REUTHER, Walter Philip

(b. 1 September 1907 in Wheeling, West Virginia; d. 9 May 1970 in Pellston, Michigan), local union president, labor leader, civil rights activist, antiwar activist, president of the United Automobile Workers, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and vice president of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Reuther was the oldest of three sons of the German immigrants Valentine Reuther, a brewery-wagon driver and union leader, and Anna Stocker, a homemaker. In 1930, while he was a student at Detroit City College (now Wayne State University), Reuther helped organize the local Social Problems Club, an affiliate of the League for Industrial Democracy, which was itself an affiliate of the Socialist Party. Although he attended college, Reuther never graduated. From November 1933 until June 1935 Reuther and his brother Victor worked in the Gorky Auto Works in the Soviet Union. Their other brother, Roy, was also active in labor. Reuther led the first major auto strike in Detroit in 1936. That year he married May Wolf; they had two children. He continued working in labor, and in 1940 he headed the General Motors department of the United Automobile Workers (UAW). Badly beaten by strikebreakers that same year, Reuther sustained crippling injuries to his right hand. Two assassination attempts were also made on his life.

Reuther did much to earn respect for labor unions from management. His career focused on worker benefits, wage raises, guaranteed annual wages, profit sharing, pensions, and holidays. He also advocated civil rights, low-cost housing, health insurance, and environmental protection of air and water. Reuther participated in two marches for social justice and racial equality, the March on Washington and the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. He also supported the struggles of the Mexican farm workers in California, and he opposed the Vietnam War.

Reuther worked hard for civil rights within the automobile industry. In the early 1960s the workforce of the American automobile industry was about 13 percent African American, and in Michigan the figure exceeded 20 percent. While paragraph sixty-three of the UAW-GM contact gave foremen the power to transfer and upgrade production workers, all too often white supervisors continued to practice racism in not promoting a multiracial workforce. Many African-American autoworkers did not know that Reuther worked unsuccessfully for years to reform paragraph sixty-three. Just as many people in the civil rights movement expressed their discontent by forcing integration at lunch counters in North Carolina, African-American workers in Detroit often criticized the racism of the factory, and they blamed labor union leadership and leaders like Walter Reuther for not changing it.

George Meany, president of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), did not endorse the 12 August 1963 March on Washington for freedom and jobs; the only AFL-CIO executive council members who did were A. Phillip Randolph and Reuther. Reuther himself participated in the March on Washington, at which some 200,000 people gathered to demonstrate their support for equality for all. Reuther not only participated in the march but also supported it by paying $16,000 for the public address system. Before the march Reuther and Randolph, along with the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., Roy Wilkins, leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Whitney Young, the executive director of the Urban League, met with President John F. Kennedy. They encouraged him to include a fair employment statute in the proposed Civil Rights Act. In later years the AFL-CIO took perhaps more credit than was its due for supporting the march and influencing civil rights legislation—in reality it was only Reuther who was present at the event.

With the help of Roy Wilkins, Reuther persuaded Randolph, who was the head of the steering committee, to add an additional Protestant, Jew, and Roman Catholic to this group for the Washington march. These additions shifted the social focus of the March on Washington away from racial equality and more toward the Kennedy administration's civil rights bill. Full employment for African Americans and a minimum wage of two dollars per hour were no longer the sole considerations. Attorney General Robert Kennedy's Justice Department wanted a peaceful march, and Reuther, who represented the UAW to both the Justice Department and the march steering committee members, did his best to make the demonstration fall in line with the administration's vision.

Reuther and the Justice Department both received unauthorized, advance copies of the speech of John Lewis, the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee(SNCC). In it he called for a revolution. When Patrick Cardinal O'Boyle (the Archbishop of Washington who was to offer the invocation at the march) read the speech, he refused to share the same platform with Lewis. With the support of the Justice Department, Reuther convinced Lewis and the other steering committee members that Lewis should rewrite his speech in a manner that would better support the coalition of labor and African Americans. Lewis rewrote the speech, toning down his criticism, and Reuther persuaded O'Boyle to give the invocation on that contingency.

In his own speech that day, Reuther called for full employment and full production for Americans during times of peace, just as in times of war. He criticized Kennedy for defending Berlin, which was at that time being supplied and supported by an airlift from the West, and not defending Birmingham, Alabama. Later that afternoon, when the march leaders met at the White House with President Kennedy, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., modestly deflected Kennedy's compliment on his speech by praising Reuther's speech, but Kennedy noted that King's speech was the major one delivered that day.

Reuther did not always do all that should have been done for civil rights. In the 1950s Horace Sheffield and Willouby Abner, African-American members of the Trade Union Leadership Council, spoke out on the inability of a white man to advocate for African-American autoworkers. Reuther remained as opposed to the Trade Union Leadership Council as he did to the Dodge Revolutionary Union movement, because of the hard Marxist lines of both organizations. The top leadership of the UAW did not actively support Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, either, which prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

Reuther made other efforts for civil rights, however, such as desegregation of the Memphis Harvester local and the inclusion of anti-discrimination in collective-bargaining contracts. Throughout his life Reuther strove to put labor at the center of the social movement for civil rights. As a labor leader who supported racial equality, Reuther was much stronger than Jimmy Hoffa—a convicted felon who was president of the Teamster's Union—David J. MacDonald, or George Meany. Unlike his contemporaries, he made labor the core of a dynamic social movement. For Reuther, unions had the power to change the world.

In another dispute with Meaney in 1968, Reuther led the UAW out of the AFL-CIO. The next year Reuther attempted, through his Alliance for Labor Action, to merge the UAW with the Teamsters Union, but he was unsuccessful. Reuther was killed on 9 May 1970 in a plane crash in Pellston, Michigan. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously. Reuther, perhaps more than anyone else, demonstrated that, through the labor movement, the improvement of the social conditions for all Americans, black and white, could be improved.

Biographical information on Reuther is in Frank Cormier and William J. Eaton, Reuther (1970); Jean Gould and Lorena Hickok, Walter Reuther: Labor's Rugged Individualist (1972); Irving Howe and B. J. Widick, The UAW and Walter Reuther (1973); John Barnard, Walter Reuther and the Rise of the Autoworkers (1983); and Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (1995). An obituary is in the New York Times (11 May 1970).

Larry D. Griffin