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of labor, white, black, middle class, and intellectual and it had been a very effective
organization over the years.” African Americans were prominent in the leadership of the
Civil Rights Congress, including Detroit’s Rev. Charles A. Hill, a national board member,
and Arthur C. McPhaul, the full-time executive secretary of the Detroit chapter.^7
Martin Halpern, “‘I’m Fighting for Freedom’: Coleman Young, HUAC, and the Detroit African
American Community,” Journal of American Ethnic History 17, (1) (1997): 19.
Notes
- Detroit Times, 13 February 1952; Detroit News, 13, 24 February 1952.
- Detroit News, 24 February 1952.
- Andrew provides a critique of the charge that Local 600 was “Communist-dominated.”
William D. Andrew, “Factionalism and Anti-Communism: Ford Local 600,” Labor His-
tory, 20 (Spring 1979): 227–55. - Ford Facts, 2 June 1951; Letter, Carl Stellato et al., to Walter Reuther, 13 March 1952, Nat
Ganley Collection, Box 6, Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Wayne State Univer-
sity, Detroit (hereafter WSU). Fortune commented that in backing Sen. Edwin C. Johnson’s
(D-Colorado) cease-fire proposal Local 600 was endorsing “a program of ending the
Korean war that had received virtually no labor support outside of the party-line unions.”
“Mutiny at Ford,” Fortune, 44 (August 1951): 44. - Martin Halpern, UAW Politics in the Cold War Era (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1988), pp. 257–62. According to a UAW survey in February and March
1947, blacks were 21.5 percent of 74,500 workers in four Detroit area Ford plants. The
percentage of blacks at the Rouge complex was certainly higher since plants outside
the Rouge had relatively few black employees. In 1952 employment of union mem-
bers at the Rouge complex was about 60,000. Memorandum, J. H. Wishart to Walter
Reuther, 11 April 1947 and attached UAW Research Department, Employment Survey—
February–March 1947, Walter Reuther Collection, Box 33, WSU; Proceedings of the
Thirteenth Convention of the UAW-CIO, April 1–6 1951, Cleveland, Ohio, p. 470. - Andrew, “Factionalism and Anti-Communism: Ford Local 600,” pp. 239–55; Halpern,
UAW Politics, pp. 259–60. - Gerald Horne, Communist Front? The Civil Rights Congress, 1946 –1956 (Rutherford,
NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988), p. 71; Art McPhaul Statement, Detroit
Civil Rights Congress Collection, Box 41, WSU; Interview with Art McPhaul, 6 October
1984; William L. Patterson, ed., We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the
United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government against the
Negro People (New York: International Publishers, 1951); William L. Patterson, The Man
Who Cried Genocide: An Autobiography (New York: International Publishers, 1971),
pp. 146–208; Oral History Interview with Anne Shore, 1982, Oral History of the Ameri-
can Left, Tamiment Library, New York University.
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