Memorandum on Ford Motor Company, Willow Run Plant

TO: Mr. George M. Johnson

FROM: Clarence M. Mitchell

SUBJECT: Ford Motor Company, Willow Run Plant.

DATE: 9/28/43

CONFIDENTIAL
=============

On returning to the office, I noted that the Committee voted to give consideration to complaints filed against the Ford Motor Company and suggested that an FEPC representative confer with a designated Ford personnel representative in the future on these complaints.1

While in Detroit on September 23, I talked [with] Mr. Cushman, Area Director of the War Manpower Commission, concerning the Ford plant. Mr. Cushman felt that the complaints against Willow Run would have to be considered as entirely separate from over-all hiring policies of the Ford Company in its other Detroit establishments. He also said that approximately twenty per cent of the Ford personnel in other plants is made up of Negro workers.

Mr. Duncan informed me that a number of the Negro employees at the Willow Run plant were ready to quit during the week prior to my visit to Detroit. These workers felt that transportation to the plant and lack of housing made it very undesirable as a place of employment, according to Mr. Duncan. He said that union officials at the plant had succeeded in persuading the workers to remain on the job.

MS: LH, DI, HqR3, Office Files of George M. Johnson. M.

1. Robert C. Weaver, who was active in the early negotiations with Ford, noted that “Although many automobile plants hired colored skilled and semi-skilled production workers during the 1920’s, the general pattern in the industry at the outbreak of the second World War was to restrict Negroes to foundry, general laboring and janitorial assignments. The one outstanding exception was the Ford Motor Company, where in 1941 the 11,000 Negro workers made up over 12 percent of the total number of workers, and where there was the bitterest opposition to organized labor. At the Ford plants, while there were colored production and highly skilled workers, the majority of the Negroes were concentrated in the foundry, thus, to a degree, reflecting the general pattern in the industry.” Weaver, Negro Labor: A National Problem 63.

By the end of 1942 Ford had reversed its comparatively progressive policy and virtually ceased hiring African American males at the new Willow Run bomber plant. That year Ford exacerbated racial tensions throughout the Detroit area when it began hiring large numbers of women for Willow Run while keeping the workforce lily-white. The hirings triggered vehement protests from black trade unionists and local black organizations, as well as mass demonstrations. The exclusion of black women workers was the norm among Detroit’s defense industries, but Willow Run was particularly important because in the past the company had hired black labor, and the plant was enormous. Ford's response to the protests consisted of token concessions to the FEPC, local black residents, and black union leaders. For an extended account of the confrontation, see Herbert Hill, Black Labor and the American Legal System: Race, Work, and the Law 136–56.

This report by Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. does not by itself show how, or the extent to which, black Detroiters drew the FEPC into the Willow Run battle. It is noteworthy that before the creation of the FEPC, Weaver was the most important African American federal bureaucrat in the struggle against employment discrimination. At Willow Run, however, his accommodating style contrasted sharply with the militancy of local blacks (especially the Detroit NAACP branch), and the FEPC eventually disregarded his counsel to “withhold action” on the NAACP’s request for intervention. Mitchell's deep respect for Weaver may account for the restrained tone of his report. Denton L. Watson, Lion in the Lobby: Clarence Mitchell, Jr.'s Struggle for the Passage of Civil Rights Laws 122–34.

The Willow Run battle was particularly important because black leaders of UAW Local 600 seized the initiative. It also underscored the difficulty that black women encountered in getting jobs in defense industries, and once again revealed the extent to which the FEPC had been constrained by the WMC's Paul V. McNutt. The FEPC addressed the Willow Run complaint only after President Franklin D. Roosevelt removed it from the WMC's jurisdiction and gave it control over all discrimination cases.

After weeks of agitation, McNutt approved the FEPC’s requests for hearings on Ford’s discrimination policies. The company then began hiring black women, a few at Willow Run. The FEPC never held the hearings. August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW 150–51. For a broader picture of the FEPC’s role in seeking jobs for blacks in Detroit, see Andrew E. Kersten, Race, Jobs, and the War: The FEPC in the Midwest, 1941-46 94–111. The only hearings the FEPC held in Detroit took place in 1945; they involved the trucking industry, Jimmy Hoffa, and Local 229 of the Teamsters Union. See the section on the Teamsters in the headnote on the FEPC and Unions.