[Marxism] The Ford Hunger March of 1932

[J Rothermel <jayroth6@xxxxxxx>]

http://www.workers.org/2009/us/ford_hunger_march_0402/
77th anniversary


  The Ford Hunger March of 1932

By Martha Grevatt
Published Mar 25, 2009 3:45 PM

March 7 was the 77th anniversary of one of the bloodiest chapters in 
Detroit labor history: the Ford Hunger March of 1932.

The stock market crashed in October of 1929. By 1930 millions were 
without work. Nowhere was the pain felt more deeply than in Detroit, 
where the auto industry’s promise of prosperity had turned into its 
opposite. When the Trade Union Unity League, the Communist Party, the 
Young Communist League and the newly formed Unemployed Councils called a 
coast-to-coast demonstration on March 6, among the millions of 
participants were 100,000 at a rally in the Motor City. Detroit police 
broke up the protest, clubbing and arresting scores of participants.

Two years later the crisis had deepened; one statistic showed four 
Detroiters dying of hunger every day. Unemployment compensation did not 
exist. With two-thirds of his employees laid off, Henry Ford, then the 
richest man in the world, said the unemployed created their own misery 
by not working hard enough.

Detroit’s network of Unemployed Councils had grown into one of the 
strongest in the country, saving untold numbers of families from a life 
on the streets. A citywide meeting of the councils—there were more than 
80 neighborhood-based chapters in metropolitan Detroit—decided to march 
on the Ford Motor Co.’s River Rouge complex in Dearborn, Mich.

The march, called by the Unemployed Councils and the United Auto 
Workers, had 14 demands: “Jobs for all laid off Ford workers; immediate 
payment of 50 per cent of full wages; seven-hour day without reduction 
in pay; slowing down of deadly speedup; two fifteen-minute rest periods; 
No discrimination against Negroes in jobs; relief [welfare], medical 
service; free medical aid in Ford hospital for employed and unemployed 
Ford workers and families; five tons of coal and coke for the winter; 
abolition of Service Men [Ford’s hated private army of spies and thugs, 
led by the notorious Harry Bennett]; no foreclosures on homes of Ford 
workers; immediate payment of lump sum of fifty dollars for winter 
relief; full wages for part time workers; abolition of the graft system 
of hiring; and the right to organize.” (Philip Bonosky, Brother Bill 
McKee: “Building the Union at Ford”)

The protest brought out thousands of workers. Beyond the immediate 14 
demands, signs connected issues affecting workers around the world. They 
called for freedom for the Scottsboro Nine, a group of Black youths 
falsely accused of raping two white women. They said “hands off China,” 
a reference to the sale of scrap iron to Japan, which used it in 
attacking the Chinese people.

The march began and proceeded without incident in Detroit. Dearborn, 
however, was Ford’s personal fiefdom; his cousin Clyde Ford was the 
mayor. Marchers were attacked with tear gas at the city’s border, but 
forced police to retreat with a barrage of stones and clumps of frozen 
mud. Police regrouped, only to have the scenario repeated.

At the entrance to Ford’s complex, Dearborn police were reinforced by 
the Dearborn Fire Department, Detroit police, and Ford’s own “Service 
Department.” The firefighters turned their hoses on the unarmed 
marchers, while police fired a hail of bullets. Coleman (also spelled 
Kalman) Leny, Joe DiBlasio, and Joe York—the 19-year-old district leader 
of the YCL—were killed. Fifty more were wounded.

When Unemployed Council leader Alfred Goetz attempted to lead an orderly 
retreat, machine-gun fire, this time from Ford’s own finest, began anew. 
The auto magnate’s right-hand man, Harry Bennett, was immediately 
recognized and injured by stone-throwing workers. Bennett emptied his 
own gun and then a police officer’s revolver into the workers. He and 
his goons killed 16-year-old YCL member Joe Bussel and left many more 
injured. Forty-eight workers, some in their hospital beds, were arrested.

More repression followed, with hundreds fired if they possessed 
left-wing literature or donated to the martyrs’ funerals. Membership in 
the CP was cause for arrest.

At the funeral, Ben Bussel spoke loudly: “In the name of my murdered 
brother, I call upon you to organize and fight. Long live the workers of 
the world.” As a band played the International—the lyrics “Arise, ye 
prisoners of starvation” particularly fitting—some 80,000 joined the 
march to the cemetery.

In June a Black worker, Curtis Williams, died of wounds suffered during 
the march. Segregation policies kept him from being buried with his 
comrades; the funeral committee hired a plane and scattered his ashes 
over the cemetery—or by some accounts over the Rouge.

Attorney Maurice Sugar had written two months earlier that police 
brutality “grows out of the institution of private property under which 
one class in society lives in luxury at the expense of the great mass of 
workers who are compelled to live in a state of poverty, wretchedness, 
and despair.” (Christopher H. Johnson, “Maurice Sugar, Law, Labor and 
the Left in Detroit, 1912-1950”) Although Sugar was able to convince the 
grand jury not to indict any of those arrested, no one was ever indicted 
for the Ford massacre.

In 1941, after years of sacrifice and struggle, the Auto Workers union 
finally won recognition from the Ford dynasty. In 1992 UAW Local 600 
retirees bought five headstones—including one for Williams—and placed 
them by the four graves. On each is carved the words, “He gave his life 
for the union.”

As workers begin again to fight evictions, foreclosures and the layoffs 
that cause them, the unyielding courage of the Ford hunger marchers is 
an inspiration.

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