Black Rage on the Auto Lines

The nation's most urgent domestic priorities are to bring the races together and to retard inflation, which exacerbates social problems. Last week management and unions were deeply involved in struggles over those issues in two primary industries. One conflict affects auto production. Another threatens the airlines (see following story).

Until recently, racial turmoil has generally been confined to the streets and campuses. However, it takes only a handful of impassioned workers to disrupt an industrial plant. On Detroit's auto production lines, where violence and walkouts were everyday occurrences in the old days of union organization, a determined band of black radicals has posed a new threat. They have overturned production schedules with picket lines and some assaults on foremen. Victims include more moderate Negroes, who nevertheless do not openly condemn the militants. Both union and management leaders are concerned that the black protest movement will grow and cause more widespread damage.

Paradoxically, the agitators have concentrated their ire on Chrysler, partly because it has so many black workers, including a considerable number of recent recruits from the hard-core unemployed. Nearly 35% of the company's 153,000 U.S. employees and 10% of its foremen and higher-ranking workers are members of minority groups. The troublemakers have also begun organizing at Ford's Rouge complex, and are threatening to move into General Motors' gear-and-axle plant in Detroit.

Strikes and Sabotage. Operating through an organization known as DRUM, for "Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement," the angries began last July by shutting down the old Dodge Main Plant in Hamtramck with a day and a half of wildcat picketing. They demanded, among other things, more black foremen, a Negro plant manager, abolition of union dues for Negroes and, for good measure, replacement of Chrysler Chairman Lynn Townsend with a Negro. On Jan. 27 another wildcat picket line closed Chrysler's Eldon Avenue axle plant for half a day. On one occasion, report United Auto Workers officials, a Chrysler foreman was doused with gasoline. Eight weeks ago, a company labor representative, a Negro, was stabbed in the back when he told a DRUM member that he was being suspended for repeatedly jostling a foreman.

Union officers insist that the fear spread by such incidents has damaged plant discipline because foremen shut their eyes to infractions rather than risk personal attack. The U.A.W. reports that troublemakers have set fires in some plants and damaged new cars by scratching the fresh paint with screwdrivers. Chrysler officials say that some machinery has been deliberately disabled. Douglas A. Fraser, head of the U.A.W.'s Chrysler department, warns: "Sabotage can be deadly, and some of that is going on."

Tomism and Treason. Though DRUM's hard-line membership is only about 100, the organization has many sympathizers. One rally was attended by 300 men and women. Most of the leaders are zealots under 30, and if they follow the exhortation of DRUM'S constitution, they are "prepared to be ruthless and vicious." They are closely associated with --and apparently receive direction from --the extremist group that captured control of Wayne State University's student newspaper last year and turned it into a black separatist organ. DRUM'S official paper, a curious combination of fancy phrases, foul language and threats, refers to whites as "pigs," and customarily calls any auto plant "the plantation" or "the slave palace." The paper is equally harsh toward Negro supervisors. Recently, on vague grounds, it condemned one Hamtramck labor-relations aide for "Tomism and treason to his black brothers."

There is some reason for the blacks' rage. Though more and better jobs are opening for Negroes in the auto industry, educational handicaps block advancement. Few Negroes pass apprenticeship tests in such overwhelmingly white skilled trades as pattern making, and there remains an undercurrent of dislike among some white foremen. Many Negroes feel trapped on the production line. When U.A.W. leaders pointed out that they had marched at Selma, Jackson and Memphis, an angry Drummer roared, "You never marched in Hamtramck."

Automakers and the U.A.W. hope to disarm the movement by acting firmly. Their strategy is to fire workers who violate contract terms. Last month, in a strong letter denouncing DRUM as a "group of extremists," the U.A.W. warned that it "will not protect workers who resort to violence and intimidation with the conscious purpose of dividing our union along racial lines." The union did not object when Chrysler dismissed 22 Negro militants after January's wildcat walkout.

For its part, DRUM insists with Marxist-style dialectic that it seeks to free Negro workers from "the racist, tyrannical and unrepresentative U.A.W., so we can deal with our main adversary, the white racist owners of the means of production." Beyond that "necessary confrontation," DRUM vows to organize and act "wherever there are black workers--in the White House, the Mississippi Delta, the plains of Wyoming, the mines of Bolivia, the oilfields of Biafra or the Chrysler plant in South Africa."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.