The intersection of Fort Avenue and Oakwood Boulevard in southwest Detroit at present features largely as a thoroughfare for vans and commuters.
Nonetheless, as you sit idling on the stoplight ready to cross the bridge over the Rouge River, you would possibly look to the facet and see one thing surprising on this closely industrialized space: A sculpture of weathered metal reaches towards the sky alongside a sprig of flowers and waves of grasses and folks fishing.
This inconspicuous nook, now the house of the Fort Avenue Bridge Park, has a number of tales to inform: of a river, a area, a historic battle and an ongoing battle.
In case you pull over, you’ll enter a spot that makes an attempt to tug collectively threads of historical past, surroundings and sustainable redevelopment.
Indicators clarify why this sculpture and park are right here: to honor the reminiscence of protesters who met on this very spot on March 7, 1932, earlier than marching up Miller Highway to the huge Ford Rouge River Advanced positioned within the adjoining metropolis of Dearborn.
As a sociology professor, I’ve a robust curiosity in how the historical past of labor and industrial air pollution have influenced Detroit.
I’m additionally within the potential for environmental restoration or “inexperienced reparations” to supply a brand new means ahead.
To know this potential future, we should first acknowledge and honor the previous.
Paul Draus, CC BY
14 calls for
Of their e book “Labor’s Untold Story,” printed in 1955, journalist Richard Boyer and historian Herbert Morais quote a up to date account of the Starvation March:
It was early, it was chilly when the primary of the unemployed Ford staff (a lot of whom had been laid off the day earlier than) arrived at Child Creek Bridge. They have been a small grey group they usually stood slapping their sides, avoiding the chilly, and questioning in the event that they alone would come.
Others quickly joined them: Black and white, women and men, immigrants and American-born. They united to ship a listing of 14 calls for to the auto tycoon Henry Ford, whose US$5 every day wage for his staff was as soon as thought-about revolutionary.
Detroit Information Employees through Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and City Affairs, Wayne State College.
Among the many marchers’ calls for: jobs for laid-off staff, a seven-hour workday with out a pay discount, two 15-minute relaxation durations a day, an finish to discrimination towards Black staff and the correct to prepare.
This crowd of a number of thousand marched up the highway on one of many coldest days of winter. They have been greeted on the Dearborn border with clouds of tear fuel, jets of chilly water and a bathe of bullets.
It was then that the Ford Starvation March turned the Ford Bloodbath.
The seeds of a labor motion
Beth Tompkins Bates, in her e book “The Making of Black Detroit within the Age of Henry Ford,” wrote that “The response of the Ford Motor Firm on that day shot holes within the fantasy that Ford cared about his staff, that he was totally different from different businessmen.”
Walter P. Reuther Library
On the finish of the day, 4 marchers lay useless, whereas many others have been injured and hospitalized. A fifth would die months later of his wounds.
Greater than 30,000 individuals confirmed up for the useless marchers’ funerals. The violent reactions of Ford safety and Dearborn police in the course of the march have been extensively condemned.
In an effort to handle the stain on its public picture, the Ford household first commissioned then expanded a significant work by Mexican muralist Diego Rivera that was to turn into the centerpiece of the Detroit Institute of Arts, often known as the Detroit Trade Mural. Rivera, a identified communist, depicted each ruthless effectivity and the racialized inequality of the economic course of.
Bettmann through Getty Photos
Ford’s battle towards unions was in the end a failure. 5 years after the Starvation March, the so-called “Battle of the Overpass” led to the group of the Rouge plant by the United Auto Employees.
The Ford Starvation March, lengthy forgotten by many, is now acknowledged as an vital catalyst within the progress of the union motion.
Battle for sustainability and justice
The battle for sustainability and environmental justice is one other main theme of the park, which chronicles the historical past of the Rouge River, together with the day in 1969 when the oily water infamously caught hearth.
The hellish picture of burning rivers helped encourage the signing of the Clear Air and Clear Water acts, in addition to the creation of the Environmental Safety Company.
The air and water in and round Detroit are a lot cleaner at present than they have been 1969. However this doesn’t change the truth that the world the place the park sits bears a disproportionate burden of the air pollution generated by the area’s industrial manufacturing, which incorporates cement vegetation, gypsum and aggregates processors, salt mining and asphalt storage, in addition to a metal mill and petroleum refinery.
One other donor to the park is Marathon Petroleum Company whose Detroit Refinery occupies the adjoining neighborhood. Although Marathon has invested within the growth of inexperienced areas by itself property, the refinery has additionally expanded in recent times, additional degrading the native surroundings.
Analysis reveals that staff profit from unionization in myriad methods, not solely instantly however not directly. However latest labor victories by the UAW, Hollywood writers and different organizers stand in stark distinction to the long-term erosion of union membership.
At this time, the Fort Avenue Bridge Park in southwest Detroit serves to remind us of the complexities of historical past and the way obvious progress in a single space could also be adopted by a setback someplace else. It additionally represents how the spirit of neighborhood, unbroken, retains pushing for one thing higher.
