In Detroit, a Hallowed Ground for Auto Workers Finally Gets Its Due
On the banks of the Rouge River, a new park honors the victims of the Ford Hunger March, a long-ignored milestone in labor union history.
At Detroit’s Woodmere Cemetery, a gravestone reading “His Life for a Union” commemorates Curtis Williams, who was denied burial after the Hunger March because he was Black.
Photographer: Justin NislyOn March 7, 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, a group of at least 3,000 unemployed auto workers gathered at the corner of Oakwood Boulevard and Denmark Street in Detroit, near Ford’s massive River Rouge automobile plant. The company had laid off more than half of its workforce; a protest march across the city and into neighboring Dearborn, organized partly by members of the Communist Party USA, was aimed at forcing Ford to rehire those workers and help them pay for heating fuel and rent.
As demonstrators chanted and sang their way across the Fort Street Bridge, the fire department turned hoses on them. When they neared the Ford plant, police officers and Ford’s own private security force fired tear gas and guns into the crowd. Five demonstrators were killed in the violence that followed, and dozens more were injured.