Detroit Industry and ‘The Mural’

July 25, 2024July 25, 2024 ~ Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

Dr. Jay Cephas considers two Depression-era murals in Detroit and their contrasting messaging about workers, labor, and power. Diego Rivera’s famed Detroit Industry murals, commissioned by Edsel Ford for the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1932, champions industrial and technological progress and the factory workers who fueled it. In contrast, Walter Speck and Barbara Wilson’s 1937 untitled mural, which originally hung in the UAW Local 174 union hall and now hangs behind the reference desk at the Reuther Library, champions the progress those industrial workers made laboring for their own welfare via union action.

Dr. Cephas is Assistant Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University. His essay “Detroit Industry and ‘The Mural’: Representing Labor and Reappropriating Care in the Museum and in the Union Hall,” was published in the 2023 volume, Architectures of Care: From the Intimate to the Common.

Episode Credits
Interviewee: Jay Cephas
Producers: Dan Golodner and Troy Eller English
Music: Bart Bealmear

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Organizing Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit

June 13, 2024June 5, 2024 ~ Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

Dr. Say Burgin explains that contrary to the common belief that white activists were purged from the Black freedom movement in the mid-1960 and 1970s, Black-led organizations in Detroit – including the Northern Student Movement, the City-Wide Citizens Action Committee, and the League of Revolutionary Workers—called on white activists to organize within their own white networks to support Black self-determination in education, policing, employment, and labor unions. Burgin is an assistant professor of history at Dickinson College and author of Organizing Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit.

Episode Credits
Interviewee: Say Burgin
Producers: Dan Golodner and Troy Eller English
Music: Bart Bealmear

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Hillbilly Highway: Charting White Migration from Appalachia to the Industrial Midwest

May 9, 2024May 3, 2024 ~ Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

Dr. Max Fraser shares the often overlooked story of the “hillbilly highway,” the route nearly eight million poor, rural, white Americans took in the 20th century from economically depressed areas in the Southeastern and Southern United States toward higher paying factory jobs in the Upper South and Midwest. He explains how the social advancement and marginalization they experienced transformed American culture, the labor movement, and today’s political landscape.

Dr. Fraser is an assistant professor of History at the University of Miami. His book Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class received an Honorable Mention for the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians.

Episode Credits
Producers: Dan Golodner and Troy Eller English
Interviewee: Max Fraser
Music: Bart Bealmear

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Betty Friedan’s Labor Roots

March 28, 2024April 15, 2024 ~ Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

Rachel Shteir shares how Betty Friedan’s early experience as a labor reporter for the Federated Press informed her later work as a famed women’s rights activist, author of The Feminine Mystique, and co-founder of the National Organization for Women. Although Friedan’s activism shaped the American women’s movement in the latter half of the 20th century, Shteir also notes that her pugilistic attitude ignored or antagonized would-be allies, including non-white women and lesbians. Shteir is head of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism in the Theatre School at DePaul University and is the author of Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter, a finalist in the biography category for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Related Resources:
Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter

Episode Credits
Producers: Dan Golodner and Troy Eller English
Interviewee: Rachel Shteir
Music: Bart Bealmear

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The UAW’s Southern Gamble in Foreign-Owned Factories

March 4, 2024February 27, 2024 ~ Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

Dr. Stephen Silvia explains how the UAW built a cooperative relationship with workers’ councils and unions at foreign automotive companies, but has nevertheless struggled to organize those companies’ vehicle factories in the southern United States since the 1990s due to anti-labor politics and the companies’ shared anti-union playbooks. Silvia is a professor in the School of International Service at American University and author of The UAW’s Southern Gamble: Organizing Workers at Foreign-Owned Vehicle Plants.

Episode Credits
Producers: Dan Golodner and Troy Eller English
Interviewee: Stephen J. Silvia
Music: Bart Bealmear

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Detroit Under Fire: Police Violence and Racial Justice in the Civil Rights Era

Crowd of people carrying picket signs (one reads, ""killer cops must go,"" another, ""All Gestapo police belong in Hell"") walk down street to protest the fatal shooting of an African American woman by Detroit Police in 1963.

December 14, 2023December 8, 2023 ~ Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

Dr. Matthew Lassiter shares stories uncovered in Detroit Under Fire: Police Violence, Crime Politics, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Civil Rights Era, a collaborative digital exhibit created by undergraduate history students documenting nearly 200 civilians killed between 1957 and 1973 by the Detroit Police Department and other law enforcement agencies in the city. Because identifying information was rarely included in official reports or the city’s mainstream media, the students instead searched the archives of local activists and community organizations to identify the victims and the circumstances of their deaths. In the process, they also found that “get-tough” policies, investigative arrests, and policing units like STRESS (Stop the Robberies–Enjoy Safe Streets) encouraged police brutality, and that nearly all of the officers involved were exonerated despite approximately two-thirds of the victims being unarmed. They found patterns of racial abuse, including that 79% of the victims were Black, and that the killings were clustered in downtown and midtown Detroit, commercial corridors, and other “color lines” where the predominantly white and predominantly Black areas of the city converged. Beyond these patterns of state violence, the website also documents the activism and resilience of the Black community.

Lassiter is Professor of History, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, and the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan and director of the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab, an initiative of the University of Michigan Department of History and the UM Carceral State Project.

Episode Credits
Producers: Dan Golodner and Troy Eller English
Interviewee: Matthew Lassiter
Music: Bart Bealmear

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Labor Radical Harry Bridges and the Cold War Ire of the US Government

November 9, 2023October 30, 2023 ~ Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

In the second of a two-part series, Dr. Robert Cherny recounts how immigrant Harry Bridges successfully led the powerful International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) for four decades beginning in the 1930s, even as his militant unionism and association with communists placed him at odds with the American government during the Cold War and at the center of several deportation hearings.

Cherny is professor emeritus at San Francisco State University and author of Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend.

Related Resources:
Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend

Episode Credits
Producers: Dan Golodner and Troy Eller English
Interviewee: Robert Cherny
Music: Bart Bealmear

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Labor Legend Harry Bridges and the Pacific Coast Longshore Strike of 1934

November 2, 2023October 31, 2023 ~ Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

In the first of a two-part series, Dr. Robert Cherny explains how the early life of Australian immigrant Harry Bridges prepared him to lead the groundbreaking 1934 Pacific Coast longshoremen’s and maritime workers’ strikes in the United States, later becoming the first president of the powerful International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU).

Cherny is professor emeritus at San Francisco State University and author of Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend.

Related Resources:
Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend

Episode Credits
Producers: Dan Golodner and Troy Eller English
Interviewee: Robert Cherny
Music: Bart Bealmear

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Taming the Octopus: Eli Black and the Search for Social Responsibility at the United Fruit / United Brands Company

September 14, 2023September 12, 2023 ~ Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

Dr. Matt Garcia traces the legacy of Eli Black, a former rabbi who, as CEO of United Fruit/United Brands Company in the late 1960s and early 1970s, attempted to instill corporate social responsibility into the notorious fruit conglomerate before ending his life following a series of business setbacks and looming corruption scandals. Garcia is the Ralph and Richard Lazarus Professor of History, Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies, and Human Relations at Dartmouth College, and author of Eli and the Octopus: The CEO Who Tried to Reform One of the World’s Most Notorious Corporation.

Episode Credits
Producers: Dan Golodner and Troy Eller English
Interviewee: Matt Garcia
Music: Bart Bealmear

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Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit

A poster on the back of an anti-incinerator publication proclaims: "Detroit Incinerator: We Say No!" From the Thomas Stephens Papers, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

June 15, 2023June 7, 2023 ~ Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

Dr. Josiah Rector explains that since the 1880s a confluence of unregulated industrial capitalism and racist practices in housing and employment in Detroit created pollution and environmental disasters disproportionately affecting the poor, working class, and particularly African Americans. He explores the resulting environmental justice movements in Detroit as residents have fought for clean air, water, and improved public health amid government and corporate divestment and Detroit’s 2013 bankruptcy. Rector is an assistant professor of urban, environmental, and labor history at the University of Houston and author of Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit.

Episode Credits
Producers: Dan Golodner and Troy Eller English
Interviewee: Josiah Rector
Music: Bart Bealmear

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