7: From Fights for Union Office to Wildcats in the Workplace

Detroit is a high-octane town. If the mixture is right, it doesn’t take much to spark a wildcat walkout at its auto or supply plants.1

After James Johnson’s dramatic murder trial, Judge Robert Colombo placed him in the custody of the Michigan Department of Mental Health. As he was bounced between various institutions thereafter, Johnson had no idea that his criminal trial had played such a key part in altering the course of Detroit’s political history. A mere two years later, Johnson was unwittingly thrust into the political limelight once again, when a liberal hearing referee for the Workman’s Compensation Bureau decided on a claim that he had filed against Chrysler Corporation during his incarceration at Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Indeed, Johnson’s fate at the hands of the Workman’s Compensation Bureau informed the battles still raging for control of Detroit’s auto plants and labor movement just as his acquittal in the criminal court had shaped the battles for control of the city itself.

In both the city and its plants, long-disenchanted blacks had gained enormous hope from Johnson’s experiences in the legal system during the summer of 1971. But whereas the city’s liberal leaders sought to capitalize on this new hope, liberal labor leaders did not. Ultimately, Johnson’s explosion in the Eldon plant and his subsequent experiences with the criminal and civil courts only reinforced the union leadership’s belief that it must reassert its control in the labor movement at any cost. And, between 1969 and 1973, this is exactly what it attempted to do. During this period, UAW leaders placed tremendous effort and expense into discrediting the black revolutionaries who had been mobilizing on Detroit’s shop floors.

In several key local union elections the UAW leadership succeeded in eliminating worker dissent by 1971—or so union officials thought. In fact, although Detroit’s RUMs and the League largely did fall apart by that year, shop-floor dissent was not completely extinguished. Fueled by the continuing egregious conditions in Detroit’s plants, the biracial and politically broad-based activism of the United National Caucus (UNC) blossomed in the wake of the RUMs’ demise. Notably, however, the UAW leadership’s bitter fight against the in-plant black revolutionaries prior to 1971 blinded it to the legitimacy of, and widespread mandate for, the more broad-based reforms advocated by the UNC. Thus, unlike their liberal counterparts in the city, labor leaders did not choose to harness this militancy and make it their own.

* * * *

Because of their aggressive tactics, their venomous criticism of the union hierarchy, and particularly because of their revolutionary political agenda, Detroit’s RUMs had greatly unnerved the UAW by 1968. Despite their relatively small numbers, the RUMs had managed to halt production in several auto plants and win a noticeable degree of sympathy and support from autoworkers. Between 1968 and 1971, union leaders in Detroit came to feel that they were at war with the RUMs. In September 1968, April 1969, March 1970, and May 1971, the UAW had the opportunity to battle black dissidents in several union elections that dramatically intensified the war for control of the labor movement.

In September 1968, a trustee of Local 3, the epicenter of DRUM activism, died while in office, and the UAW scheduled an election for September 26, 1968, to determine who would succeed him. In a surprising move, one that was born of intense internal debate and of consultation with leaders of the League, DRUM decided to run a candidate for this office “to test the strength of the organization ... to get publicity for the organization and to better identify it in the eyes of other black workers ... [and] to be able to use the election as an organizational tool.”2

To the shock of UAW officials, the DRUM candidate, Ron March, won 563 votes to the 521 for his opponent, Joe Elliot.3 Because March did not win by enough of a margin to meet the UAW Constitution’s requirements governing elections, the union scheduled a runoff election for October 3, 1968. This gave Local 3’s leadership time to mobilize. Implicitly warning UAW President Walter P. Reuther of the danger of a DRUM victory, in early October 1968, Irving Bluestone “attached the kind of material being distributed by DRUM at Local 3”4 in a memo that he sent to Reuther. And, specifically to prevent DRUM from winning, Local 3’s leadership approached its large pool of Polish retirees and encouraged them to vote in the runoff election. Given the Local’s ethnic composition prior to becoming more African American, the supply of white Polish retiree voters in Local 3 was extensive. Yet since retirees normally did not exercise their voting rights in such minor union elections, the union solicitation of their support was highly irregular. But union leaders well knew, based on their close surveillance of DRUM literature that relations between black revolutionaries and white Poles at Chrysler were troubled, and that a high retiree turnout could influence the election.5 However, the leadership of the UAW did not count solely on the retirees’ anti-black biases to bring them to the polls; officials also sent a letter urging them to vote because a DRUM victory might lead directly to the termination of all retiree benefits.6

Despite such leadership maneuvering to discredit him, March nevertheless received 1,386 votes in the October runoff election. Joe Elliott, the underdog in the first election, managed to receive 2,091 votes, which made him the new trustee of Local 3.7 Not surprisingly, union leaders breathed a sigh of relief at this outcome, while DRUM leaders were furious. Immediately after the election, DRUM distributed a flier blaming the “underhanded” tactics of both the UAW and the police of Hamtramck (the city completely within Detroit where Local 3 was located) for preventing a fair election. According to DRUM, moments after March had won the initial trustee election, “the Polish pigs of the Hamtramck police department jumped into their cars and rode to the back of the bars on Jos Campau and Clay to wantonly beat over black brothers with double-edged axe handles and spray them with deadly mace.”8 According to DRUM leader General Baker, several DRUM supporters were arrested in this melee, and DRUM leaders then went to the police station and union hall to find out what was going on. As Baker reported in a 1969 interview:

Once we got into the union hall, in comes the mayor and the police commissioner of the city of Hamtramck ... [then] ... one of the white union officials runs outside and calls [more] police and about the whole 50 man police force ran in with mace and ax handles and started spraying and beating everybody in the hall under the guise that we were attacking the mayor and police commissioner.... All the doors were locked, so it obviously had been set up some kind of way, except the doors they came in. Everybody in there just got wasted.9

During the runoff election, DRUM maintained that the police repeatedly stopped or ticketed cars carrying black DRUM voters so as to keep them from the polls.10 According to DRUM, in addition to the police upsetting their chances in the runoff, the UAW “racists” had literally stolen the election.11 As Baker put it, “we figured there was cheating in the voting machines. That’s the only way. Even with the retirees voting ... we had the majority down there to vote.”12

But despite its disappointments in 1968, DRUM had another opportunity to challenge UAW leaders in the electoral arena. In March 1969, the vice president of Local 3, Charlie Brooks, vacated his position to take a job with the UAW International. When the UAW scheduled a special election for April 9 to determine Brooks’s successor, DRUM immediately entered Don Jackson as a candidate. This time, DRUM maintained, the UAW would have to come to terms with the fact that “more and more black workers are finding it necessary to take the D.R.U.M. road.”13 Such bravado clearly unsettled the UAW leadership. On March 10, the International Executive Board (IEB) sent a letter to every UAW member to point out that it had made great strides at Dodge Main plant, where 66 percent of full-time union officials were black and 56 percent of the elected stewards were black noting also that 65 percent of the elected stewards and committeeman at Local 3 were black as well.14 In addition to sending this letter, the UAW leadership decided to throw its support behind a black candidate in the upcoming Local 3 vice presidential election.15

But not every black member of the UAW was appeased by this endorsement, nor did all of them agree that it was the union who should be taking credit for the recent rise in the number of black authority figures on the shop floor. Some observers outside of the labor movement thought that “more blacks are now on the staffs of both institutions [union and company] than before DRUM made its appearance” precisely because of DRUM’S activism.16 As DRUM members themselves saw it, Chrysler simply had “switched black ‘management’ all around the plant to make it seem as though a number of brothers have been upgraded.”17 They went on to accuse the UAW’s choice for vice president, Andy Hardy, of being “Uncle Remus himself.”18 March directly approached Local 3 voters with DRUM’S message that “the time has come for Black workers to wake up and refuse to be fooled by the tactics of professional negro sell-out artists. The time has come for us to support men for their political positions, not for their family or social relationships.”19 These views clearly resonated with some non-DRUM black workers. As one such autoworker put it when explaining his support of Jackson, “I do not agree with all of the tactics and strategies of D.R.U.M., but it is here for all who want to see it.... [Black promotions] and also the attitude of the white foremen has changed his approach toward the black workers, since the ‘DRUM guys’ started beating the DRUM against racism last May!”20

Despite such worker support, however, the April 9 election between Jackson and Hardy was a virtual repeat of the earlier election for trustee. Once again, a victor was not determined right away because the votes cast required a runoff election. And in this second election, during which Jackson received 1,254 votes to Hardy’s 2,800, once again the UAW was relieved while the leaders of DRUM were outraged.21 Both groups knew, from the large numbers of votes both March and Jackson had recently received, that DRUM was a legitimate contender for power in Local 3. Indeed, DRUM was firmly convinced that it was the UAW’s fear of this power that had led it to take extraordinary measures to ensure a black radical defeat.

According to DRUM, both the DPD and police from Hamtramck, allegedly with the tacit approval of the UAW, had worked together to prevent a Jackson victory. DRUM claimed that the DPD came to Jackson’s house on the morning of the election and “confiscated his license plates from his car under the pretense that they were stolen even though he produced his registration. They held his plates for a couple of hours and [then] returned them stating it was a mistake.”22 DRUM also maintained that a car with DRUM members Ray Johnson and Ron March was followed by both the DPD and the Hamtramck police. According to DRUM, “they were stopped at Lawton and Pasadena, taken out of the car at shot-gun point and arrested for allegedly assaulting an officer and resisting arrest.”23 On April 30, 1969, Jackson and March wrote a letter to the president of Local 3, Ed Liska, asking him to investigate the improprieties that they thought had taken place during the runoff election, but they received no satisfaction from this quarter.24 DRUM, which initially had been ambivalent if not downright hostile to the idea of entering the electoral arena, was amazed at the hostile reaction that its campaigning had touched off among the union traditionalists. DRUM hoped, however, that any irregular maneuvering on the part of the union leadership would merely serve to net DRUM more supporters from the still-disenchanted auto workforce. As DRUM noted optimistically, “the election demonstrated clearly to workers that the UAW bureaucracy was willing to risk outright scandal rather than to allow blacks to control their own union.”25

The UAW leadership, however, had no intention of allowing DRUM to capitalize on what was unequivocally a UAW victory. In 1970, the UAW faced DRUM once more in an electoral battle, and this time it hoped to neutralize completely the black radicals at Local 3. In March 1970, virtually every top leadership position in Local 3 was up for grabs as the elections for its Executive Board loomed and, once again, black revolutionaries geared up to battle union traditionalists. In the race for the presidency of Local 3, DRUM member March challenged incumbent Liska. In the race for vice president, Jackson faced off against incumbent Hardy. DRUM also ran Raymond Johnson for financial secretary, Gracie Wooten for recording secretary, and Carlos Williams for treasurer. DRUM members Betty Griffith, Charles Roberts, and Grover Douglas also ran for open trustee positions.26

Clearly, DRUM had not been cowed by its defeats in the elections of 1968 and 1969. Its bold electoral push in 1970 and its optimism that it would triumph can only be understood in the broader context of the tremendous inroads that other League components were simultaneously making across the Motor City. From city schools and universities to city streets and courtrooms, black and white radicals were on the move and were enjoying noticeable victories. As League leader Mike Hamlin put it, “the League had dizzying success.... [W]e felt that nothing could stop us.... [O]ur historic moment had arrived.”27 As one of the League’s most important organs, DRUM believed that it, too, would succeed in wrestling power from its arch nemesis in the auto plants just as the League’s urban components successfully were taking on city liberals and conservatives alike. As DRUM put it, “our movement has begun and it will not be stopped. VICTORY IS INEVITABLE.”28

But when DRUM geared up for the Local 3 elections on March 18, so did the UAW. In this final ugly battle between black revolutionaries and UAW traditionalists, the union leadership once again emerged victorious. Liska won the presidency with 2,732 votes to March’s 973. Jackson lost to Hardy, who received 2,470 votes. Wooten lost with 896 votes to Jerry Shelton’s 1,585. And Raymond Johnson received 666 votes to A. Newkirk’s 743. Only DRUM members Griffith, with 880 votes, and Williams, with 847 votes, had enough ballots in their favor to allow them a second chance at victory in a later runoff election.29

Even though the UAW traditionalist’s slate had defeated DRUM’S top candidates through the electoral process, never before had such controversy surrounded a UAW victory. Immediately after the victors were announced, workers at Dodge Main plant reported widespread improprieties in the election and registered their complaints with the UAW’s Credentials Committee. Such workers claimed that many retirees had been allowed to vote without proper identification and that only two or three balloting machines were working so that many active UAW members never had the chance to vote. They maintained as well that the machines that were working regularly were tampered with by union election officials and repairmen without the required challengers present, and that there was improper campaigning by Local 3 leadership candidates who were present illegally on the election floor. Some suggested that DRUM challengers were ignored, that the DRUM levers were often not working, and that there was a piece of metal over March’s lever in at least one polling booth. Finally, the complainants charged that ballots had been counted the next day even though the proper number of challengers was not present.30 DRUM members detailed these charges in the newsletter article “Liska Won at the Point of a Gun.”31 And at least thirty workers from Dodge Main plant eventually signed affidavits detailing the election fraud that they also claimed to have witnessed.32 In the end, however, “the Credentials Committee of the 22nd Constitutional Convention of the UAW [which] investigated protests of members of Local 3 ... found insufficient evidence to order a new election.”33

That the Credentials Committee took this position is not altogether surprising, as DRUM members were not alone in chronicling what had taken place during the Local 3 elections.34 The leadership of Local 3 also kept its own detailed notes on what had transpired on March 18 and 19, and it made sure to forward its accounts to President Reuther and Region 1 Director George Merrelli on March 24. According to one of these reports:

Problems developed as soon as the polls opened Wednesday morning at 4:45am.... DRUM candidates were in and out of the hall[,] constantly badgering voters.... [Q]uite a bit of drinking was taking place, and certain challengers were seen using pills of an unknown nature.... [O]n both days in the afternoon DRUM candidates plus about a hundred or so SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] people campaigned in front of the hall using bullhorns, stopping traffic, and using threats and scare tactics against the voters.... DRUM challenger Lewis Zachary, in a fit of anger, tipped over the retirees’ voting table and tore the voting log book. He also dragged a voter out of the booth while he was voting, under the pretext of challenging his vote.... In my opinion, the conduct of the DRUM people was disgraceful, and their sole purpose was to usurp the prestige of a peaceful honest local union election.35

The various “Election Notes” that arrived in Reuther’s office not only offered an account of the events of March 18 and 19 but also offered personal profiles and risk assessments of several DRUM members present on those days:

All news about this individual [Ron March] reveal that he is a complete failure and is using the black issue as the cause of his own failure.... [He is] a fiery type of man.... [General Baker] is a huge strong built guy with a very ugly face.... [H]e is not a speaker but a planner.... [Charles Wooten] is a tiger with emotions.... Wooten is a fiery speaker and a dangerous man.... [W]herever the leaders of DRUM go, he is right in the middle of the group.... [Raymond Johnson] is not intelligent in any way but is a hater all the way.... [Donald Jackson] is a quite nice guy and appears to be a nice guy.... [H]e doesn’t fit with the DRUM group but is with them all the time.36

Even though the UAW had successfully defeated the DRUM slate at Local 3, it did not relax thereafter. There was, after all, a runoff election coming up, and two DRUM members were candidates. Even though the UAW maintained that “the most dangerous DRUM people are the few young men who are hellbent on destruction,”37 the potential electoral victory of black DRUM women like Betty Griffith was obviously threatening as well. Right before the runoff election, Local 3 President Liska sent a telegram to Reuther in which he “urgently requested]” a meeting “with yourself and Brother Merrelli to discuss protection for this Local union in the forthcoming run off election. DRUM forces in the first election deliberately tried to sabotage election proceedings as well as results by direct force against membership.”38 But Liska need not have worried. During the Executive Board runoff, both DRUM candidates lost, and DRUM had clearly suffered a huge setback in every election that it entered. DRUM continued to maintain that these defeats were highly suspicious. As DRUM member John Watson put it, “DRUM suspected that the union would cheat,” but it was the effort that the union allegedly had expended on defeating DRUM that Watson found most shocking.39 According to Watson, the most appalling moment was when “George Merrelli, the regional UAW leader, stormed into the hall with his entire 50-man staff. They were armed and had the additional support of a contingent of police.”40 Whatever had actually happened during these elections, the fact remained that after March 1970, DRUM was certainly in decline. Because DRUM failed in its attempt to take power in the local, and because the company subsequently fired several key DRUM leaders, including March, black radicals in the other plants were deeply unsettled.

To increase their unease, after the defeat of DRUM at Local 3, the UAW leadership noticeably geared up for elections at Local 961 in May 1971. Local 961 included the Eldon Avenue plant, the home of ELRUM. The tensions between the UAW and ELRUM were perhaps even greater than those between the UAW and DRUM. ELRUM had escalated its attack on the union ever since Gary Thompson’s death, and also ELRUM already had run candidates, and did quite well, in an earlier Executive Board election.41 In addition, the union was even more defensive at Eldon than at Dodge Main because ELRUM was not the only vocal dissident group there. A UNC affiliate, the Eldon Safety Committee, had repeatedly joined ELRUM in its criticism of the UAW and of the union leadership at Eldon in particular. The union, however, did not make many distinctions among these dissident groups.

Members of ELRUM and members of the Eldon Safety Committee (led by UNC Co-Chair Jordan Sims) had only a loose connection, and the latter group often made it clear that it disapproved of the RUMs’ exclusionary policies. But to the union leadership at Eldon, there was little difference between these groups, and both had to be stopped. One leaflet put out by a pro-ad-ministration group in the plant indicates the degree to which Sims’s opponents saw him and ELRUM as one and the same. According to this leaflet, which authors claimed was penned by Sims himself in order to discredit him, “I organized E-L-R-U-M in December 1968. In January 1969 I led them in a wildcat, that got 22 of them fired.”42

Undeterred by such propaganda, black dissidents passed out questionnaires to Eldon employees asking them to note “wrongs that might have been committed by union or management” so that they could better “act in serving the needs of the workers.”43 Simultaneously, the leadership of Local 961 appealed directly to its membership to denounce the plant dissidents and to stand behind union loyalists in the upcoming election: “We would like to talk to you about DRUM and ELDRUM and the hate literature that they have put out in the plant.” They went on to say that Eldon’s workers should be wary of the RUMs because these radicals intended to take over the entire United States, not just the local.44 Because the union leadership was astute enough to realize that the appeal of the RUMs lie in their commitment to fighting racism, they further told the Eldon workers that “we like to point out to you that this LOCAL union has sent people to Lansing and Washington many times to help lobby for anti-discrimination legislation.... [I]t’s also interesting to note that we have worked closely with the NAACP in helping push through these liberal programs.”45

Even with all of these appeals to the rank and file at Eldon, however, in May 1971, ELRUM and the Eldon Safety Committee both enjoyed much support on the shop floor. This made it even more important for union traditionalists to prevail electorally as they had at Local 3, and campaigning became quite passionate as election day drew near. A group calling itself the Concerned Eldon Avenue Employees (known by ELRUM as “The Invisible Honkeys Slate”) put out a leaflet calling Sims, the Eldon Safety Committee’s choice for president, “an atheist who wants an all black union.” The group went on to say that Sims “is mentally ill. He is a cruel, selfish, uncouth nappy chinned BLACK MAN,” and it questioned that if he and his supporters “hate the UAW so badly and want an all black shop—why don’t they find employment elsewhere?” At the end of its newsletter, the Concerned Eldon Avenue Employees encouraged fellow workers to “support your local union and its hard working officials.”46

Unfazed by such negative campaign literature, Sims approached the voters of Local 961 with the following campaign agenda and response to his critics: “Line speed, health and safety violations from dirty floors to defective safety switches and poor ventilation are unbearable and unresolved. Nothing has been done about the excessive noise. If elected I’m going to use established procedures and I’ll see to it that federal and state laws are enforced.... I am not anti-International. The International exists to serve the membership and not the other way around as some people think.”47 In response to criticism that he was a front man for ELRUM and was seeking a UAW takeover, Sims wrote his own leaflet, in which he noted, “I am only one MAN seeking ONE OFFICE and I am willing to HONESTLY put my case before this MEMBERSHIP!”48

Sims campaigned against both the Local’s black incumbent, Elroy Richardson, and a white union steward named Frank McKinnon. Local 961’s election took place on May 12, 1971, and like the earlier election at the Dodge Main plant, at the union leadership’s request, there were armed guards on the premises to “prevent extremists and outsiders from disrupting the election process.”49 Also, as at Dodge Main plant, the votes in the Local 961 election were split, requiring a runoff election two weeks later between Sims and McKinnon, who had finished first and second, respectively. After the first election, the incumbent union president Richardson complained publicly that there had been many “‘outsiders’ in front of the hall,” and there were “black militant workers ... among election challengers.”50 Sims responded to Richardson’s allegations by filing his own complaint with the Michigan Civil Rights Commission, charging that the election process at Local 961 was being jeopardized by red- and race-baiting. Such unsavory tactics proved successful, as, on May 28, 1971, McKinnon won the runoff election, albeit by an extremely narrow margin.51

With the election of McKinnon, it appeared to UAW leaders that the black militants at Eldon finally were in retreat. Despite the Michigan Chronicle’s 1969 warning that if union reformers were “kept out of power, the UAW may well be adding to the list of dissidents who seek to rectify grievances with the company and union through channels such as DRUM and other militant groups have chosen,” by May 1971, UAW officials were thoroughly relieved that they had succeeded in stemming the tide of shop-floor dissent.52 With many RUM members fired or blacklisted from the industry, with the defeat of March and Sims, with Chrysler hiring more blacks into management, and with more moderate blacks winning union office around the city, the union leadership was newly confident that it had regained the upper hand on the shop floor and that labor relations soon would stabilize.53

Although the UAW may have been naive to think that its electoral successes had quelled shop-floor dissent, especially because management would continue to push autoworkers to the breaking point after 1971, it was right to believe that the RUMs had little remaining power. But while the union felt that it had played the decisive role in ridding the plant of RUM dissidents (and while leftist critics of the union often voiced the same opinion), the RUMs’ demise stemmed as well from limitations in their own agenda as from outside forces. Between 1967 and 1971, black autoworkers had admired the RUMs for their bravery when dealing with the company and the union. They also recognized that the RUMs were usually the first to speak up on their behalf when something egregious occurred in the workplace. But it is significant that so few of these workers actually became RUM members during these years. Ultimately the RUMs’ rhetoric, style, and racially exclusive and ill-planned tactics, as well as the fact that its male-dominated leadership too often saw the RUM struggle as a means to fulfil the destiny of “black manhood,” had severely weakened these organizations over time.

In their efforts to “tell it like it is,” the RUMs often offended autoworkers, particularly the older ones. As the only white RUM member, John Taylor, put it, “the older people had a lot of trouble with the whole tone.”54 RUM leaders’ reaction to any discomfort with their tone was simply to say, “if anyone becomes easily offended when they hear or read cursing or cussing words, profanity, etc. Don’t read this article!”55 Yet, even while older black workers generally agreed with the RUMs that the racism in the plants was intolerable and that those who allowed the discrimination to flourish were absolutely in the wrong, many were turned off when the RUMs accused black union officials of being “Sambos” and “Uncle Toms” and called them “Mother Fuckers.”

The off-putting rhetoric of RUM leaders directly undercut the worker cooperation that they sorely needed if they wanted to lead the labor movement. In the April 3, 1968, ELRUM, for example, ELRUM leaders chose to criticize the union for the very real problem of white women getting preferential hiring treatment over black women by calling the white women “White Bitches” who worked for “Elroy’s [Richardson] prostitute service.” They went on to say that these “Honkey Whores” “turned tricks” for the “Uncle Toms and dumb Honkeys” in Local 961, and especially for the “Fat old Honkey Butch pollack Backavatich.”56 To black workers who had long fought against the cavalier use of racial epithets and to female workers (both black and white) who had always condemned sexist rhetoric, such language was inexcusable. According to Taylor, this particular ELRUM article “really turned people off.”57 In response to this piece, one black Eldon worker wrote to RUM leaders about the “obscene pamphlet you gave me yesterday morning”: “Your pamphlet displayed disrespect for your fellow workman and was a disgrace to every black woman who works here.... [Y]our expressions make you a discredit to the black man and the black cause.... [W]e black men of the Eldon Ave. Axle don’t need nasty talk and cuss words to express ourselves.... [T]hen you come along with those terms ‘House Niggers’ ... but I am no nigger now and I never will be one.”58

Not only did RUM leaders routinely use racially inflammatory and sexist language, but they also made poor choices with regard to organizational style. For example, when RUM leaders chose to wear black berets and carry weapons, many of the older women in the Eldon plant felt “physically afraid of the ELRUM people.”59 During the Local 961 election, “most of the people counting the ballots were female and older ... and they thought the ELRUM people had guns and were going to go berserk.”60 These women were not necessarily paranoid since RUM leaders had made no apologies when they publicly stated that “those who oppose us will be dealt with through any means necessary.”61 This did not bode well for the RUMs’ longevity. As Taylor said, after seeing this fear in the Eldon women, “I knew right then that there had been a tremendous failure of ELRUM.”62

RUM leaders came to alienate workers not only in the realm of rhetoric and style but also with some of their tactical decisions regarding which workers to court within the plants and when to engage in direct action. From the RUMs’ inception, for example, their leaders insisted that members refuse to work with whites in the plants, and yet whites made up at least 40 percent of every plant that RUMs were in. ELRUM, for example, rarely gave its leaflets to white workers.63 Such insularity not only persuaded the UAW that the RUMs were anti-democratic, but it also alienated numerous white workers who might otherwise have been sympathetic to the RUMs’ call for reining in management. As UNC leader Sims noted, “when ELRUM first started, all the workers could understand was the hostile belligerent or condescending attitude of management to workers ... [and] the whites wanted to help push the program, even though it was black.”64 But when RUM leaders refused such help, many plant whites became openly hostile to them. The RUMs’ racial exclusiveness also alienated black workers. As the African American who wrote to ELRUM about its controversial “prostitute” newsletter put it, “until we unite and work as one, and I don’t mean black and all black; I mean black and white together; we will always be building and others will be tearing down.”65

Also, when the RUMs engaged in direct-action initiatives on the shop floor, such as wildcat strikes, they often opted for macho flare over detailed planning. After Gary Thompson was killed at the Eldon plant, for example, ELRUM leaders quickly moved from calling Chrysler a “murderer” to initiating a wildcat without first thinking through how they would generate sufficient worker support. As Taylor remembered, “we hadn’t organized our base correctly. We weren’t ready for the strike hit. We should have agitated more around the issue of Gary Thompson and safety in general.”66 Not only did ELRUM fail to secure the necessary support for its wildcat on an ideological level, but it also ignored the economic considerations that were in many Eldon workers’ minds at the time. According to Taylor, Thompson’s death “just verified [what] we had been saying and we were kind of self-righteous. In our ignorance, we failed to note that Memorial Day was on Friday that day.... [S]o they [the workers] were getting triple time and we had picked that day for a strike.”67

RUM leaders’ strategies for union elections turned out to be as flawed as their strategies for work stoppages. On the one hand, RUM leaders’ tactical decision to enter the union’s electoral process was based merely on a desire to upset the status quo in the plants. As DRUM’S Baker put it, “we never really ran to win.”68 Thus, when RUM leaders made a bid for union office, they did not attempt to work with progressive black or white union committeemen or stewards; nor did they work very hard to win support from mainstream black and white workers. On the other hand, by running candidates in union elections, the RUMs had entered the UAW’s turf and thus had exposed themselves to public attack. Ironically, not only did the RUMs suffer in these local elections, but so did the non-RUM dissidents who also ran for office and were trying to improve shop-floor life along biracial lines.

The fact that the RUMs and the League were completely male-dominated, and that leaders often rationalized the broader workers’ struggle in terms of securing the privileges of black manhood, also severely compromised these organizations’ viability. It was not unimportant, for example, that ELRUM’s caustic denunciation of Chrysler’s role in Thompson’s death specifically noted that this worker had a pregnant wife at home. Indeed, much of the RUM leadership’s hostility toward auto companies and the UAW alike directly stemmed from its belief that both groups actively denied black men their sanctified role as men, husbands, and fathers. RUM literature often couched the shop floor’s struggles taking place across Detroit in terms of the black man’s need to assert his manhood so that every white man—and black woman—would be prevented from seeing him as inferior. As DRUM leaders put it, they had listened to Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown and “were inspired by the sentiment and ideas of manhood expressed by their words.”69 After repeatedly outlining what the role of “black men” should be, RUM leaders instructed members and supporters alike to “keep your head up, look whitey in the eyes and say, ‘I’m just as good as you.’”70 In addition, RUM leaders specifically noted that such manhood must be asserted so that white workers no longer would disrespect “their” black women.71 As one RUM official put it, “all white men think our women are whores and can be had.... [B]lack men must protect their women and children.”72

Not surprisingly, the numerous and highly dedicated black women in the RUMs and the League did not appreciate such patronizing rhetoric, and when the men in these organizations refused to tackle their own sexism, internal group tensions mounted. Just as there was a women’s revolt within the Black Panther Party between 1969 and 1970,73 women in the RUMs and the League also rebeled against the practices of the men in these groups. As one female member put it, the League and the RUMs let women do “much of the work in the movement—typing, cleaning, making leaflets ... but when it came to ‘shine time’ we were not anywhere.”74 Over time the RUMs’ and the League’s stated quest to empower black men, as well as to have white men and black women alike give black men their due respect, came to alienate many of the women in these organizations. According to activist Miriam Kramer,

A lot of us got pulled into the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and we were its backbone. But male supremacy was rampant and we never got proper credit.... [W]omen like Cassandra Smith, Edna Watson, Dorothy Duberry, Diane Bernard, and Gracie Wooten played tremendous roles.... [W]e were forceful but we were played down.... [W]e endured a lot of name calling and had to fight male supremacy. Some would call us the IWW: Ignorant Women of the World.75

League member Edna Ewell Watson had a similar assessment of women’s position in that organization:

The role of women in the League was traditionalist in terms of black patriarchal ideology and political priorities. Women were positioned and constructed to be supportive of the male leadership.... Many of the male leaders acted as if women were sexual commodities, mindless, emotionally unstable, or invisible.... There was no lack of role for women in the League as long as they accepted subordination and invisibility.76

Kramer and Watson were not exaggerating the subservient position to which black men had relegated women in the League and the RUMs. The League, for example, routinely assigned women to internal committees such as the “Youth Committee,” the “Clean-up Committee,” and the “Cooking Committee” in disproportionate numbers. Leaders placed “Cassandra, Sandra, Julia and Jerome” on the Cooking Committee and “Julia, Cassandra, Waistline, Evette, and Cadesia” on the Clean-up Committee. The Youth Committee likewise was comprised of “Diana, Gracie, Julia, Trisha, Ilena, Cassandra, and John.”77

Given the central role that securing the privileges of “black manhood” played in their desire to tackle shop floor discrimination, not surprisingly, the male leaders of the League and its RUM affiliates were largely unapologetic about their position of dominance. It angered leaders John Williams, Rufus Burke, and Clint Marbury, for example, when anyone in the organization tried “to elevate the problems of women on par with capitalism by calling it sexism.”78 Whereas some men in the RUMs felt benevolent toward the women over whom they felt dominance (noting that black men should be “respectful in relationships with women and children”),79 other equally domineering RUM men were less charitable. They maintained that “our Sisters on the other hand must first respect themselves before they can ask for ‘respect.’” They went on to suggest that black women needed to be more circumspect about their “dress, language and disposition.”80 Years later, Watson speculated that “perhaps the different handling of gender issues might have made the League more viable, but history was against us.”81

While the RUMs’ gender politics weakened the organizations, larger political divisions within their parent group, the League, dealt the death blow. On June 12, 1971, the League split in an ugly factional fight. As League scholar James Geschwender has argued, “the contradictions in the League version of the capitalist-colonial exploitation model suggested incompatible tactical lines, which were a constant source of strain in the organization.” When they split from the League, Executive Board members Kenneth Cockrel, Mike Hamlin, and John Watson argued that the organization always had been based on three distinct forces: the “proletarian revolutionaries” like the three of them, who advocated simultaneous and equal organizational efforts in the plant and the community; the “backward reactionary-nationalist lumpen-proletarians,” such as General Baker and Chuck Wooten, whose efforts at plant organizing included anti-white sentiment and had too many “cultural nationalist tendencies”; and the “petty-bourgeois opportunists,” such as Luke Tripp, who sought “refuge in the ivy-covered halls of white capitalist universities.”82

As it turned out, the Baker / Wooten group most often clashed ideologically and strategically with Cockrel, Hamlin, and Watson.83 To Baker and the other “lumpen-proletarians,” the Cockrel group’s legal work and many of its community-based efforts were too reformist and spread the League too thinly. Baker, in particular, felt that with Black Star Productions, Black Star Printing, two Black Star Bookstores, and a Black Consciousness Library, the League drained too many of its resources away from the all-important shop floor.84 Of course, the Cockrel group could not have disagreed more. Referring to the extensive work that Cockrel had done in the Motor City’s courtrooms, one supporter said, “Our work did not consist of a mere defense of cases in court, but mass education and agitation through rallies [and] the structuring of the Labor Defense Coalition to show the class nature of the system.... The court was used to educate the community to contradictions between labor and capital [such as] in the James Johnson case.85

Indeed, the Cockrel group felt that the League had earned substantial support within the black community precisely because of its legal activism, whereas the organization’s other factions “used their position in the League as a basis for an arrogant, condescending parade inside the black community.”86 According to Cockrel, Watson, and Hamlin, the League’s long-term potential was destroyed by those who were too steeped in “exclusionary” black nationalism. As they said, “the Leagues’ failure to promote the extension of proletarian consciousness among the masses of whites in the United States will be fatal to our struggle.”87 In their opinion, “the politics of black nationalism had been injected into the workers’ organization through gossip and behind the back conversation rather than through the vehicle of open political discussion.”88 They argued that certain exclusionary members’ “conduct as regards to other human beings, especially women, was on a level wholly inconsistent with continuance in the ranks of a revolutionary organization.”89

Even though the League’s final split was couched in purely political and strategic terms, the experiences of the RUMs in the plants clearly indicate that the roots of its demise were social and cultural as well. One need only look at the League’s “code of conduct”—in which members were reminded not to “hit or swear at people,” not to engage in “excessive drinking or getting high in public,” and to be “respectful in relationships with women”90—to see a key reason why there was little RUM presence in the plants after 1971. It was not that all League members engaged in such inappropriate behavior; it was simply that enough of them were guilty of it to cause a serious public relations problem for the organization. As the League’s Executive Board noted on March 29,1971, “such conduct damages our organization’s reputation and drains legal and other resources needlessly,” after it again reminded members that there would be “no loafing around the offices ... no unnecessary fights or abrasive contact with the public or member in our ranks.”91

Whatever “officially” killed the RUMs, when the UAW looked around Detroit’s auto plants in 1971 and concluded that shop-floor dissent was on the wane because of the RUMs’ defeat, it underestimated the average worker’s desire for a more humane and less racist workplace. Historian Steve Jefferys has written that, in the plants at this time, there were “two tendencies among the black workers ... those influenced by black nationalist and socialist politics of the black power movement, and those blacks who had entered the local UAW machine.”92 Mistakenly, the UAW leadership saw the in-plant political situation in this same dichotomous manner. Because UAW leaders could only see shop-floor politics in terms of those who were “commies” or those who were union loyalists, they were blind to the legitimacy of another shop-floor dissident movement of distressed autoworkers that flourished in the wake of the intense management speed up which was neither black nationalist nor communist, nor safely within the leadership fold.

The UAW did not adequately take into account the implications of the fact that working conditions in city plants kept deteriorating between 1971 and 1973. Chrysler’s plants in particular had become nothing short of hazardous, as that company ran production around the clock and put most of its workers on inhumane overtime schedules to meet an unprecedented demand for its cars. Chrysler’s sales and earnings between April and June 1973, for example, were nearly double that of the previous year. Yet its prosperity came not through an expansion of its operations or by updating and modernizing its existing facilities, but rather from an intense speedup.93 Although the UAW leadership no longer had to contend with the vocal attacks of the RUMs during these years, it still was bombarded with grievances about safety and production standards.94 And while the RUMs weren’t there to draw attention to it, the fact remained that workers were still suffering serious injuries on the shop floor.95

By 1973, safety conditions were deplorable in virtually every Detroit auto plant. On August 15, 1973, the Detroit Free Press detailed the substandard conditions found by the UAW at twenty of them.96 By that year, health and safety had become such a prominent issue that the UAW’s national publication, The Washington Report, also addressed the issue of safety, workplace chemicals, and on-the-job accidents on a regular basis.97 But as had been the case between 1960 and 1967, the issue of health and safety had become most pressing in Chrysler plants after 1971. Notably the Michigan Civil Rights Commission (MCRC) had deemed safety conditions “abominable”98 at Chrysler’s Eldon Avenue plant, which “covered over a million square feet and housed 2600 machine tools of over 170 types”99 This was not an altogether surprising assessment, considering that there was only one safety representative responsible for as many as 2,500 automotive machines and between 75 and 80 pieces of mobile equipment, such as jitneys and trucks.100 And, according to one scholar, “it seems to be the practice of foremen, when equipment is needed, to pull the tags off of the equipment in the repair area that badly need corrective maintenance and put them back into service on the floor.”101

During the early 1970s, as more and more workers were injured on the job at Eldon, the plant was subjected to an increasing number of workplace inspections. Following the particularly grisly on-the-job death of Gary Thompson in 1970, UAW Safety Director Lloyd Utter inspected the Eldon facility, noting a “complete neglect of stated maintenance procedures in this plant. The equipment is being operated in an inexcusably dangerous condition.”102 As a result of such reports, Chrysler acknowledged in August 1970 that it must correct “a number of safety and housekeeping items.” But a few months later, Utter once again reported that “there seems to be no concern about housekeeping in this plant and the safety program reflects this lack of concern.”103

Between 1971 and 1973, nearly every Detroit autoworker was dealing with oil slicks on shop floor, faulty cranes, presses without guards, fumes, and hundreds of other safety violations. Journalist Rachel Scott was so astounded by working conditions during this period that in 1974 she wrote a powerful expose of the auto industry.104 Scott discovered that in Chrysler plants “on an average day ... ten to twelve workers were injured seriously enough to be sent to Workmen’s Compensation lawyers at Chrysler for evaluation.”105 According to Joseph Baltimore, a former Workmen’s Compensation Board adjuster for the company, Chrysler so desperately wanted to protect its “lost-time” record that there were “a number of cases where people had operations, fingers cut off, and they [brought] them back to work the same day.”106

Once again UAW leaders did not ignore such terrible shop-floor conditions. In June 1972, for example, President William Gilbert of Local 7 spoke to members about numerous in-plant problems that existed and then “put management on notice that this will no longer be tolerated.... [S]erious problems exist in health and safety.”107 Likewise, in August 1973, UAW Region 1 leaders decided to go over management’s head when they sent the Occupational Health and Safety Administration a telegram demanding an inspection of Chrysler’s Forge plant, where “three times within a two week period, a defective overhead crane dumped tons of steel in pedestrian areas.”108 But the union leadership still did not want to hear what workers themselves thought should be done to correct these problems. When the United Justice Caucus (UJC) on August 31, 1972, submitted “a petition signed by over 800 members of local 7 to President Bill Gilbert calling for a special meeting to deal with problems,” Gilbert refused to accept it.109 Not surprisingly, then, as safety conditions did not improve, and as worker injuries mounted, UAW members came increasingly to believe that their leaders’ efforts were completely inadequate. As one worker with a pregnant wife and five children, Nathaniel Williams, wrote to UAW President Leonard Woodcock in 1973:

I was under the impression that the union (UAW) was establish to protest the inalienable rights of its individual members from certain injustices related to his employment.... But from what I have seen and for what I have had to endure from the inadequacies of the union—have cause me to believe the relationship the higher union officials has with the lower union members, is that of being the other end of the company’s VISE by which workers are ... SQUEEZED INTO THE MIDDLE WITHOUT RETRIBUTION.110

Worker Beulah Wallace voiced a similar sentiment in another letter to Woodcock: “I cannot get representation from the local union ... when I ask my foreman to call my committeeman, he just laughs at me and tells me to catch the committeeman at the coffee machine.... What is happening to the U.A.W., which at one time under President Walter Reuther was one of the greatest unions in the free world?”111

As a result of such hazardous conditions on Detroit’s shop floors, as well as workers’ growing perception that the UAW was still not tackling plant problems aggressively enough, shop-floor dissent did not die with the RUMs. Yet because the union had so heavily attributed shop-floor dissent to the League and the RUMs, it was slow to realize that such dissatisfaction had a life independent of revolutionary black or white agitation. Indeed to the company and the union, the shop-floor labor-relations system, unlike between 1967 and 1971, now seemed to be operating quite smoothly. While each well knew that problems still existed in the auto plants, at least everyone appeared to be following the established rules for addressing them. It was not until March 1973, when a Workman’s Compensation Bureau hearing referee ruled on Johnson’s claim against Chrysler, that the UAW finally realized how fed up its workers really were with these “rules.” The union responded to this realization, however, by gearing up for battle.

Back in 1971, when James Johnson, Jr. retained the services of white radical attorney Ronald Glotta to represent him in his workman’s compensation case against Chrysler Corporation, no one could have predicted that his actions would once again shake up Detroit. Chrysler had rejected Johnson’s claim outright and, thus, it would be two years before anyone would hear of him again. After years of legal wrangling, however, Glotta and lawyers for Chrysler had the opportunity to present their arguments before a hearing referee of the Workman’s Compensation Bureau in a very eerie reprise of the Johnson murder trial. Although Glotta presented much of the same evidence in this hearing as Cockrel had done in the murder trial, including calling many of the same witnesses, Glotta’s legal strategy had a slightly different slant.

Whereas attorneys in the murder trial focused on the life history of Johnson, in the compensation case, Glotta honed in far more on the actions of Chrysler. Glotta essentially put the corporation on trial. Using as his legal precedent a case argued in 1960 by attorney Donald Loria, Carter v. General Motors, Glotta argued that working at Chrysler, and specifically working under the inhumane conditions and overt racial discrimination that Chrysler condoned, had exacerbated Johnson’s precarious mental state and caused him to have a breakdown.112 In short, Glotta forcefully maintained that Johnson’s breakdown was a work-related injury. It was not until the Carter v. General Motors case that mental disability qualified for compensation benefits under Michigan law, and Glotta hoped to show that the working and racial conditions at Chrysler indeed had mentally disabled his client.

The details of Johnson’s compensation hearing closely mirror those of the murder trial, except that in these proceedings, Johnson’s “insanity” came under far more scrutiny than it had in the criminal trial. For starters, Chrysler’s lawyers did not allow the psychological evaluations from the defense team in the criminal trial to go unchallenged. These attorneys had Johnson reevaluated by a Dr. Gorden Forrer, who categorically rejected Dr. Clemens Fitzgerald’s original diagnosis that Johnson was schizophrenic. Forrer claimed that Johnson had a mere “characterological disorder with paranoid trends,” and that his only real problem was that “his psyche causes him to view reality as a racist plot.”113 In Forrer’s opinion, Johnson’s goal was to “destroy white representatives of society” not because of racist behavior toward him, but because “he views [them] as an extension of the repressive, depriving, threatening authority of his childhood father.”114 Once again, the question was raised whether Johnson was indeed scarred by American racism—in this case imparted by Chrysler—or whether he was simply plagued by an “ever-present race consciousness.”115

On February 28, 1973, Hearing Referee John J. Conley handed down his ruling. In his twenty-eight-page landmark decision, Conley, whom Glotta described as a “liberal with a good heart,” ruled in favor of Johnson, ordering Chrysler to pay compensation benefits to him. Additionally, Conley ordered that “said defendant shall furnish, or cause to be furnished to said employee, medical (including psychiatric treatment and counseling and group therapy as recommended by Dr. Fitzgerald in his testimony.)”116 To justify his decision, Conley outlined the various events at Eldon relating to Johnson’s breakdown, including the fact that on the day of the murders Johnson had been told to go to work in “the dirtiest, the hottest, hardest, and most menial in the department ... and he believed that he had by hard and meritorious service worked his way out of such a job.”117 When he was suspended for not going to that job, Conley concluded, Johnson believed that he had been fired. As Conley put it, Johnson “was convinced his persecutors had won and when he shot the three men he was acutely and overtly psychotic.... [H]is actions were not the actions of a sane criminal.”118 In his concluding remarks, Conley stated that although the case had received “considerable publicity and created considerable interest in it, such tragic results, of an employment caused or aggravated mental illness, does not in any way change the legal issues, or influence, or affect plaintiff’s entitlement to workman’s compensation.”119 Conley then awarded Johnson workman’s compensation benefits of $75 per week, dating back to the day of his “injury”—the day of the murders—July 15, 1970.

From the moment that he heard about Conley’s decision, Johnson tried to distance himself from the media hype surrounding it. “I am no hero,” he said. “I never wanted to be a hero. I just wanted to be left alone to do my job and make an honest living.... [I]t was either that job or I went on welfare.”120 Johnson’s attorney, however, deliberately highlighted the controversial implications of his client’s case. As Glotta told the Detroit Free Press, “this landmark decision is a direct indictment of the racism and inhuman working conditions at Chrysler. Chrysler pulled the trigger which resulted in Johnson’s insanity and the death of three men.”121 In another press release, Glotta pointed out that “the workman’s compensation decision shifts the burden of economic responsibility from the tax payers of Michigan, who have been paying for Johnson’s incarceration and treatment, to the real culprit, Chrysler Corporation.”122

In light of speeches such as Glotta’s, and anticipating the outrage of many conservative Detroiters with the workman’s compensation ruling, Ernie Fackler, Director of the Michigan Bureau of Workman’s Compensation, stated that although “it appears the state is giving cash to criminals ... we are not condoning his crimes, which are serious indeed. But we are saying that this man was mentally disabled, in part, due to his job.”123 He went on to say that “this was an especially agonizing decision because of the less than aggressive defense put up by the Chrysler Corporation. In fact they said nothing to refute the facts in this case.”124 But statements like Fackler’s, and even articles in national publications like the Wall Street Journal, which suggested that this ruling had “carefully separated the killings from the workman’s compensation issue,”125 had virtually no impact on the storm of criticism that followed the Conley ruling.

Some critics of the Johnson ruling placed as much blame on Chrysler as on the liberal official who had handed it down. As an editorial in the Detroit News put it, while Conley’s decision took Detroit back to the “dark ages,” “Chrysler’s non-defense in this case is almost as shocking as the final judgement.” The Detroit News editorialized that “Chrysler Corporation, for whatever internal corporate reasons, has done a disservice to business in Michigan and the employment of many disadvantaged workers.”126 Most critics of the Conley decision were not as restrained, however. To them, his decision was “a ruling against reason,” and they suggested further that “for the sake of common sense, this ruling needs reversing.”127 Indeed, to conservative white Detroiters, Conley’s decision was not just a blow to Chrysler; it was the most offensive example to date of liberals catering to blacks in the city’s legal system. In their minds, the Johnson compensation ruling, following as it did a string of equally “outrageous” legal maneuvers since 1969, was final confirmation that black interests had superseded white in Detroit.128

Whites in Detroit’s surrounding suburbs were equally incensed and surprised by the Johnson ruling. As a letter to a newspaper in the virtually all-white Macomb County noted, “Ever since we read last week about the horrendous decision imposed on Chrysler Corporation ... we have wondered if sanity and justice prevail anymore anywhere.... [I]t wouldn’t be out of order either to have the Bureau examine the credentials of its hearing referee.”129 More than all of the other controversial legal decisions between 1969 and 1973, the Johnson compensation ruling had given substance to the lofty liberal principle of “reparations.” It had not been particularly threatening when liberal leaders had espoused the principle of reparation, but when “reparations” meant dollars in compensation payments, white conservatives were incensed.

According to one auto industry scholar, the Johnson verdict had particularly “ugly overtones among white workers.”130 But in fact, there were white workers who could see that something positive might be made of Johnson’s unprecedented compensation award. Maybe, they thought, the UAW would use this case as ammunition in its battle to clean up the auto plants. Indeed, not a few workers at Chrysler held this hope. But the UAW was not at all inclined to do this. From its perspective, anything connected to Johnson seemed only to be a lightening rod for shop-floor destabilization and an erosion of its authority.

Back in July 1970, when James Johnson actually had committed the murders, the union had been noticeably silent on the matter.131 Embroiled as it was in the election battles with DRUM and ELRUM, the union did not want to call further attention to Johnson, as he was so popular with the plant dissidents. It irritated local union leaders immensely that shop-floor militants were “playing brother Johnson up as a hero.” Leaders of Local 961 pointed out that “this local union believes that brother Johnson was sick” and that the attention on him was creating “a false image of your local union [and of the] working conditions in the Chrysler Eldon Avenue Axle Plant.”132 It also troubled union officials that, after the murders, line foremen reported that workers were saying things like “this evens things up” and seemed to be proud that foremen were now afraid of them.133 Such fallout was precisely what local union leaders wanted no part of. They thought that the hype around the Johnson case would simply fade away, especially after the RUMs were ousted from the plants. But when Johnson’s compensation ruling made headlines in March 1973, many workers, both black and white, believed that their complaints about the conditions in the plants had finally been validated. By 1973, numerous autoworkers could agree with a legal spokesman who said that “it is hoped that the Johnson case will become the spearhead for a new effort to improve working conditions not only at the Eldon Plant but in all the plants in the United States,” and that “this victory can become even more meaningful if it is seen as the result of a united effort by many people and [it is] used to launch an even greater effort to fight the very conditions which drove James Johnson to the insane act of shooting and killing three other employees.”134

Disgruntled workers who had been relatively silent for the previous two years were energized by Johnson’s victory in 1973. When a radical group called the Motor City Labor League put out a leaflet exclaiming that “the James Johnson case is a victory for all of us. WE SHOULD TAKE ADVANTAGE OF IT,”135 its message found receptive ears. Six days after the verdict, three autoworkers fired from the Eldon plant for wildcatting in 1969—Jordan Sims, John Taylor, and Fred Holsey—wrote to UAW president Leonard Woodcock saying they wanted to meet with him to reevaluate their own discharges. They told Woodcock, “we were fired because we fought the conditions which Chrysler has chosen to maintain at the Eldon Plant which led to the psychotic breakdown of Mr. Johnson and the death of three fellow employees.... [T]he recent Johnson decision is a vindication of the position we took prior to our discharges.”136 On March 15, these workers also wrote to the Detroit Free Press: “We are dismayed at your recent editorial regarding the James Johnson workman’s compensation decision.... [W]ith humane, nondiscriminating employment practices, Chrysler would still have four good tax paying workers at the Eldon Plant.”137

Although the UAW leadership considered itself to be a pillar of the liberal coalition in the city that clearly welcomed the implications of the Johnson award, labor liberals did not see the Conley ruling in a similarly positive light. Indeed Sims, Taylor, and Holsey met with so little success in their meeting with Woodcock that the next day they decided to try talking to another UAW leader, Douglas Fraser. In their meeting with Fraser the trio discussed not only their specific discharges but also problems with the UAW contract. Sims wanted the UAW to push for inclusion of Section 502 of the National Labor Relations Act in the upcoming contract. As Section 502 stated, “nor shall the quitting of labor by an employee or employees in good faith because of abnormally dangerous conditions for work at the place of employment of such employee or employees be deemed a strike,” and Sims felt that workers desperately needed such powerful language in their agreement with Chrysler.138 But having recently spent so much energy to bring about Sims’s defeat in the 1971 election at Local 961, the UAW was reluctant to see the Johnson ruling as an opportunity to push for his reinstatement, and union leaders certainly were not going to take seriously his suggestions regarding contract language or bargaining strategy.

But Sims was not the only Detroit autoworker who saw the Johnson decision as an opportunity for the union to push the company or the labor relations system in more worker-oriented directions. Only days before Conley announced his decision in the Johnson case, a group of workers at Chrysler’s Jefferson Avenue assembly plant had become fed up with the conditions there and decided to walk out in protest. These workers were still out on a wildcat days later when Conley announced his ruling and they felt a surge of optimism that their union would authorize their illegal strike since it was over many of the same issues that had broken James Johnson. They knew it would not be unheard of for the UAW to call such a strike during the term of the contract, as it had done just that in the highly public Lordstown strike of 1972.139 But the leadership of Jefferson Local 7 did not support its workers. Instead, on March 8, 1973, local union officials issued the leaflet “Walk outs: unauthorized strike must stop!!!”140 and looked on as Chrysler subsequently fired several of the Jefferson workers who had wildcatted.

Because of its bitter and recent battles with the RUMs between 1968 and 1971, the UAW was immediately hostile to the dissent and militancy it saw resurfacing in 1973. Union leaders saw a revolutionary black nationalist agenda behind every shop-floor push to humanize the plant or to liberalize the labor relations system, and they were determined not to facilitate that agenda at all costs. Even though top union leaders knew that it was generally in their interest to address the issues that created shop-floor dissent, in 1973, they ignored this wisdom.141 Blinded by political paranoia, the union opted to block dissent at every turn. In fact, the militancy among autoworkers in 1973 was not born of black nationalist agitation. By that year, autoworker dissent had become broad-based, multiracial, and politically diverse. Ironically, like its liberal counterparts in the city, the union leadership could have embraced its members’ energy and determination without compromising its beliefs.

As union leaders might have remembered, there had in fact been a biracial and broad-based group of dissidents in the auto plants who were not affiliated with the RUMs for a long time. While workers attracted to the politics of black nationalism and revolution joined the RUMs between 1968 and 1971, others had been joining the United National Caucus (UNC) and its various offshoots in plants around Detroit. As the RUMs’ presence declined in the plants, the UNC only grew. The UNC and its affiliated groups were attractive to workers primarily because they agitated very effectively and consistently around the issue of workplace safety. They published informative newsletters such as the Mack Safety Watchdog and the United Justice Train, which kept workers apprised of the many hazards on the shop floor and instructed them of their rights under their contract. The July 1972 issue of the United Justice Train, for example, reported that “worn out sockets slip off the bolts, peeling skin off the knuckles.... Overhead motors are fastened to the cables with homemade wore gadgets. When these slip off it means a broken head for whoever is underneath.”142

The UNC had always welcomed both black and white trade union activists, and while it was extremely critical of the racism in the plant and agitated against it, it never espoused black nationalist rhetoric so politically moderate black workers could participate comfortably. It was not that the UNC had been hostile to the black nationalists and revolutionaries in the RUMs when they launched workplace protests. Indeed, the UNC often courted RUM support as it clearly did during the election at Local 961 in 1971. But the relationship between the RUMs and the UNC had nevertheless been fraught with tension. While the RUMs often saw the UNC as bourgeois opportunists, the UNC felt that the RUMs were making a huge tactical mistake by not including whites and not attempting to reform, rather than overthrow, the UAW. Although the UNC did not like UAW policies any better than the RUMs did, it did support the institution of the UAW and wanted to bring it back to its earlier, more militant days.

But the UAW did not take the UNC at its word, nor did it understand that the UNC’s appeal was growing among Detroit’s autoworkers. Indeed, while UNC co-chair Sims had lost to McKinnon in the May 1971 runoff election at Local 961, Sims had received 1,142 votes to McKinnon’s 1,178, indicating the considerable support he enjoyed even in that early year. But because the UAW leadership did not recognize the key differences between the UNC and the RUMs, when the RUMs fell apart after 1971, the union leadership mistakenly assumed that the support for activists like Sims also would fizzle.

Workers’ support for the UNC, and for UNC representatives like Jordan Sims, only spread after 1971. Between 1971 and 1973, the UNC managed not only to win over many more shop-floor workers, but it also began to work with many of the remaining black and white revolutionary activists whenever a major dispute with the company or the union erupted. Black radicals, for example, had come to respect the UNC for its active support of black workers in their confrontations with foremen. When black worker Tilden Engle shot his foreman, Regis Lantz, in Chrysler’s Jefferson plant, the remaining black nationalists stood by him, but so did the UNC. As the January 1973 United Justice Train put it, “maybe the important question is: why does a worker become so desperate that he can think of no solution except shooting a foreman? The answer to that question is that the worker has no confidence in the willingness or ability, of Local 7 in particular, to deal with his problems.”143 White leftists also grew more willing to work with the UNC because, as members of the International Socialists put it, “the UNC has regularly propagandized against racism and unemployment” and “is still the only cross-local oppositional group that exists inside the UAW.”144

This new cooperation between various dissident strains within the plant was born not only of necessity but also of a significant ideological shift within the minds of the remaining RUM activists. With the League in tatters, many black labor militants in 1973 began to reconsider their previous position of refusing to work with whites. As the remaining members of the Jefferson assembly plant RUM eventually decided, “we must refuse to fight our own class allies,”145 and they began to call “for the unity of the working class against the capitalist class.”146 The RUM members remaining at Chrysler’s Dodge Truck plant also had changed their view on working with whites: “The old RUM movements had a very positive aspect in that they organized workers into a force to get something done. But why didn’t the RUM movement last? ... [Y]ou just can’t organize black workers alone because white, arab, Mexican, Puerto Rican, etc. all workers’ face the same conditions as black workers ... the new RUM movements understand that it’s not just a black-white struggle ... but a struggle between the classes.”147 Over time, many original RUM members even began to support the UNC’s position on the need for claiming, rather than rejecting, the UAW as an institution. Some remaining RUMs, such as JARUM, actually decided to place the UAW insignia on the masthead of their dissident paper. As members of JARUM told fellow workers, “it is your union and it is my union. We see that we can run it together and we must run it together.”148

Equally significantly, by 1973, white leftists in the plant also became more vocal about their long-held position that the struggle in the plants should be understood as a worker, not purely a black liberation, enterprise. While it was far easier for dissidents to work together across racial and political lines in 1973 than it had been in 1967, this did not mean that there were still no serious political differences between the UNC, the remaining RUM activists, and the white leftist dissidents. Indeed, as some members of the virtually all-white International Socialists saw it, “without any question, the UNC might tomorrow become an obstacle.”149 It did mean, however, that shop-floor dissent over the poor working conditions and racism in the plants was now grounded in coalition efforts. As the UJC wrote, “we workers often are divided along race, age, and sexual lines [but] ... those divisions serve only to weaken us.”150

And indeed the shop-floor dissent that began to grow after 1971 was remarkably broad-based. On February 6, 1972, for example, the UNC held a “conference on racism” at a local union hall that attracted approximately 200 representatives from various organizations, including the remnants of the League, to educate people about racism in the economy, on the shop floor, in the community, and in the labor movement. These conference attendees also sought to pass resolutions on what should be done about inequality and discrimination. When some who still called themselves League members asked conferees also to endorse a resolution that workers must “overthrow the bourgeois state and fight for socialism and communism,” members voted it down, and the “resolution that was adopted was similar to the one proposed originally by the UNC leadership, speaking to workers’ control of their working conditions.”151 In January 1973, another “rank and file caucus” of both black and white workers from numerous political camps came to discuss “the unwillingness and inability [of the UAW] to provide a winning strategy for the battles we face.”152 At this event, as at others, the UNC wanted “to make one thing clear. We’re not trying to ‘wreck the UAW’ [UAW president] Woodcock and company are doing a good job of that. We’re trying to make the UAW stop serving the company and start serving the workers.”153

Still, UAW leaders continued to believe that the post-1971 dissent was orchestrated by outside revolutionary activists, particularly because plants like Jefferson assembly had been idled by at least four work stoppages since January 1973.154 Even though it was the UNC at Jefferson that routinely engaged in shop-floor protests in which “workers black and white, young and old, male and female, demonstrated the kind of militancy and solidarity necessary to defend us from corporate abuse,” the union simply could not believe that it was witnessing legitimate worker protests against the speedup and unsafe conditions that existed in every plant by that year.155 And although UNC members continually told UAW leaders that it was “not a political group” or “a substitute for a political party,” the UAW decided that the UNC was indeed composed of socialist and communist agitators and soon began keeping tabs on the UNC almost as vigorously as it had on the RUMs 156 UAW leader Emil Mazey sent Ken Morris a letter in which he enclosed “a Caucus letter from Local 7, which you should find of interest.”157 Later that year, George Merrelli sent Douglas Fraser a letter with a paper “attached which is probably an advanced copy of a letter which is to appear in the United National Caucus Newspaper. Thought it might be of interest to you.”158 Perhaps Merrelli sent this letter to Fraser because union official Walter Wallers already had written to him saying, “George, I have talked to you before about this situation. I feel that Jordan Sims is making Local 961’s Hall a haven for United Caucus headquarters.”159

While UAW officials found it hard to believe that shop-floor dissent was now politically broad-based, they found it equally hard to believe that the dissent could be biracial. But the shared enemy of inhumane speedup, overtime, and horrible working conditions had managed to unite Detroit’s blacks and whites in common cause. After 1971, Detroit’s autoworkers could see their shared class interests on the shop floor in ways that they still could not in their neighborhoods. As Detroiter Roger Robinson put it, “I think the brutality of the auto industry caused people in this geography to recreate community. Even with the racism and the craziness, you go into most plants and the black workers and the white workers generally look out for one another.... [T]here’s a political subculture in the industrial unions where coalitions are made based on real power. And they don’t even necessarily like each other.”160

Indeed, between March 1973, when the Johnson compensation ruling sparked workers’ hopes that the UAW would push the company to clean up its plants and tackle shop floor racism there, and May 1973, a formidable biracial dissident force emerged. UNC leaders had managed to package their plan for leading the labor movement in a way that blended every worker’s desire for more shop-floor power with the desires of black workers in particular for more racial equality in the plants. In 1973, the UNC articulated the inexorable connection between these goals, and its commitment to them, by demanding that “iron clad provisions must be written into the next contract that prohibit all discriminatory hiring, promotion, and upgrading policies” and “that our union fight for workers control over production standards.”161 Such UNC rhetoric won it a great deal of respect from line workers. As one worker, Willie F. Pride, wrote, “what the Justice Train stands for is good....”162 And as a result of worker support, Jordan Sims, the UNC co-chair and longtime nemesis of UAW officials, won the presidency of Local 961 in May 1973.163 As scholar Dan Georgakas explains, “Jordan Sims, even after being fired in 1970 for his shop floor agitation, went to union meetings regularly and organized his forces as he might have had he still been working in the plant.”164

Sims’s ascendancy to the presidency of Local 961 reflected not only the newfound power of shop-floor dissidents but also the changed nature of that dissent. Sims was neither a revolutionary nor an outside agitator: He was a trade union reformer who believed that the union still could and should stand behind its workers and fight aggressively for their rights. Again, however, UAW leaders did not take Sims’s victory as their cue to become more militant; rather they saw his win as evidence that union control was once again slipping into the hands of a radical sect. After Sims’s win relations between the UAW and its rank and file only deteriorated further.

By the summer of 1973, as heat and speedup took their toll, workers dramatically escalated their attack on union leaders for the way they dealt with the company. Of course, the UAW had tried to rein in management when conditions got particularly bad, but it was still not willing to halt production. And this is what workers now believed was the only way to force the company’s hand. When the UAW’s promises of change were no longer enough, its own rank and file at Chrysler once again exploded. Between July 24 and August 13, 1973, autoworkers rocked Chrysler and the UAW with two of their most dramatic wildcat strikes to date. These walkouts, at Chrysler’s Jefferson Avenue Assembly and at Detroit Forge, respectively, were sparked by the same issues of workplace racism and intolerable working conditions that had been causing wildcats since 1968 and had fueled the broad-based dissident movement that put Sims in power in 1973. Wildcatting was not the chosen strategy of all workers in 1973, but by that year, if a handful of dissidents initiated a work stoppage, other workers readily went out with them.165 As Georgakas noted about the 1973 wildcats, “The most significant aspect of these strike[s] was that black radicals had maintained a working alliance with white, mainly Polish workers, something that had not occurred at Dodge Main in 1968, at Eldon in 1969-70 or at the Chrysler Sterling Stamping Plant where white workers had rebelled in a week long wildcat over working condition grievances similar to those voiced by DRUM and ELRUM.”166

The Jefferson wildcat began on July 24 at 6 a.m., when Isaac Shorter, a twenty-six-year-old black migrant from Mississippi, and Larry Carter, a black twenty-three-year-old from Florida, locked themselves in a six-foot power cage in the metal body shop where they worked. They cut off the power to the feeder lines that ran through their department and demanded the immediate discharge of their white foreman, Tom Woolsey, for his allegedly blatant racist practices on the shop floor. Woolsey was despised by many black workers within his department because he had a reputation for belittling black workers by calling them names and by threatening them with bodily harm. He had received five grievances at Jefferson and had already been transferred within the Chrysler system several times.167

Trying first to work through the system, Shorter and Carter got 70 percent of their department—214 people—to sign a petition calling for Woolsey’s discharge. Carter gave this petition to his union representative so that the he would file a grievance on the workers’ behalf. But when nothing happened to Woolsey, Shorter and Carter decided to take matters into their own hands. According to Carter, “I turned my petition in Monday to my Chief Steward, Tom Matthew, and I didn’t hear anymore about it, so we had to move to a higher level to demand it.”168 According to Shorter, neither he nor Carter were “members of any party” and neither ever had been a member of a RUM, although they did consider themselves communists.169 But even though Shorter and Carter were black and were admitted leftists, more than 150 workers surrounded the structure where the duo had barricaded themselves and actually placed their hands on its cable to prevent a Chrysler maintenance crew from removing them from the power cage. As Shorter reported, “it wasn’t just me and Larry—it was the individual thing until we pushed that button, and when we pushed that button in the cage, it became a worker’s thing. A people’s thing.”170

Supporters of Isaac Shorter and Larry Carter at the Jefferson Avenue assembly plant, July 24, 1973. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

It should not have surprised the UAW that these men enjoyed such broad-based support in this plant. As the Jefferson UNC group had noted after another recent work stoppage in the plant, “We workers at Jefferson Assembly often find ourselves divided along race, age and sexual lines. These divisions serve only to weaken us ... last Friday these divisions broke down. 85% of the workers in Department’s 9173 and 9160, and with the support of the rest of the plant, fed up with being treated like children, put down their tools and walked off their jobs.... These workers, black and white, young and old, male and female, demonstrated the kind of militancy and solidarity necessary to defend us from corporate abuse. ... [W]here is our leadership when we need them?”171 But the union refused to recognize the significance of the biracial cooperation in that wildcat or in Shorter and Carter’s July shutdown. Indeed, as Shorter and Carter staged their protest, UAW leaders were making every effort to end the wildcat and “to get Shorter and Carter to leave the cage.”172 But the workers crowding around the cage booed them and told them to leave the area. By midday, Shorter and Carter had expanded their list of demands to include a written guarantee of amnesty for all wildcatters. And, by 7:15 that evening, Shorter and Carter managed to get Woolsey fired and also obtained a written guarantee from Chrysler’s plant manager and the production manager that they would not be fired after the wildcat.

Isaac Shorter (left) and Larry Carter at the Jefferson Avenue assembly plant, July 24, 1973. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

The UAW was stunned and appalled by the day’s events. It could not believe that the company had capitulated to what it saw as a small group of troublemakers. As Shorter explained in a later interview, “Douglas Fraser said that we were hijackers. We don’t consider that we were hijackers for the simple reason that hijacking is an individual thing.”173 Shorter could not fathom why the UAW refused to concede the broad-based worker support that he and Carter’s action had received: “The workers supported us, I’d say ninety-five percent.... [W]orkers even went to sleep around the cage and ten minutes after we were in the cage workers were bringing us chains, locks, and even wanted to escort us to the bathroom. Workers stayed there with twenty-five years seniority, some of them probably retiring in the next couple of months. They were in there until we got out.”174

Significantly, after Shorter and Carter’s wildcat, the UNC, not a RUM, hosted the victory celebration.175 Shorter spoke to the politically and racially diverse audience gathered there about the need to stand together to bring better conditions to the plants.176 Several editorials in the Detroit Free Press also reflected the broad-base support that Shorter and Carter enjoyed.177 Not surprisingly, the UAW was deeply concerned that the actions of Shorter and Carter would only encourage further illegal protests. And in the article “A Precedent in Chrysler Shutdown,” the Detroit News voiced the same concern. As it turned out, both the UAW and the media were correct. On August 7, 1973, the midnight shift of Chrysler’s Detroit Forge plant initiated its own illegal work stoppage.

Of all Chrysler’s plants, Detroit Forge had been the site of some of the most intense speedup and forced overtime. For six months, 60 percent of Chrysler’s shop-floor employees had been forced to work a seven-day week.178 Because the plant was running at full productive capacity, there was little time left for cleanup and maintenance, and workers’ injuries rose noticeably. In July 1973, worker Harvey Brooks had his arm crushed in a conveyor belt. In August 1973, thirty-five-year-old Tony McJennet had a finger amputated in a faulty crane. Another worker was severely injured when an axle flew off a conveyor belt into his chest, and the next day, management insisted that another worker resume the job on the faulty belt despite the fact that the belt had not been fixed and there was still blood on the equipment.179 Even though there had been a RUM at Forge called FORUM, by 1973, the horrific safety conditions and work schedules had created a dissident movement much bigger than this RUM ever was. Indeed, in August, Forge workers united across the color line and the political spectrum.

As had been the case at other Chrysler plants across the Motor City, union officials had already tried valiantly to deal with the preponderance of safety hazards at Forge. On July 29, 1973, for example, UAW leader Hank Ghant (undoubtedly spurred on by the July 24 shutdown at Jefferson) personally had toured the Forge facility and was so dismayed by what he found that he attempted to force “management to change and improve conditions.”180 By August 3, however, even he had to concede that management was moving too slowly, so he went straight to members of the UAW national bargaining committee, which was in the process of preparing for the expiration of the National Agreement, and told them that something had to be done. Clearly, however, the workers at Forge were not interested in any more meetings or negotiations. They wanted action.

As soon as the midnight shift walked out, other Forge workers refused to go inside the plant, and by the next day, there were approximately 1,397 workers out on an unauthorized strike. Chrysler’s response to the walkout was to file an injunction against the picketers and the leaders of UAW Local 47.181 Embarrassed by such legal censuring, Leon Klea, president of Forge Local 47, instructed these workers to return to work immediately, but he was “jeered and booed and told they weren’t going back to work.”182 Klea was convinced that this work protest, like the others before it, had been engineered by outsiders who had, as Douglas Fraser put it, “been reading Marx and Engels.”183 Fraser admonished the wildcatting workers to “repudiate these people who are creating a serious problem at Forge.”184 Angry Forge workers told reporters that Fraser’s opinion about the origins of the strike was absurd, and they invited anyone to see the conditions for themselves.185 Fifteen of the Forge workers who had shut the plant down said in a leaflet that they distributed, “you all know that as members of Local 47 you refused to work in an unsafe plant, and not any militant or any other group was behind it.”186

Despite, and perhaps because of, the union’s attempt to discredit the strike through its red-baiting tactics, Forge workers refused to end their wildcat.187 Instead, they asked the union to call a strike vote to authorize their protest. On August 9, 1973, “an interracial group of about 250 workers consisting mostly of older workers” met with officials from Local 47 to make just such a suggestion.188 For a time, their request fell on deaf ears, but on August 11, 1973, with the strike continuing unabated, Fraser finally decided to take his own personal tour of the Forge plant. After the tour, Fraser agreed that the conditions there were horrendous. He then told workers that if the company did not clean up its plant, he would authorize a strike vote for the following Friday.189 For a moment, striking workers at Forge were optimistic that their protests would be legitimized. 190 But when striking workers met with UAW leaders to discuss the vote on August 12, Fraser told them that no strike vote would be authorized until everyone first went back to work. As a special leaflet signed by Fraser, Merrelli, and Klea informed Forge workers, “the UAW is a union that listens and responds to the interests of its membership,” and it assured the workers that “progress is being made by the UAW at Detroit Forge.”191

Indeed, the UAW was addressing working conditions at Forge more aggressively in light of the wildcat. Leaders not only compiled a detailed handwritten account of the health and safety conditions, but they repeatedly brought it to management’s attention.192 Additionally, these leaders sent an urgent telegram to OSHA inspectors requesting a “safety inspection of Chrysler Detroit Forge Plant, which has forced 1500 hundred workers out of the plant with the immediate threat that deadly working conditions may set off a chain reaction that could involve 40,000 other Chrysler workers.”193 The UAW maintained that “management’s refusal to correct outrageous conditions is responsible for the plant closings.”194 But when it spoke to Forge’s workforce, the union blamed the wildcat on “outsiders [who] have no input or influence upon your grievances nor upon your union.”195

Understandably, Fraser was very concerned that this unauthorized strike would jeopardize the UAW’s bargaining position, as the contract was expiring the next month.196 Because Chrysler had already fired eighteen workers for participating in the wildcat, however, most strikers were outraged at Fraser’s suggestion that they go back to work.197 But the UAW stood firm and eventually convinced the wildcatters to return.198 While the workers did go back, they did so with a great deal of resentment. As a Detroit Free Press headline put it: “Wildcatters Go Back, but Not Kittenish.”199 After the wildcat was over, the union never authorized the much-awaited strike vote. The Forge wildcat lasted six days and forced Chrysler to cut the production in three of its engine plants by 50 percent. But the UAW did not capitalize on the company’s weakened position to demand satisfaction for its constituency. Instead, it stood by the company’s ultimatum that anyone who continued to wildcat would be immediately discharged. Reflecting the sentiment of more workers than it probably realized, the Detroit Free Press commented that “the UAW was lately known for donning the velvet glove instead of the iron fist.”200

Despite such media chiding, however, the UAW’s leaders were greatly heartened by their success in ending the 1973 wildcats and once gain began to feel optimistic about the future. The UAW had successfully eliminated some of the most dangerous challengers to its authority in the Jefferson and Forge plants and this was no small feat. Labor officials had been in a bitter and protracted war with black and white revolutionaries ever since 1967, and, for a significant period of time, it appeared that they might be losing, particularly as numbers of their politically moderate constituents became increasingly enamored with the determination and direct action activism of those radicals. Rather than attempt to co-opt their enemy or to claim credit for their enemy’s inroads against managerial abuses as civic leaders had done with police abuses, labor leaders decided to crush radical dissent by whatever means necessary. After the 1968–71 union elections, it appeared that they had been successful.201 But as was the case in the city, as long as abuses continued future dissent was almost assured. After 1971, when shop-floor dissent resurfaced as both a biracial and a politically diverse entity, the UAW was most hostile to it. Ultimately the UAW’s deep-seated, and historically rooted, opposition to a revolutionary politics blinded it to the legitimacy and potential usefulness of the militancy increasingly exhibited by its own constituency.

Because the UAW successfully quelled shop-floor dissent at Jefferson and Forge, the influence and power of its critics was on the wane by mid-August 1973. The UAW leadership’s actions in July and August made it clear to Chrysler’s workers that their union would spare no effort to keep them on the job despite their workplace grievances. Although it would take one more major showdown between the UAW leadership and shop-floor workers to decide conclusively who had won the battle for control over the future direction of the labor movement, the events that had transpired at Jefferson and Forge led both black and white radicals, as well as moderates, to suspect that it was highly unlikely that their more militant, anti-management vision would triumph.