Two days later, on June 11, the Kennedy administration dispatched Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to Tuscaloosa to ensure that a few black students could register for summer session at the University of Alabama, where George Wallace, the segregationist governor, had vowed to stand in the schoolhouse door if necessary to prevent their enrollment as the state school’s first black students. Katzenbach sternly and stoically endured Wallace’s show of theatrics outside Foster Auditorium, saying he was there to enforce the law, and the administration deputized the Alabama National Guard to ensure the students could exercise their legal rights without state interference. At eight that night back in Washington, Kennedy went on national television from the Oval Office to explain what had happened in Alabama and to place that event in the context of the larger struggle for equality. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution,” Kennedy told the nation. “The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.” The speech offered more than words; Kennedy announced that the following week he would send a sweeping civil rights bill to Congress that would ban discrimination in public accommodations ranging from restaurants to hotels and stores.
Hours later, returning home after a late meeting at which he watched Kennedy’s speech, Medgar Evers was assassinated, shot in the back in the driveway of his home by Byron De La Beckwith, a Mississippi Klansman who had been hiding in the bushes with a high-powered Enfield rifle. It would take another thirty years for De La Beckwith to be brought to justice. Evers, who had visited Detroit several times and been interviewed frequently for stories in the Michigan Chronicle going back to the days of the Emmett Till lynching in 1955, became a martyr to the cause, and both Reuther and C. L. Franklin pledged donations to a scholarship fund established in his honor.
For Reuther, the Evers assassination had a chilling resonance. Fifteen years earlier, on April 20, 1948, he had survived a similar attack when a politically motivated gunman hiding outside his house on the northwest rim of Detroit shot him after he returned from work. The likely reason Reuther was not killed was that he had changed his routine and parked his Chevy on Appoline Street, entering the family’s brick bungalow through the front door rather than parking on a side street and entering through the backyard, where the would-be assassin had been lying in wait for hours. Reuther was late getting home that night after spending much of the day at a UAW executive board meeting at the Book Cadillac and then stopping at Solidarity House. He had called and asked May to have a meal ready for him. She prepared leftover stew that he ate in the breakfast nook. After finishing the stew, he walked toward the refrigerator to find a bowl of peach preserves. When he turned to look at his wife, who was talking to him about one of their daughters, a bomb-like blast reverberated in the late-night softness as double-ought buckshot from a 12-gauge shotgun broke through the kitchen window, hitting Reuther in the back and right arm, shattering the arm to pieces and throwing him to the kitchen floor in a pool of blood.
Neighbors saw a man run from Reuther’s backyard toward the side street, where a getaway driver was waiting in a red Ford sedan. In the violent world of Detroit labor, the suspects were many and varied. Some thought the attackers came from the left, motivated by Reuther’s efforts to purge communists from UAW leadership. Others suspected racists from the right who disliked his support of racial integration in union activities, including the bowling league. Reuther had received unsigned hate letters from both groups before the assassination attempt. The crime was never solved. “Those bastards shot me in the back,” he told his brothers from his bed at New Grace Hospital. Another aide, Ken Bannon, director of the UAW’s Ford office, recalled dashing out to New Grace the day his boss was shot. “He’s lying there, before the doctor came from Ann Arbor, he lay there and he said, ‘Ken, they’ll never destroy our beliefs this way. No matter how they go about it we will live on . . . and we’ll make progress for people. Guns won’t stop us.’ The guy is just so goddamned real it’s hard to believe.”
The threat of violence always hovered over Reuther’s Detroit. The beating he had suffered at the hands of two hired thugs who bulled their way into his apartment in 1938 when he and his guests were expecting a delivery of chop suey had been precipitated by the more infamous attack on him a year earlier by Ford security toughs outside Gate 4 of the Rouge plant. That day Reuther had stationed himself on the overpass to prepare for the arrival of a platoon of women who were soon to arrive by streetcar to hand out leaflets demanding a decent wage. They had obtained a permit from the Dearborn city clerk. Reuther described what happened next in testimony before John T. Lindsay, a National Labor Relations Board trial examiner: “A group of men approached us. They approached in a very aggressive manner. One of them, in a very aggressive voice, said, ‘This is private property and get the hell off of here.’ Men were coming toward us from the south part of the superstructure and we instinctively turned toward the north stairway to obey the command to get off. We didn’t want violence.”
He had taken three steps, Reuther testified, when he was slugged in the back of the head. “I was pounced on by ten or twelve men. I crossed my arms and tried to protect my face. I was being pounded on all parts of my head and upper body. All around me there was scuffling but I couldn’t see what was happening to the others.” After beating Reuther, the Ford men carried him by his hands and legs to the overpass stairway and pushed him down the stairs, then chased him through the parking lot just as the women with the handbills were walking up from the streetcar stop.
Eleven years later, after Reuther survived the assassination attempt, the union created the equivalent of a secret service unit to protect the family. They moved to a house in Detroit’s suburbs that provided better protection. The security detail conducted hourly checks of the grounds outside the house. Packages “from Hudson’s or some other store” would be accepted only if delivered by someone the UAW knew. All other packages were to be opened in the garage. The two daughters, Linda and Lisa, were escorted to and from school as if they were children of the president, and when they played in the front yard, a security man had to be there to watch them. At dusk the first-floor drapes were drawn and lights were turned on in the backyard. Reuther never drove again; he rode in the backseat of an armored Packard sedan, then in a midnight-blue Oldsmobile driven by Edward Torlone of the UAW’s security detail, who was licensed to carry a concealed weapon. The Olds was outfitted to Reuther’s specifications: mobile car phone, seat belts, tinted glass, front and rear radio speakers, padded dash, white sidewalls. But the shooting did nothing to slow Reuther’s vigorous life. With the labor movement strong and growing, his most productive years were still ahead, traveling, writing, speaking, organizing, moralizing, pushing. And he was able to keep doing other things he loved; he still packed a collapsible fishing rod with his travel gear and played tennis regularly, though his grip was weakened by the buckshot wounds and friendly opponents knew to volley to his forehand.
• • •
By 1963 bigness in the modern world had become one of Reuther’s central themes: big business, big labor, big cities, big government, big life in every respect. How to accommodate that bigness and make it liberating instead of oppressive was his obsession. He believed that the concentration of power, if used foolishly, could do grave harm, but if used wisely could be a force for good. The question was not power itself, but how it was harnessed. He compared power concentrations to “the genie in the lamp.” It could be used for the better if humans handled it adeptly. “Contemporary men and societies must learn to live with bigness,” he said in a speech that year at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in New York. “Nostalgia for an earlier time of agrarian simplicity is understandable, but no substitute for ideas, policies, and programs for coping with the new technological, economic, and political rev
olutions transforming our lives. We have no practical option of stopping these movements, assuming it would be desirable to do so. Our great task is to attempt to guide and shape them in the interests of freedom and justice; to see to it that they enhance rather than diminish human dignity, security and liberty; to prevent them from creating new tyrannies over the minds and bodies of men.”
Racial inequality was an old tyranny, with its roots in slavery and the agrarian way, and Reuther, taking the positive view of bigness, saw the big institutions of sixties America as important tools in overcoming it. Much like President Kennedy, he viewed Jim Crow segregation as a hypocritical detriment to the United States in its cold war struggle against the Soviet Union and a parallel threat to the growth of progressive labor on an international scale. While the president expressed concern that large demonstrations and marches might backfire and hinder the cause of legislative change, Reuther saw it as his role to be the insider on the outside, pushing the legislative route while participating in and helping to fund the protests, accentuating the racial diversity of the movement while attempting to temper the most radical voices that might alienate erstwhile sympathizers. In an acute observation on Reuther’s alignment, his biographer Lichtenstein saw that while King “guarded his freedom and the autonomy of the movement for which he spoke,” Reuther “stepped over the line” and “throughout these crucial months of 1963 . . . used his influence to serve that of the president within these councils.” To some degree this showed Reuther’s hunger for affirmation from the top, but from his perspective he was using the power of bigness to his and the cause’s advantage.
Civil rights was not a new issue for Reuther. He had been active in the movement for two decades, going back to the racial tensions in Detroit during World War II. On April 11, 1943, two months before the city exploded in a race riot, Reuther took the stage at a rally in Cadillac Square, joining the NAACP in calling for the hiring of more blacks in the war plants. He said that industrialists were hiring white southerners who were newcomers to the city for jobs that could have gone to long-standing black residents. “No thinking American would discriminate against other Americans,” he said at that rally. “It is against the Constitution of the United States, against the constitution of the UAW, and it is against the best interests of the country in winning the war. There is no manpower shortage in Detroit. All industry needs to do is to use the men and women who are already here. A great many Negro women are ready and anxious to obtain factory work.”
Twenty years later, as the Walk to Freedom approached, Reuther became increasingly interested in his union’s role. On June 14, the day after leading a labor delegation to the White House, where he lobbied for strong equal employment wording in the new civil rights bill, he had a letter distributed to all UAW officials in the twenty-nine locals of Region 1 and Region 1A, covering southeastern Michigan and parts of Canada, urging them to produce “large representation” at the Detroit march. “The cry for freedom in Birmingham and Jackson has excited the nation to the need for unparalleled and long-overdue action on the civil rights front,” Reuther wrote. “We will personally participate in this demonstration along with Dr. Martin Luther King, leader of the SCLC.” The letter also pointed out that King and Reuther would both address the rally at Cobo Hall following the march down Woodward Avenue. “This is a matter requiring special effort,” he told his top lieutenants in a cover letter. (Wittingly or not, that last comment accurately reflected not only Reuther’s convictions but also the gap between his commitment and that of much of the rank and file. For every action there is a reaction. On Reuther’s home turf, that reaction eventually would involve autoworkers bailing out of the city for the suburbs and rejecting their leader’s liberal philosophy, many of them later voting for George Wallace and then Ronald Reagan. More immediately and narrowly, Reuther’s actions made it easier for manufacturers in the South to campaign against organizing. As his brother Victor later recounted, “Employers in the South printed [a] leaflet saying don’t vote for these nigger lovers who gave $160,000—to help . . . Martin Luther King. In the middle of an election, they would print those leaflets. Well, we’d lose some southern elections over that issue—but it never changed Walter’s thinking about it.”)
If the liquored discussion at Buddy Battle’s office bar involving C. L. Franklin and the UAW officials pried open the door for Reuther’s involvement in the march, he was now fully inside and trying to bring others with him. Beyond that, he was furtively trying to set up a longer-term alternative to the Detroit Council for Human Rights, which he and others feared would be sidetracked by Franklin’s inexperience and Cleage’s militancy. On the Thursday evening of June 20, three days before the Walk to Freedom, he convened a meeting of what might be called Detroit’s liberal establishment in the English Room at the Detroit Statler Hotel downtown “for the purpose of discussing and comparing notes on what we might do as citizens to be helpful and constructive in assuring meaningful progress in our community on this great moral issue.” He wanted the meeting to be “informal and unpublicized” and did not tell Franklin or Cleage about it, but did invite Ed Turner and Arthur Johnson and other representatives of the NAACP, along with various black and white doctors, judges, lawyers, clergy, labor leaders, and representatives of the auto companies, utilities, Hudson’s department store, the newspapers, and the League of Women Voters. According to notes of the meeting archived at the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State, Reuther recommended forming a “small ad hoc” committee that could “provide info re total activities,” facilitate existing programs, and “eliminate potential explosive situations.” The general sense among those Reuther brought together was that expectations were heightening and it was time to get things done.
That Saturday, June 22, Reuther was back in Washington for another meeting with President Kennedy. He was accompanied by his brother Roy and William Oliver, one of the two UAW officials who had carried the cash south two months earlier to bail the Birmingham demonstrators out of jail. At the White House, they joined a diverse group of civil rights leaders that included King, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, John Lewis, the young chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and chief organizer of a March on Washington planned for late August. A huge civil rights demonstration in the nation’s capital was something that Randolph, now seventy-four, had been thinking about for more than two decades, going back to 1942, when a march he had been organizing was canceled at the last minute after President Roosevelt defused the protest by issuing Executive Order 8802, calling for fair employment in the defense industry. History was repeating itself in terms of presidential caution. Kennedy, like Roosevelt, feared that a rally of predominantly black demonstrators in Washington could backfire. In point 5a of a memo preparing JFK for the meeting, Lee C. White, the chief White House aide on civil rights, wrote, “Consider negative impact of march on Congress.”
White House minutes show that Kennedy arrived in the Oval Office at 9:07 that morning, accompanied by his brother, the attorney general, whose Justice Department was in the middle of the civil rights action. Much of the first hour and a half was spent in private huddles before the larger meeting, including one with Reuther, but the Kennedy brothers spent most of that time with King. There were two problems they feared might hinder their cause and weaken them politically at the same time, and King was at the center of both. The first was a deeply private matter that Robert Kennedy broached first, and when that had little effect the president took King for a walk alone in the Rose Garden. The White House believed, based on information provided by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, that two men in King’s inner circle, including his New York lawyer, Stanley David Levison, were communists. “I presume you know you’re under very close surveillance,” the president told King. The FBI, with Bobby Kennedy’s approval, had been tapping Levison’s phones and bugging his office for fourteen months. Mentioning the two King associates by name
, Kennedy said, “They’re communists, you’ve got to get rid of them.” King received the news without betraying emotion, questioned the accuracy of the report, and gave no indication of what he might do in response to the president’s demand. The second concern for the Kennedys took up much of the time at the larger meeting and went back to point 5a in Lee White’s memo: fears that the August demonstration would hurt rather than help the legislative effort. “We want success in Congress, not just a big show at the Capitol,” JFK said. The wrong demonstration at the wrong time might turn off some otherwise potentially sympathetic congressmen.
Wilkins shared that concern, but for most of the other civil rights leaders this was old and hollow advice they had had to deal with month after month, year after year, a variation of the expressed fears of white clergy that compelled King to write his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Randolph told the president that “the Negroes were already in the street,” and it was better that they be led by serious, nonviolent veterans of the movement than by rabble-rousers “who care nothing about civil rights nor about non-violence.” King expressed exasperation at being told again and again the time was wrong. That might be so, he said, “but frankly, I have never engaged in any direct action movement which did not seem ill-timed. Some people thought Birmingham was ill-timed.” Reuther said that local demonstrations, such as the Walk to Freedom planned for Detroit the next day, were needed to build support for legislation, but he stressed that the Washington demonstration had to be inclusive and free from infighting. Momentum was building along with expectations, and it was apparent that nothing the White House said would stop the march. They were all putting “a lot on the line,” Kennedy said, and they had to make sure that they preserved good faith in each other. “I have problems with Congress, you have yours with your groups.”
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