leadership and then out comes the program. . . . [This is an] Old Commie trick. We had to fight the same thing in the early days of our organization.”111 To UAW leaders, radicals were once again threatening control of Reuther’s brand of trade unionism.

Indicating just how threatened top UAW officials were by the RUMs, an intense internal discussion about the inner workings of these groups had in fact been well under way well before Shelton Tappes attempted to determine what DRUM wanted. On October 4, 1968, Douglas Fraser encouraged black UAW leaders Nelson Jack Edwards and Marcellius Ivory to come to a meeting in which “unquestionably we will be talking about D.R.U.M.’s activities.”112 And, on July 15, 1968, top UAW leaders again called a special meeting to discuss DRUM’S most recent activities. According to meeting minutes, President Reuther told those assembled that “this is a group of black nationalists and they are tied in the with the Chinese Commies at Wayne State University. We are going to see more of this [activism,] which is organized by the black nationalists.”113 While he did not disagree with Reuther’s assessment of the RUMs at this meeting, Fraser cautioned that “we have to handle this delicately [because] in the last issue of DRUM there are indications that they have the support of other plants.” And then, as somewhat of a voice in the wilderness, black IEB member Jack Edwards suggested to fellow officials at this gathering that “we can’t isolate ourselves from their ideas.”114

But as RUM activism escalated, union leaders became increasingly unsympathetic to such notions. By 1969, the UAW was keeping even closer tabs on the RUMs. For example, Ken Morris, director of UAW Region 1B, amassed an extensive collection of RUM newsletters, while the director of UAW Region 1, George Merrelli, also had begun a large file on the RUM materials being circulated in the plants.115 Indeed, when top UAW officials came across RUM literature, they often forwarded it to President Reuther himself, as well as to other high-ranking leaders. For example, Bluestone sent copies of DRUM literature to Reuther on July 2, 1968, because “this group represents a growing and serious problem.”116 That same year, Merrelli sent Fraser copies of both the South End and the DRUM Constitution, while Fraser sent Emil Mazey, Ken Morris, Pat Caruso, and E. Bruce “a copy of the first issue of MARUM” as well.117

Just as it was important for union officials to keep abreast of what its black dissidents were writing, it soon became equally necessary that they figure out exactly who was behind the RUM insurgency. Clearly, these leaders did not believe that RUM dissent was indigenous to the auto plants. As Reuther’s statement to the IEB on July 15, 1968, indicates, UAW leaders suspected that it was campus radicals who actually were instigating the RUM activism in the plants. Merrelli seemed to agree with Reuther, as he wrote to Ed Liska, president of Local 3, expressly so that he could share with him “a copy of the ‘South End,’ an official Wayne State University Student publication,” believing that Liska would “find the story quite interesting.”118 And the suspicion of top union leaders that the RUMs were run by outsiders was certainly fueled by leaders at the local level. In 1969, William Gerbe of Local 3 wrote Merrelli about a stormy meeting that had taken place at his union hall because Gerbe wanted Merrelli to know that, in his opinion, “there were four hundred in the hall and about seventy-five percent were not our members.”119

But suspecting that the in-plant RUMs were following the “China Commie philosophy” of outside groups because the “Inner City Voice publication [is the] same source as D.R.U.M.”120 was not the same as proving such a connection. Efforts to identify plant dissidents as outside agitators or DRUM/WSU conspirators, so that they could successfully be exposed and thus eliminated, met with varied success. When two employees at Hamtramck assembly were involved in an altercation with officials there, Frank Menendez of that plant was able to let Merrelli know that “both employees in question were very high in the leadership structure of DRUM.”121 Yet in another case, official Bill Beckham had to report, “I am not sure this will answer the question that you are asking, in that this active group in the UAW cannot be laid, based upon the evidence, at the door of the individual you are asking about. He may be involved, but we are not aware of such involvement.”122 Regardless of what they could prove, as students interviewing union officials in 1969 noted, “there appears to be widespread consensus attributing the Wayne State South End newspaper as being a main instigator” in stirring up shop-floor dissent.123 These officials tended to agree further that they were not going to let such student activists in any way affect their labor relations system.124

The UAW’s determination to expose the RUMs as the tool of white student radicals and as a dangerous threat in their own right is revealed in several mass mailings that it sent to members after 1968. In its open letter to “All Local 961 Members,” UAW leaders of that local not only accused ELRUM of being the tool of WSU student radicals and of anti-establishment types like Tom Hayden, but it also reminded workers that “the UAW is the greatest Democratic Union in the world. You can hold office regardless of your race, color, or creed.”125 Not just local union leaders but leaders from the UAW International as well decided to approach members directly about the RUM threat. In an open letter from the International UAW to “All Members of the UAW Local 3,” UAW officials argued that the in-plant black radicals were the “voice of a worldwide propaganda network. . . . [They call] for bloody and violent revolution over and over. . . . This group—whatever it is and whatever it stands for—has no legal or moral right to bargain with the Chrysler Corporation. . . . Negro members are too intelligent to permit themselves to be used as pawns by an outside group of extremists who want to divide us and create chaos and revolution.”126

By March 1969, the IEB of the UAW had decided that it was necessary to write not simply to members of UAW locals where the RUMs were active, but also to every UAW member in the country. Officials at Solidarity House had begun to receive RUM leaflets from leaders of UAW locals in cities other than Detroit, and this was alarming. One such city was Atlanta, where RUM activists at a General Motors plant had put out a leaflet exhorting “all brothers and sisters of the PLANT-TATIONS” there “to listen and speak to Brothers from the Revolutionary Movements of the AUTO PLANT-TATIONS of Detroit, Michigan.”127 As ominously to union leaders, members of GM-RUM in Atlanta had also noted that “after nine months of giving out the ‘Voice’ we’ve found that not only do white workers have an interest in the paper and the things that its saying but they even feel left out.”128

Just as the Reuther caucus of the UAW had believed itself to be the only logical choice to lead the union in the 1940s, so it did in the late 1960s. And just as it had put enormous effort into undermining its Communist-supported Martin-Addes-Leonard caucus opponents by accusing them of being antidemocratic and dangerous during those years, the heirs to Reuther’s labor relations vision once again came to put enormous effort on eliminating the new threat from the Left. Indeed, as UAW official Emil Mazey put it in an interview with the Detroit News, the “black militants in Detroit’s auto factories pose a greater peril to the UAW than the communist infiltration did in the 1930s.”129

The UAW leaders of the 1960s and 1970s were proud of the liberal-Democratic union that they either had worked so hard to build or had inherited. These leaders took pride in the fact that they had delivered high wages and good benefits to their membership, and also that they had “been in the vanguard of the legislative fight for civil rights [and had] marched in Detroit, Washington, D.C., Selma, Jackson, Mississippi, Memphis, Tennessee for justice and equality.”130 They were proud as well that they had “been in the leadership of the crusade against poverty.”131 More so than any other dissident impulse on the shop floors of Detroit between 1969 and 1972, the in-plant black and white revolutionaries had undermined the political premises on which the postwar labor-management accord had been constructed. Even more determinedly than their counterparts in city government, Detroit’s liberal labor leaders were unwillingly to accede power to these challengers.

Between 1968 and 1972, the liberal leadership of the UAW dramatically escalated its attempt to undermine the black and white revolutionary insurgency. Over time, however, it became clear that neither collecting information on the dissidents nor writing exposés of them for the benefit of the general membership, had rid the plants of the RUMs. In fact, it may have even fueled their activism. When the UAW wrote to its general membership about the RUM threat, one leadership-oriented worker accused officials of paying too much attention to the militants and thus encouraging them. As this “confused UAW member” wrote in disgust to the leadership of UAW Region I, “you seem to have given a bit of legal status to the DRUM movement by recognizing and ‘negotiating’ with them.”132

Whether they were being spurred on by attention from the UAW leadership or by their own sheer determination, the fact was that Detroit’s RUMs were growing in power and influence between 1968 and 1972. Clearly, the radical view that “at the height of the civil rights struggle, Reuther was always found at the head of the line, while never really raising any struggle against the racism that existed in his own union or the plants, where blacks constituted a majority,” was shared widely on the shop floors.133 Much to the UAW’s dismay, through their in-plant organizations, black and white radicals were presenting line workers with a vision for how postwar labor-management relations might be conducted that was more militant than the one long defended by labor liberals. As the mainstream black newspaper the Michigan Chronicle noted, “no matter what the actual number of DRUM members, many other black auto workers knew this mess for what it is and while they may not be DRUM members, they sure as hell support some of the DRUM goals.”134

One black autoworker knew firsthand the plant problems that made the RUMs so attractive. This worker, one who would become a cause célèbre to black and white revolutionaries, and whose popularity on the shop floor would convince the UAW leadership that it must reassert control of the workplace at any cost, was James Johnson Jr. While the city and workplaces of Detroit were becoming war zones of racial conflict as well as sites of new political possibility after 1967, Johnson continued to go to work every day, simply trying to make a living. But even though his plant had become a hotbed of RUM activism, Johnson was completely uninvolved in the controversies and conflicts at Eldon. He was not a member of ELRUM, and he had never walked out in a wildcat. He was, however, deeply frustrated by the treatment he had endured since Chrysler hired him.

On May 9, 1970, for example, Johnson had a serious car accident in which he sustained injuries to the back of his head and neck. After taking time off from work at his doctor’s insistence, he “received a telegram from [Chrysler] to return to work or be terminated.” Against the advice of his physician, Johnson did come back to work, but when he returned he discovered that Chrysler had denied him benefits to pay his medical expenses. Then, on May 29, 1970, he took a few days off from work after getting the approval by a foreman in his department. But when Johnson came back to work, he could not find his time card because it had been removed from its usual place. When he finally tracked the card down, someone had stamped it “Clear AWOL.”135 When Johnson questioned this, Chrysler’s personnel department maintained that he had never told the foreman of his intention to take a vacation and therefore he had been absent without permission.

In time, Johnson was able to have both the insurance and the vacation decisions rescinded. As foreman Bernard Owiesny said later, “I didin’t know about him having permission to take a vacation at the period.”136 Nevertheless, these incidents had a profound impact on him. Johnson was certain that he had endured these bureaucratic complications, as well as the constant verbal abuse from his foreman, because he was a black man in an all-white department. Not surprisingly, experiences such as these all too often “conjured up childhood experiences in Mississippi” and aggravated Johnson’s already precarious mental state.137

In June 1970, yet another incident occurred in Johnson’s work life that only confirmed his suspicion that he was being victimized on the job. During that month, job setter Robert Baynes took a two-week vacation and recommended that Johnson fill in for him, given that he knew how to do the job already. Because the job setter was like an assistant to the foreman, this was quite an honor. Johnson was also excited by the opportunity to make $5 an hour while he filled in for Baynes. To Johnson’s disappointment, “Mr. Owiesny, however, placed a Ronnie Jasper, a white man and a close personal friend of his on [the] job setter’s job.”138

As a result of the times during which he had been forced back to work after his car accident, denied his medical benefits, cleared from the company’s rolls after his vacation, and blatantly passed over for a white man in a temporary job promotion, Johnson was under increasing emotional stress throughout May and June of 1970. In July, he finally snapped.

On July 15, Johnson came to work as usual at 2:30 p.m. and went directly to his job in the cement room. He performed his regular job for forty-five minutes. A foreman named Hugh Jones, who was filling in for Johnson’s foreman, Owiesny, came over to Johnson and assigned him to work the number 2 oven, his old and despised job. As Johnson well knew, the oven line was one of the worst jobs in the plant, and “he believed that he had, by hard and meritorious service, worked his way out of such a job.”139 Johnson was doubly upset because Jones was one of the few black foremen in the plant, and it bothered him a great deal that Jones would betray another black man in that way.

Despite his anger at being told to do so, Johnson went to the oven line. Yet once he got there, he did not begin the job. According to later testimony, Johnson “didn’t refuse to do the job . . . [but he] didn’t have the proper gloves. The gloves [were] not laying for the employee to take.”140 Johnson then asked foreman Jones to call his union steward, Clarence Horton. When Horton arrived, managers were summoning Johnson to the personnel office. Horton attempted to get a heat pass for Johnson, as it was 90 degrees in the plant and more than 120 degrees near the ovens, but instead Johnson received a suspension for “insubordination.” According to the supervisor’s report completed by foreman Jones, Johnson “was told to do a job that he refuse to do so, and went and sit down and number 2 oven was off until I could find another man to start up. All this happen[ed at] 3:15 p.m. This employee is now being suspension as of know 3:30, 7/15/70, and sapose to report to Labor Relations 3:00 o’clock 7/16/70.”141 Steward Horton later testified that there was nothing he could do; management had already made its decision.142 According to one state official who later commented on these events, “when suspended (which he [Johnson] considered fired) he was convinced his persecutors had won.”143

As an indication of how utterly disillusioned autoworkers had become with the labor relations system, Johnson did not even bother to file a grievance before he left the plant that day.144 After he was suspended, he “appeared very nervous and upset,” but he left the plant peacefully.145 But at 4:55 p.m. that same day, with a fury that shocked the nation, he came back to the Eldon plant with a gun, went to his department, and opened fire. According to the general foreman at Eldon, Wallace Moore, “Someone then stuck their head in [my] door and yelled ‘Hey you guys better get out of here, he’s shooting at anything with a white shirt on.’”146 After shooting foreman Gary Hinz twice, Johnson then asked, “Where’s Jones?”147 He found Hugh Jones and fired at him twice before the man fell. Even after Jones fell, Johnson “fired at point blank range then four times.”148 Johnson next pointed his gun at a worker named Melvin Cooper but walked away because “Melvin Cooper was not in a white shirt.”149 On his way to the Jordan street exit, Johnson ran into a job-setter named Joseph Kowalski. According to a stock chaser named Ed Lacey, “Kowalski came out and tried to talk to him but he couldn’t. Kowalski turned around and was shot in the back and fell down.”150 After shooting Kowalski, Johnson allowed himself to be handcuffed by plant security. He said little as security guards escorted him from the plant, and he found himself charged with first-degree murder.

But the in-plant radicals had much to say about Johnson’s deed. In fact, Johnson had become a shop-floor celebrity because, as the Inner City Voice editorialized, “like the heroic black workers in the past who decided to put an end to the racist harassment which is unavoidable, Brother James accepted the challenge to his manhood; and as a result, this courageous Brother was forced to wage an armed struggle at the point of production. . . . It was then that Brother decided that justice would be served.”151 The July 1970 issue of ELRUM was equally celebratory. Its front-page headline read, “Hail James Johnson.”152

Reaction to the murder in the city’s black community was equally intense and equally, if more subtly, sympathetic. As even the mainstream black newspaper the Michigan Chronicle noted, “anyone familiar with Detroit’s auto ‘plantations’ would not be entirely surprised [at] what James Johnson did,” primarily because of the “hoax” of Equal Employment Opportunity and the fact that someone like Johnson was just another “‘mule,’ a man machine.”153 The Michigan Chronicle was also quick to point out that “Johnson’s union, or to put it more accurately, union failure, enters into this grisly story.”154 One radical Detroit paper, The Metro, actually suggested that “Johnson got the wrong men. . . . [T]he real criminals sit in their offices in Highland Park [Chrysler], Dearborn [Ford], and the General Motors Building, and Solidarity House [UAW]. . . . [T]hey don’t have to worry about being shot down by an angry worker. Yet. But they should.”155

Of course, Detroit’s conservative whites and its liberal politicians and labor leaders did not see the Johnson murders at all in the same way that the radicals did.156 In fact, these murders and the ensuing trial only served to transform Detroit’s bitter war for civic and labor-movement control that conservatives, liberals, and radicals had been fighting for years into an even more bitter affair. As city residents began to focus their attention on the potential outcome of Johnson’s and several other controversial trials, Detroit’s war at home quietly moved from its streets and shop floors to its courtrooms with quite surprising consequences for the city’s political future.