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253, 2846, 281, 247, 1375, 273, 8891, 15, 496, 346, 8486, 14790, 1680, 41682, 614, 937, 271, 4223, 22420, 7813, 11338, 3929, 13, 7406, 8698, 285, 17446, 5779, 251, 2361, 326, 10508, 15, 24, 2558, 273, 512, 31824, 5085, 275, 17372, 574, 644, 13598, 347, 273, 4162, 13, 247, 4677, 973, 2469, 253, 9330, 2558, 346, 36510, 1616, 449, 24709, 8213, 7197, 13, 1142, 273, 841, 4178, 2979, 497, 273, 4105, 3290, 15, 496, 26421, 689, 9135, 13, 933, 23031, 723, 497, 27948, 347, 749, 15291, 13, 285, 767, 1107, 1996, 436, 1180, 369, 4829, 5571, 13, 933, 15, 346, 8486 ]	favor in the black community. It enjoyed the sustained support of community leaders Louis Martin, Horace White, Charles C. Diggs, Malcolm Dade, and Charles Hill, the last of whom in early 1941 was elected president of the local division of the National Negro Congress. UAW officials received an audience in both of the black newspapers, where they reaffirmed the union's commitment to challenging the racism of white workers and pledged to establish job equality between black and white workers. The board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) remained divided over unionism, though it now leaned toward support while antiunion sentiment among black professionals began to soften as loyalty to Ford waned. The Ford drive came suddenly to a head when a spontaneous strike broke out at the River Rouge plant on April 1, 1941. Ford's use of black strikebreakers, among other things, fanned racial tensions and led to violence on the picket line, and over the next week and a half the union and black community leaders worked together to rally community support and convince black workers to leave the plant. On April 3, Louis Martin held a luncheon with a cross-section of 100 community leaders to hear the appeal of the UAW. The night before, the NAACP youth council held a midnight meeting during which the group voted to support the strike, and the next day—while the luncheon was in progress—Horace Sheffield, a Ford foundry worker and west side NAACP youth council president, drove a UAW-CIO sound car around the Rouge plant urging black strikebreakers to leave. Over the coming days both a federal labor conciliator and NAACP national secretary Walter White tried to convince strikebreaking black workers to leave the plant. All of this galvanized the local NAACP and Urban League to support the strike and the union. The strike finally came to an end on April 11, when the company agreed to a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election to be held six weeks later. The UAW-CIO overwhelmingly won, defeating the Ford-backed UAW-AFL and becoming the sole representative and bargaining agent for all Ford workers. With this victory the trade union movement achieved its central goal of consolidating one industrial union for all autoworkers. Moreover, the UAW-CIO victory at Ford established Local 600. Representing the Rouge plant's more than 60,000 workers, Local 600 immediately became one of the nation's largest and most militant locals, and it provided a powerful base of black political activity well into the postwar period. Just as important for black Detroiters, the Ford victory signaled an alliance between the UAW and black Detroit. Black workers had forged this alliance on their terms, after pushing civil rights unionism during the decade preceding the strike. The Ford victory dramatized the importance of black workers and the black community to the triumph of industrial unionism in Detroit. The Ford strike coincided with the emergence of the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) as a major mobilization of African American protest. They shared a noteworthy complementarity in focus and reciprocity in impact. The MOWM originated in early 1941 when A. Philip Randolph began organizing around his proposal for a nationwide mass demonstration of African Americans for greater participation in defense efforts. His call for 10,000 African Americans to "march on Washington" on July 1 gained momentum during the spring, with both grassroots support and the endorsement of the black press. On June 25, when it appeared that as many as 100,000 people would participate, President Roosevelt relented, issuing Executive Order 8802 banning discrimination in defense industries and establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC). In response, Randolph called off the march (officially it was "postponed"). But he and the MOWM planning committee resolved to carry their efforts forward, turning their energy into an organization that would continue to apply pressure on the president and the nation. By 1942, the spirit of the MOWM merged with another national protest, the "Double V for Victory" campaign calling for victory over fascism abroad and Jim Crow at home. Initiated by the Pittsburgh Courier in February and soon picked up by the rest of the black press, the campaign fused patriotic support for the war effort with a commitment to the fight for full equality. The Courier and other black newspapers pushed the campaign with news coverage of Double V events, editorials, columns, letters from readers, editorial cartoons, and pictures. Meanwhile, during the summer of 1942 the MOWM held a series of mass rallies across the country in places such as New York's Madison Square Garden, the Chicago Coliseum, and the Saint Louis Auditorium. These dramatic demonstrations of black solidarity and militancy fueled Randolph's strategy of building a mass movement that could continue to apply political pressure. In September 1942 the MOWM held a national policy conference in Detroit, an example of national African American political mobilization's feeding into and helping to frame wartime black protest in the city. To be sure, the idea of double victory had an immediacy and direct application for black Detroiters: their struggle for jobs in defense plants was simultaneously an effort to participate in the war effort and a fight against racial discrimination. This link between national and local black activism emerged in concrete form in Victory Committees, which were essentially caucuses within union locals formed by black workers to put pressure on UAW leadership. Bringing the spirit of Double V into the plant, they advocated for the rights of black workers to participate in defense work, specifically by safeguarding seniority rights and securing promotions, both on the job and within the union staff. Additionally, Victory Committees served as a base for advocating for black women workers, both in hiring and, once they began to enter the plant in small numbers in 1943, for equal treatment of black and white women workers in the plant. These committees also formed the basis for the Metropolitan Labor Council, established in 1943 by black unionists from several locals to better coordinate their attacks on discrimination. In creating the Victory Committees and the Metropolitan Labor Council, black unionists were building structures inside but somewhat independent of the union, giving them sites for broad-based activism. They used these semiformal groups to address shop-floor issues, to challenge the union, and even to fight discrimination beyond the plant. The foundation for these efforts had been set in the 1930s by the power of large numbers of black workers at the Rouge plant whose activism shaped a tradition of relatively autonomous and community-based black union activism in Detroit that would extend at least through the 1960s. During the war this activism drove an expanding apparatus of black protest that was central to the world Jimmy encountered when he began working at Chrysler and that he both learned from and participated in as a labor organizer and civil rights activist. By 1943 black Detroit had developed various bases of political action allowing for multiple levels of protest. The Detroit NAACP, for instance, had established a labor committee in April that organized a mass rally against continuing discrimination in defense work. Two months later the branch held an "Emergency Conference" on the "Status of the Negro in the War for Freedom." These and other efforts pushed for federal action, either through the FEPC or through the wartime bureaucracies created to oversee war production. Meanwhile, much of the contestation over black employment took place in the plants, as black workers staged wildcat strikes to secure job upgrades while white workers, seeking to protect the color line, mounted hate strikes to maintain their exclusive rights to higher-paying defense jobs. Jimmy had immediate connections to this protest activity and close knowledge of these developments. As a Chrysler Jefferson worker and member of Local 7, he witnessed the overlapping dramas of the labor movement and black protests during the war. UAW president R. J. Thomas, who frequently and very publicly articulated the union's policy of antidiscrimination and its commitment to racial equality, was a member of Local 7. One of Jimmy's earliest influences in the labor movement, fellow Chrysler Jefferson worker Nick DiGaetano, was among the 1,000 volunteers during the Ford strike. Another member of Local 7, John Conyers Sr. (father of John Conyers Jr., eventual U.S. congressperson from Detroit), was one of the most prominent black unionists during the crucial struggles of the late 1930s and early 1940s. After the citywide Chrysler strike the year before Jimmy entered the plant, Conyers headed one of the UAW offices in preparation for the NLRB vote at Ford. In 1942, Conyers and other black Chrysler Jefferson workers organized one of the city's first Victory Committees. In the spring of 1943 Chrysler plants across the city experienced a series of work stoppages, including a citywide wildcat strike in May. The previous month 600 black male workers at Chrysler's Highland Park plant had walked out to protest the working conditions faced by black women in the plant. Jefferson Avenue soon followed suit, with black male workers there staging multiple walkouts to protest the treatment of recently hired black women. Thus, a flurry of activity took place in and around Jimmy's plant during his first three years there, exposing him to the ongoing struggle of black workers. He also experienced the city's dire housing shortage, another pressing problem for African Americans in wartime Detroit. The city was unprepared for its rapid population growth as thousands of people migrated to the Detroit area in search of defense jobs. The influx taxed an already insufficient housing stock, pushing the city to a state of crisis. In "Detroit Is Dynamite," an August 1942 Life magazine article, Louis Martin and Ted Poston reported that 98.7 percent of all dwelling units in Detroit had been occupied as of April, a figure well past the 85 percent "danger mark." Making matters worse, many of these residences were of poor quality. In 1938 over 58,000 dwellings were categorized as substandard, and two years later this number was nearly 70,000. "Det

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favor in the black community. It enjoyed the sustained support of community leaders Louis Martin, Horace White, Charles C. Diggs, Malcolm Dade, and Charles Hill, the last of whom in early 1941 was elected president of the local division of the National Negro Congress. UAW officials received an audience in both of the black newspapers, where they reaffirmed the union's commitment to challenging the racism of white workers and pledged to establish job equality between black and white workers. The board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) remained divided over unionism, though it now leaned toward support while antiunion sentiment among black professionals began to soften as loyalty to Ford waned. The Ford drive came suddenly to a head when a spontaneous strike broke out at the River Rouge plant on April 1, 1941. Ford's use of black strikebreakers, among other things, fanned racial tensions and led to violence on the picket line, and over the next week and a half the union and black community leaders worked together to rally community support and convince black workers to leave the plant. On April 3, Louis Martin held a luncheon with a cross-section of 100 community leaders to hear the appeal of the UAW. The night before, the NAACP youth council held a midnight meeting during which the group voted to support the strike, and the next day—while the luncheon was in progress—Horace Sheffield, a Ford foundry worker and west side NAACP youth council president, drove a UAW-CIO sound car around the Rouge plant urging black strikebreakers to leave. Over the coming days both a federal labor conciliator and NAACP national secretary Walter White tried to convince strikebreaking black workers to leave the plant. All of this galvanized the local NAACP and Urban League to support the strike and the union. The strike finally came to an end on April 11, when the company agreed to a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election to be held six weeks later. The UAW-CIO overwhelmingly won, defeating the Ford-backed UAW-AFL and becoming the sole representative and bargaining agent for all Ford workers. With this victory the trade union movement achieved its central goal of consolidating one industrial union for all autoworkers. Moreover, the UAW-CIO victory at Ford established Local 600. Representing the Rouge plant's more than 60,000 workers, Local 600 immediately became one of the nation's largest and most militant locals, and it provided a powerful base of black political activity well into the postwar period. Just as important for black Detroiters, the Ford victory signaled an alliance between the UAW and black Detroit. Black workers had forged this alliance on their terms, after pushing civil rights unionism during the decade preceding the strike. The Ford victory dramatized the importance of black workers and the black community to the triumph of industrial unionism in Detroit. The Ford strike coincided with the emergence of the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) as a major mobilization of African American protest. They shared a noteworthy complementarity in focus and reciprocity in impact. The MOWM originated in early 1941 when A. Philip Randolph began organizing around his proposal for a nationwide mass demonstration of African Americans for greater participation in defense efforts. His call for 10,000 African Americans to "march on Washington" on July 1 gained momentum during the spring, with both grassroots support and the endorsement of the black press. On June 25, when it appeared that as many as 100,000 people would participate, President Roosevelt relented, issuing Executive Order 8802 banning discrimination in defense industries and establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC). In response, Randolph called off the march (officially it was "postponed"). But he and the MOWM planning committee resolved to carry their efforts forward, turning their energy into an organization that would continue to apply pressure on the president and the nation. By 1942, the spirit of the MOWM merged with another national protest, the "Double V for Victory" campaign calling for victory over fascism abroad and Jim Crow at home. Initiated by the Pittsburgh Courier in February and soon picked up by the rest of the black press, the campaign fused patriotic support for the war effort with a commitment to the fight for full equality. The Courier and other black newspapers pushed the campaign with news coverage of Double V events, editorials, columns, letters from readers, editorial cartoons, and pictures. Meanwhile, during the summer of 1942 the MOWM held a series of mass rallies across the country in places such as New York's Madison Square Garden, the Chicago Coliseum, and the Saint Louis Auditorium. These dramatic demonstrations of black solidarity and militancy fueled Randolph's strategy of building a mass movement that could continue to apply political pressure. In September 1942 the MOWM held a national policy conference in Detroit, an example of national African American political mobilization's feeding into and helping to frame wartime black protest in the city. To be sure, the idea of double victory had an immediacy and direct application for black Detroiters: their struggle for jobs in defense plants was simultaneously an effort to participate in the war effort and a fight against racial discrimination. This link between national and local black activism emerged in concrete form in Victory Committees, which were essentially caucuses within union locals formed by black workers to put pressure on UAW leadership. Bringing the spirit of Double V into the plant, they advocated for the rights of black workers to participate in defense work, specifically by safeguarding seniority rights and securing promotions, both on the job and within the union staff. Additionally, Victory Committees served as a base for advocating for black women workers, both in hiring and, once they began to enter the plant in small numbers in 1943, for equal treatment of black and white women workers in the plant. These committees also formed the basis for the Metropolitan Labor Council, established in 1943 by black unionists from several locals to better coordinate their attacks on discrimination. In creating the Victory Committees and the Metropolitan Labor Council, black unionists were building structures inside but somewhat independent of the union, giving them sites for broad-based activism. They used these semiformal groups to address shop-floor issues, to challenge the union, and even to fight discrimination beyond the plant. The foundation for these efforts had been set in the 1930s by the power of large numbers of black workers at the Rouge plant whose activism shaped a tradition of relatively autonomous and community-based black union activism in Detroit that would extend at least through the 1960s. During the war this activism drove an expanding apparatus of black protest that was central to the world Jimmy encountered when he began working at Chrysler and that he both learned from and participated in as a labor organizer and civil rights activist. By 1943 black Detroit had developed various bases of political action allowing for multiple levels of protest. The Detroit NAACP, for instance, had established a labor committee in April that organized a mass rally against continuing discrimination in defense work. Two months later the branch held an "Emergency Conference" on the "Status of the Negro in the War for Freedom." These and other efforts pushed for federal action, either through the FEPC or through the wartime bureaucracies created to oversee war production. Meanwhile, much of the contestation over black employment took place in the plants, as black workers staged wildcat strikes to secure job upgrades while white workers, seeking to protect the color line, mounted hate strikes to maintain their exclusive rights to higher-paying defense jobs. Jimmy had immediate connections to this protest activity and close knowledge of these developments. As a Chrysler Jefferson worker and member of Local 7, he witnessed the overlapping dramas of the labor movement and black protests during the war. UAW president R. J. Thomas, who frequently and very publicly articulated the union's policy of antidiscrimination and its commitment to racial equality, was a member of Local 7. One of Jimmy's earliest influences in the labor movement, fellow Chrysler Jefferson worker Nick DiGaetano, was among the 1,000 volunteers during the Ford strike. Another member of Local 7, John Conyers Sr. (father of John Conyers Jr., eventual U.S. congressperson from Detroit), was one of the most prominent black unionists during the crucial struggles of the late 1930s and early 1940s. After the citywide Chrysler strike the year before Jimmy entered the plant, Conyers headed one of the UAW offices in preparation for the NLRB vote at Ford. In 1942, Conyers and other black Chrysler Jefferson workers organized one of the city's first Victory Committees. In the spring of 1943 Chrysler plants across the city experienced a series of work stoppages, including a citywide wildcat strike in May. The previous month 600 black male workers at Chrysler's Highland Park plant had walked out to protest the working conditions faced by black women in the plant. Jefferson Avenue soon followed suit, with black male workers there staging multiple walkouts to protest the treatment of recently hired black women. Thus, a flurry of activity took place in and around Jimmy's plant during his first three years there, exposing him to the ongoing struggle of black workers. He also experienced the city's dire housing shortage, another pressing problem for African Americans in wartime Detroit. The city was unprepared for its rapid population growth as thousands of people migrated to the Detroit area in search of defense jobs. The influx taxed an already insufficient housing stock, pushing the city to a state of crisis. In "Detroit Is Dynamite," an August 1942 Life magazine article, Louis Martin and Ted Poston reported that 98.7 percent of all dwelling units in Detroit had been occupied as of April, a figure well past the 85 percent "danger mark." Making matters worse, many of these residences were of poor quality. In 1938 over 58,000 dwellings were categorized as substandard, and two years later this number was nearly 70,000. "Det