Walter Reuther: Address before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

About the Author

Walter Reuther was a leading figure in the American labor movement, serving as president of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) from 1946 to 1970. He was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, on September 1, 1907. His father, Valentine, worked as a brewer and taught his sons, Walter and Victor, the importance of union membership and social activism. At the age of nineteen, Reuther moved to Detroit and joined Ford Motor Company as a tool and die maker. Fired by Ford because of his campaign work for the Socialist Party, he traveled to the Soviet Union with his brother, where they trained employees at the Ford-Soviet joint venture facility in Gorky and observed Stalin's rule firsthand.

When the brothers returned to the United States in 1935, Walter became active in Detroit union politics and was elected to the UAW's executive board in 1936. He was instrumental in unionizing Detroit's automobile industry, gaining notoriety in May 1937 when Ford company policemen attacked a group of UAW representatives who were distributing union flyers outside the Ford complex in Dearborn, Michigan. The incident became known as the Battle of the Overpass. Publicity photos of a battered Reuther made him a celebrity, and in 1939 the UAW named him head of the General Motors (GM) department.

In 1940 Reuther devised a proposal to capitalize on underutilized capacity in the nation's automobile manufacturing plants. In his “500 Planes a Day” plan, which he outlined to the public in a series of articles and speeches, he proposed that idle production facilities be used to manufacture five hundred military planes a day to aid Britain and its allies. Reuther enhanced his national reputation when he argued that GM could raise its workers' wages without raising the price of its cars. In his 1946 National Hour Radio Address on Inflation, Reuther called for the automobile manufacturer to reveal its financial status to the public and to act in the interests of society, not just its shareholders. In 1948 GM agreed to a contract tying wage increases to increases in the cost of living and in productivity.

As president of the UAW, Reuther fought to increase benefits for union workers, claiming that job security and dignity for manufacturing employees would benefit the entire country, not just union labor. He campaigned for such ideas as a cost-of-living wage increase, unemployment benefits, health and life insurance, bereavement pay, and pension plans. Reuther called for a guaranteed annual wage and delivered a key address to the 1955 UAW convention outlining his ideas.

Reuther traveled widely outside the United States; he believed that the labor movement had to be international in order to truly achieve its objectives. He helped found the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. Once a supporter of Communism, Reuther turned against the Soviet Union and in 1959 addressed the May Day Freedom Rally in West Berlin.

Reuther was also engaged in a wide variety of social issues in his day. An ardent supporter of the civil rights movement, he was one of the few white people honored with a place on the podium at the March on Washington in 1963. Reuther was a friend of Martin Luther King, Jr.; he contributed to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and delivered a speech before the 1957 convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Detroit. He worked to develop low-cost housing in Detroit and built a worker education center near Black Lake in northern Michigan. On their way to visit the Black Lake facility, Reuther and his wife, May, were killed when their plane crashed on May 9, 1970.