Franklin soon apologized, saying his temper got the best of him, and then defended himself on his Sunday night radio broadcast from New Bethel and in a letter hand-delivered to the Michigan Chronicle that began, “Regardless of reports, I, as the elected leader of the human rights movement, have not now, have not in the past, nor in the future plan to blast anybody of whatever stripe in the leadership trust of the Negro community.” The issues were bigger than a power struggle, he said, and the times called for unity. Drawing on his southern connections, he produced a telegram from King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, praising him for his work helping her husband’s efforts. King’s aides at SCLC headquarters in Atlanta, on the receiving end of a constant barrage of anxious calls from all sides, moved to ease the situation, in appearance if not in reality. They appointed another minister, Charles W. Butler of New Calvary Baptist, to serve as their Detroit regional director and liaison for the event, placing a buffer between Franklin and his doubters, and told Franklin that if indeed he wanted King to appear he had to demonstrate a show of confidence by having other ministers send telegrams declaring their support. Franklin accumulated endorsements from thirty Baptist ministers, ranging from Rev. Judge Lee Pastor at Abraham Missionary Baptist to Rev. D. D. Williams at Wolverine Missionary Baptist. He also included a message from Thermon Bradfield, a member of New Bethel, who wrote to King, “We believe if God ever anointed any man he anointed Rv. Franklin. We know he has done some great jobs for God we further believe this is the greatest job he has ever undertaken to do this I mean lead us out of the wilderness.”
Obstacles to Franklin’s leadership started to fall away one by one. Charles Diggs, the city’s powerful black congressman, came out in support of the reverend and the march, saying he failed “to see a justification for the attitude taken by these Negro ‘neutrals’ who have not supported the movement.” It was an endorsement of critical importance that brought other Detroit leaders on board and reassured King. Diggs and King had developed a strong bond since the days of the Montgomery bus boycott, when Diggs, in his Sunday night radio broadcasts from his House of Diggs funeral home, solicited funds to assist the boycott and ended up presenting King with $10,000 raised in Detroit. At about the same time as the Diggs endorsement, Horace Sheffield, Buddy Battle, and other black labor activists in the Trade Union Leadership Council switched from caution to unequivocal support of the rally. Police Commissioner Edwards issued a permit for the parade, saying there would not be a police problem and that King would be welcomed as a distinguished visitor.
Then there was the sensitive matter of Walter Reuther, the UAW president, and what role he would play. Reuther was a twelve-cylinder political engine with enormous horsepower, fully committed to the cause, and one of King’s essential white allies in the civil rights movement. He could not be ignored or shunted aside. But Rev. Cleage kept insisting that it remain a black event, and there was an undercurrent of concern among other black leaders, even as they appreciated Reuther’s support and worried about Cleage’s stridency, that white liberals would end up dictating decisions. How could this be finessed? The task was assigned to Horace Sheffield and Buddy Battle, both of whom had come out of Ford’s Rouge plant—Battle as a truck loader, Sheffield in the salvage department—to take leadership roles under Reuther in the UAW. Devising a plan that drew on one of Franklin’s vulnerabilities, they invited the reverend and his lawyer, Del Rio, to meet them at TULC headquarters on Grand River. Marc Stepp, another union official, was there, and in an oral history later recounted the liquid seduction that brought Franklin around: “So the alcohol closet was right behind Buddy Battle’s desk. Open the door and there’s all the whiskey and whatnot. So you know, there was plenty of that there. And . . . it was hot as hell. [Franklin] was perspiring and drinking like hell and Sheffield, you know, kept playing the role of the great host, make damn sure he drank what he wanted, you know. And Del Rio was there cursing, you know Del Rio, raising hell. But anyway, we got a decent role for Walter Reuther.”
The High Priest of Soul Preaching had his sermon set at the pitch of his hum. The Walk to Freedom was coming. The eagle stirreth her nest: Oh a few more days. Oh a few more days. A few more days. Oh, Lord.
Chapter 9
* * *
AN IMPORTANT MAN
Certainly one of the most fertile brains in the United States of America, certainly one of the organizational geniuses of our day and time, and one of the most important men in the world, I give you Mr. Walter Reuther.
—Police Commissioner George Edwards introducing Reuther at the Detroit Economic Club in 1963
WALTER REUTHER SPENT MUCH OF his time contemplating the plight of man in the modern world, and when he thought, he wrote. Not books or many articles, but countless notes, memos, letters, telegrams, speeches, night wires; his words were dispatched in all directions at any hour. By 1963 he had worked in the public realm for more than half of his fifty-five years. He was known in world capitals from Tokyo to London to Buenos Aires, and his influence as an intellectual leader of the international trade union movement in many but not all ways surpassed the status of George Meany, his labor colleague and bitter rival. While Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, operated as a power broker out of headquarters in Washington, blocks from the White House, and loved to hang out with cronies in Miami Beach, Reuther, who served simultaneously as UAW president and AFL-CIO vice president, maintained his base with his autoworkers at Solidarity House on East Jefferson Avenue in Detroit. That is not to say that he was a political outsider; he worked the inside game but from the liberating middle distance of the Midwest. Detroit had been his home since he arrived in the Motor City from Wheeling, West Virginia, as a teenager and began a rise through the heart of the twentieth century that took him from the tool-and-die division at Ford’s Rouge plant to the top job at the United Auto Workers union.
With his red hair and boyish mug, Reuther was a confident, straight-ahead personality with a philosophical bent and a complicated take on the political swirl around him. In the smoky and alcohol-infused atmosphere of labor halls, he neither smoked nor drank. From his earliest years, his German immigrant parents, Valentine and Anna, veterans of West Virginia’s coal wars, bathed Walter and his siblings in the idealistic waters of socialism. As a close friend once noted, Walter was inculcated in the belief “that working people have a right to more of the good things in life—security, dignity, standard of living, education, and that all human beings of whatever race, creed and color were equal before God and before their fellow men.” His idealism came naturally, yet he prided himself on pragmatic progressivism over purity, getting things done over making noise, and during the tumultuous ideological struggles within labor in the decades bracketing World War II he staked a middle ground between communist organizers and capitalist owners. By the early sixties he could be attacked simultaneously by Goldwater conservatives in America as a “red menace” and leftist protesters in Kyoto as an “agent of American imperialism.”
When Reuther was on his way to being elected president of the UAW in 1946, George Romney labeled him “the most dangerous man in Detroit” because of his ability to bring about “the revolution without seeming to disturb the existing norms of society.” It was an odd declaration, as much grudging praise as damning criticism, and later Romney and Reuther found themselves at times working in concert, agreeing to the industry’s first profit-sharing plan for workers. Reuther by then was not Marxist but Rooseveltian—in his case meaning as much Eleanor as Franklin. Reuther shared Eleanor Roosevelt’s humanist worldview and moral righteousness, and over the years since FDR’s death had also become personally close to the former first lady. Every summer or fall since the war, he and his wife, May, had made time in their crowded schedules to stay with her at Hyde Park for a week; their last visit, in November 1962, came during the final days before her death.
His connections to the Democrats now in the White House were also of long standing. Reuther had known Lyndon Johnson since the forti
es, when he occasionally slept on the Texas congressman’s couch if no hotel rooms were available in the wartime capital. Their relationship had swung up and down and up again over the years, first bound by a common passion for New Deal politics, then strained by Reuther’s wariness of the southerner on civil rights issues and preference for Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota as JFK’s running mate, and finally strengthened again with Vice President Johnson’s emergence as a strong voice on racial equality and economic opportunity. LBJ in most instances was a dominating personality, but according to Irving Bluestone, one of Reuther’s top aides, Johnson treated Reuther as an equal, respecting his power and independence enough that “they could have a two-way conversation.”
Reuther’s relationship with JFK did not stretch back as far but was strong enough that in 1954, when he sent a telegram to the New York Hospital for Special Surgery, where Kennedy was undergoing back surgery, he received a two-page handwritten note from Jacqueline saying he “would never know” how much the message lifted Jack’s spirits. Reuther was as habitual about flattery as he was about moralizing, but Kennedy fully understood how essential the labor leader and the UAW were to his rise and seemed to enjoy Reuther’s company. “Walter and Jack Kennedy were very close,” Jack Conway, a Detroiter who came out of Reuther’s UAW to serve as a housing official in the Kennedy administration, recalled later. “They used to sit—sometimes two and three hours at a time—and philosophize. The thing that Jack Kennedy found in Walter Reuther was an intellectually stimulating person that he could bounce ideas off. And he felt a deep personal obligation to Walter because he and the UAW were probably the strongest supporters he had. He came to the UAW convention and said in effect if it hadn’t been for that organization he would not be president.” The convention was in Atlantic City, and when JFK spoke there on May 8, 1962, he did say as much, though in his own witty fashion. “President Reuther,” Kennedy began, looking out at the multitude of labor comrades. “Last week, after speaking to the Chamber of Commerce and the presidents of the American Medical Association, I began to wonder how I got elected. [pause] And now I remember.”
Since taking office, Kennedy had tapped the UAW leader for advice and assistance on many issues beyond the economics and politics of labor disputes. Reuther had provided a critical endorsement of JFK’s push for across-the-board tax cuts for individuals and corporations, saying it would give the economy an injection of “high velocity purchasing power.” On the world stage, he and his union played an important supporting role in the cold war effort by steering international trade unionists away from communism. During the Berlin crisis, the union flew one hundred of its local presidents directly to Berlin “as a demonstration of our solidarity with the people of that beleaguered city.” Reuther also took a prominent role in an effort to free prisoners in Castro’s Cuba after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. Through a government-inspired private enterprise known as the Tractors for Freedom Committee led by Reuther, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Milton Eisenhower, the goal was to raise enough funds to buy tractors and medical supplies and send them to Cuba in exchange for 1,200 prisoners. The plan failed, but Kennedy commended Reuther’s effort in a 1961 letter, saying he “successfully exposed the cynical and brutal nature of the Cuban regime. In so doing the U.S. won a major propaganda victory and advanced closer to the day when the Cuban people will once again be free.”
From then on, Reuther’s most pressing communications with Kennedy increasingly concerned not foreign policy but civil rights. He was constantly pressing the administration to move forcefully and quickly, receiving memos back from JFK aides explaining their goals and practical considerations, and being relied on by the White House—along with a select few other white activists such as Joseph Rauh of Americans for Democratic Action—to serve as an establishment liaison to black civil rights leaders, especially King and his southern desegregation campaigns. Reuther thought so highly of King that he brought him to Detroit in 1961 to be the main speaker at the UAW’s twenty-fifth-anniversary dinner and afterward distributed pamphlet copies of King’s speech to his rank and file and pressed a 33 1/3 long-playing record of it with proceeds going to the SCLC. “Please note that you have my continued support in the great work you are doing for the working man, and indeed for all of humanity,” King wrote in a letter of gratitude.
The two had remained in frequent contact as civil rights momentum built month by month over the next two years, forcing Washington and the nation to deal with the issue in ways they never had before. King’s Birmingham campaign of civil disobedience in April 1963 led not only to his defining letter from jail but to haunting images of brutality—peaceful protesters being knocked down by fire hoses and attacked by police dogs and club-wielding cops—that galvanized public attention. After the goals of the campaign were largely met and the rudiments of a breakthrough agreement with local leaders had been reached, hundreds of protesters still remained locked behind bars in the jails run by the city’s stridently racist police chief, Eugene (Bull) Connor. The White House, needing help to resolve the Birmingham end game, turned to Reuther. Attorney General Robert Kennedy called Reuther and Rauh and asked them to provide cold cash to bail the demonstrators out of jail. Acting swiftly, the two allies rounded up $160,000, and in the evocative phrase of Nelson Lichtenstein, Reuther’s most insightful biographer, “within hours the UAW staffers Irving Bluestone and William Oliver were on their way south, the cash stashed in bulging money belts around their midsections.”
Of the various ways that Reuther and his union aided the civil rights effort, here was the most fundamental. Detroit and its people made many sacrifices to advance the cause of racial equality over the years, sending pastors and lawyers and lay activists to the most treacherous reaches of the Deep South. Detroiters, black and white, rode in the freedom rides, and walked in the marches and sat in the sit-ins. Rosa Parks, the steel-willed seamstress and heroine of the Montgomery bus boycott, was now a Detroiter, moving up to the Motor City to join her brother and sister-in law, Sylvester and Daisy McCauley, after failing to find work in the South. The activist lawyers Conyers, Keith, and Crockett made several trips to rural counties in Mississippi and Alabama to represent black citizens dealing with the inequalities of Jim Crow justice. On the same day that King was arrested in Birmingham, Charles Diggs was in Clarksdale, Mississippi, staying at the home of Dr. Aaron Henry, president of the state NAACP. The Detroit congressman and his host were roused from bed in the middle of the night by the explosion of a local version of a Molotov cocktail, made from cheap gasoline and a soda bottle, that had been thrown through Henry’s living-room window. Two years after Birmingham, another Detroiter, Viola Liuzzo, a white mother of three, would be killed by Klansmen, shot twice in the head while driving through Alabama after coming south to help in response to the horror of Bloody Sunday, when peaceful marchers were beaten by police as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on the way to Montgomery.
This force of individual and collective action was crucial, the motivation powerful and often brave. Yet there was also the practical matter of money, and in that realm Detroit’s contribution—mainly the work of the UAW and primarily a result of the commitment of Walter Reuther—was vital. It could be said that to a significant degree Detroit and its autoworkers were the movement’s bank. Months after Birmingham, Reuther asked for and received an informal accounting of UAW funds used in the civil rights cause. The resulting document showed that the contributions had increased exponentially, multiplying fourfold year by year, from $2,925 in 1959 to more than $114,000 by the fall 1963, the money going to scholarship funds, civil rights organizations, testimonial dinners, and legal actions (including the bail money), and to cover the organizational costs of marches and protests. The amount at least trebled when in-kind contributions of manpower and publicity were included.
Money was also an important aspect of C. L. Franklin’s grand notion of a Walk to Freedom. The goal of raising tens of thousands of dollars for the SCLC’
s southern campaign prompted Coretta Scott King to write Franklin a telegram: “It is wonderful to know that the people of Detroit will be sharing, even at a distance, the Birmingham experience.”
In the days of June leading up to the Detroit rally, pivotal events were happening one after another, imbuing Franklin’s idea with increasing resonance. On June 1 in Jackson, Mississippi, NAACP president Roy Wilkins and Medgar Evers, the organization’s field secretary for that state, were arrested while leading a picket line outside downtown stores. On June 5 student protesters in Danville, Virginia, staged a sit-down act of civil disobedience in the mayor’s office and were arrested for “inciting to riot.” On June 9 activist Fannie Lou Hamer was arrested at the Columbus, Mississippi, bus station on charges of attempting to eat at a whites-only counter and was badly beaten that night in jail.
That same day, thousands of miles away, Detroit’s Mayor Cavanagh was at the Hawaiian Village Hotel in Honolulu for the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, a group in which he was a rising star and future chairman. The main speaker was President Kennedy, and the subject that JFK had traveled “a good many thousands of miles” to discuss was race. The issue, he said, “was not northern or southern or eastern or western, but a national problem, a national challenge.” The cause of equality was just, and the mayors should “be alert, not alarmed” by the civil rights protests then sweeping the nation, with more to come that summer. “The events in Birmingham have stepped up the tempo of the nationwide drive for full equality and rising summer temperatures are often accompanied by rising human emotions. The federal government does not control these demonstrations. It neither starts them, nor stops them. What we can do is seek through legislation and executive action to provide peaceful remedies for the grievances which set them off, to give all Americans . . . a fair chance for an equal life.”
Once in a Great City Page 15
