The Hunger March, 1932

March seventh, nineteen thirty-two was a cold day, and the Great Depression was in its third year. Three thousand unemployed workers, most of them former Ford employees who had been laid off as the Depression cut production, gathered in Detroit to march on the River Rouge complex in Dearborn and present a list of demands to the company. They wanted jobs back, a seven-hour workday, no speed-ups on the line, an end to child labor in Ford plants, and the right to organize a union. These were not radical demands by the standards of what industrial workers in other countries had already won. In Ford's United States, in nineteen thirty-two, presenting them at the Rouge gate was an act that carried mortal risk.

The march crossed the city of Detroit and entered Dearborn, where Ford's Rouge complex sat on several thousand acres. At the Dearborn city line, Dearborn police fired tear gas into the crowd. The marchers kept moving. At the Miller Road gate of the plant, Harry Bennett's Ford Service Department, which functioned as Ford's private security force and employed men with criminal records for their willingness to use violence, joined the police. They turned fire hoses on the marchers in freezing temperatures. Then they opened fire.

Four men were killed at the scene: Joe York, twenty years old; Kalman Leny, twenty-six; Joe DeBlasio, thirty-one; and Joe Bussell, sixteen. A fifth man, Curtis Williams, died of his wounds five months later, on August seventh. Fifty more were wounded, several of them seriously. The newspapers the next day described a riot. The workers who had been shot described a massacre. No one was charged with any crime.

The funerals were held in Detroit on March twelfth. An estimated sixty thousand people followed the coffins through the streets. The crowd was so large that organizers marched under a banner. Speakers at the graveside warned that Ford had shown what the company thought of workers who asked for anything. They were not wrong.

The Ford Hunger March is not a well-known event outside of labor history. It happened five years before the Battle of the Overpass gave the United Auto Workers its defining image. It happened twenty years before the UAW negotiated its landmark contracts. The five men who died at the Rouge gate in March nineteen thirty-two are buried in Detroit. A monument to them stands at Woodmere Cemetery.