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The story of Walter Reuther, the American union leader who fought alongside MLK...
“Through trials, efforts and your unswerving devotion to humanitarian causes, you have made life more meaningful for millions of working people.”
- Martin Luther King to Walter Reuther
It’s a little-known fact that MLK wrote his “I Have A Dream” speech in Solidarity House, the Detroit office of the United Auto Workers (UAW) labour union.
It was Walter Reuther who had made the offices available to the Civil Rights Movement, along with thousands of dollars of UAW funding.
Reuther was a union leader who always thought beyond the interests of his section of the working class.
Reuther wanted, in his own words, “a labor movement whose philosophy is to fight for the welfare of the public at large.”
Reuther was one of the most prominent union leaders to throw his weight behind MLK and the civil rights struggle
Born in West Virginia on this day in 1907, Reuther’s upbringing prepared him for a life of radical politics.
His parents were German immigrants and his dad, Valentine Reuther, was a Socialist Party union organiser who knew Eugene Debs.
Walter and his siblings (who also became leaders of the UAW) were raised to prioritise the common good over private interest.
In 1927, Reuther moved to Detroit – “Motor City” – to work in its booming car industry.
Meanwhile, he began in politics as a Socialist Party of America organiser, a role which soon enough got him fired from his job at Ford Motors.
Impressed by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Reuther pivoted to the Democratic Party.
The Reuther brothers used the political space created by the New Deal to intensify and expand union organising in Michigan.
From 1936 they launched a wave of UAW strikes at all of the big auto companies to demand labor union recognition – at this point, most bosses still refused collective bargaining rights.
Roosevelt's New Deal was developed in response to the poverty and unemployment of the Great Depression era
This wave of strikes culminated in Walter’s brother Roy launching a strike at the General Motors plant in Flint, a strike which changed the face of industrial unionism in the U.S.
Backed by Walter as President of the UAW Local 174, a national shutdown by autoworkers helped the Flint strikers to victory.
After 44 days, GM gave up and agreed to recognise the UAW.
All the remaining auto bosses followed suit, even the tyrannical Henry Ford, albeit after a showdown with Walter Reuther at Ford’s River Rouge Complex in Dearborn, where Walter was personally beaten up by Ford’s hired goons.
American workers now had a practical right, not just a paper right, to unionise – thanks in no small part to Walter Reuther.
A committed antifascist, Reuther then helped throw the UAW behind the Allied war effort during the 1940s:
“England's battles, it used to be said, were won on the playing fields of Eton. America's can be won on the assembly lines of Detroit.”
And after the war, Reuther took the struggle for greater democracy into America itself.
He made the United Auto Workers an institutional pillar of the Civil Rights Movement, supporting all of its major campaigns during the 1960s.
Under Reuther's leadership, the UAW voted to make a "no strike" pledge to ensure that the war effort would not be hindered by strikes
At Reuther’s funeral in 1970, Coretta Scott King said:
“Walter Reuther was to Black people, the most widely known and respected white labor leader in the nation. He was there when the storm clouds were thick.”
Reuther supported non-white workers whether or not they were in the auto sector.
He gave UAW funding to the striking Black sanitation workers in Memphis – the same workers that MLK had been visiting when he was assassinated.
And Reuther backed Cesar Chavez’s new United Farm Workers (UFW), a union of mostly Mexican-American farmhands out West.
Reuther was also a pioneering environmentalist, and under his leadership the UAW was key to launching the first ever Earth Day in 1970.
Reuther’s broad, transformative political vision for America made him all sorts of powerful enemies, from the Nazi-sympathising and union-busting Henry Ford to the despicable authoritarian J. Edgar Hoover.
Reuther’s commitment to a better world earned him two assassination attempts before he died in a plane crash in 1970.
He was without doubt one of the great Americans of the twentieth century.
Who were our radical ancestors? What's the legacy we're following? To understand the present, we have to look back at our past, and that's exactly what Pete's radical history emails and blog posts do.
With so many remarkable individuals, It's impossible for Pete to choose his favourite figure from radical history, but if he had to, he'd say Sylvia Pankhurst: "She always appreciated that the struggles for feminist, economic, and racial emancipation are linked together, and she did all of her politics with that truth in mind. Also, like me, she's a Mancunian!"
