The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford

It has been twenty-five years since the Journal of American History published Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein's provocative article on the rise and fall of civil rights unionism (“Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor Radicals and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Dec. 1988, pp. 786–811). For a while the essay's reach remained largely within labor history, where it played its part in a contentious debate on unions' racial record in the New Deal era. Then, in a 2005 JAH article, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall integrated its argument into her reconceptualization of the civil rights movement (“The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” March 2005, pp. 1233–63). From the Left-led unions of the 1930s and 1940s, she said, the long movement arced, its trajectory shaped by the fusing of race and class and the fierce resistance they engendered. With her valuable new book Beth Tompkins Bates pushes the story backward, tracing the origins of one of the two unions that Korstad and Lichtenstein's article examined: the United Auto Workers (uaw) Local 600, the bargaining unit for the Ford Motor Company's fabled River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan. She begins at the end of World War I, when Henry Ford, then at the height of his power, decided to increase dramatically the number of African Americans on his payroll without imposing the segregation that was common in most of industrial America. In exchange, he expected his new hires to be loyal and quiescent: good “Ford mules,” as they came to be called, silently slogging through the plant's back-breaking workday with their heads bowed low (p. 62

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