On March 7, 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, over 5,000 unemployed auto workers and their allies marched in Detroit to demand relief and jobs from billionaire auto boss Henry Ford. The event is known to history as the Ford Hunger March.
The onset of economic crisis had hit the working class in Detroit (and everywhere else) hard. At the time, it was estimated that there 400,000 jobless in the metro area. For those who still had jobs, there wages had been cut in half since the stock market crashed in October 1929.
The march was organized by the Unemployed Councils, an initiative of the Communist Party USA. Key leaders were Albert Goetz, leader of the Detroit Unemployed Council, and CPUSA mayoral candidate John Schmies. On March 6, the eve of the protest, William Z. Foster—secretary of the Trade Union Unity League and a leader in the Communist Party—gave a speech to rally the workers.
The next morning, in the bitter cold, marchers arrived carrying banners reading “Give Us Work,”, “We Want Bread Not Crumbs,” and “Tax the Rich and Feed the Poor.” They marched peacefully through Detroit, eventually reaching the Dearborn city limits on their way to Ford’s Rouge River plant.
There, they were met by police and Ford company agents armed with machine guns. The workers remained peaceful, but eventually the cops and hired gunmen opened fire—shooting workers in the back as they marched away.
Four were killed, including Young Communist League organizer Joe York. Arrest warrants were issued for Foster, Goetz, Schmies, and other Communist leaders as prosecutors sought to cripple the unemployed movement. Eventually, it was clear that the only violence that day had been committed by police.
Days later, 60,000 people turned out for the funeral of those killed in what became known as the “Ford Massacre.” Along with the “Battle of the Overpass,” the Flint Sit-Down Strike, and other events, the Hunger March is considered one of the key events that eventually led to the unionization of the U.S. auto industry.
On March 8, 2025, there will be a march and commemorative program held in Detroit (see below for details). Presented here is original coverage of events from the Daily Worker, predecessor of People’s World.
Ford-Murphy Police Slaughter Hunger Marchers:
4 Dead, 3 Dying, 35 Shot in Machine Gun Massacre
Daily Worker | March 8, 1932
– 5000 Detroit Workers Put Up Heroic Defense While Demanding Relief and Jobs in Sub-Zero Weather
– Working Class of Detroit Enraged by Massacre of Unemployed Ford Workers; Plan Mass Demonstrations and Funeral
– Workers Hold Ground In 1 1/2 Hour Struggle Demanding Jobs, 50 Per Cent of Full Wages, No Discrimination Against Negroes
DETROIT (March 7)—With machine guns and revolvers spitting a hail of leaden death and tear gas bombs throwing up dense clouds of choking fumes, scores of police brutally smashed the mile-long Ford Hunger March of 5,000 workers here yesterday.
Joe York, District Organizer of the Young Communist League, is dead. From six to seven workers were shot and are reported to be dying, in addition to two dozen other workers who were seriously injured.
Despite the array of machine guns, revolvers, and tear gas bombs, the unarmed workers defended themselves for an hour-and-a-half on Ford property before falling back in the face of the deadly rattle of police machine guns.
The armed onslaught took place at the climax of the Hunger March to the Ford plant organized by the Unemployed Council of Detroit. The march began at one o’clock in the afternoon. Crowds of workers began to gather at Oakwood and Ford early in the day, swarming off the trolley cars without paying for their fares. Police who tried to arrest the workers refusing to pay their fares were attacked by angry workers and the arrested workers rescued.
Nearing Dearborn Road, the dividing line between Detroit and Dearborn, the workers were met by 50 or 60 police, who began hurling tear gas bombs. This attack succeeded in merely temporarily stopping the march. The workers immediately ran to the side of the road and began raining the police with bricks and stones. They chased the police down the road. The police fell back before the workers as the march continued down Miller Road to Dix Road.
Here the police ambushed the workers and unlimbered machine guns and fire hose. In spite of the rain of death that came from the machine guns, the workers continued throwing stones and heroically battling the police.
With the arrival of police reinforcements, the workers began to retreat. Someone shouted out that they would come back with 50,000 workers. The crowd roared its approval. As they turned their backs on the police for the return march, the police let loose a barrage of machine gun bullets aimed at the backs of the retreating workers.
The exact number of workers injured and wounded is not known as the Daily Worker goes to press. The whole working-class section of Detroit is seething with bitter indignation and protest at this murderous attack of the Ford-controlled police on the unemployed Ford workers.
The demands of the Ford Hunger Marchers are:
- Jobs for all laid-off Ford workers.
- Immediate payment of 50 percent of full wages.
- Seven-hour day without reduction in pay.
- Slowing down the deadly speedup.
- Two 15-minute rest periods.
- No discrimination against Negroes as to jobs, relief, medical service.
- Free medical aid in the Ford hospital for the employed and unemployed Ford workers and their families.
- Five tons of coke or coal for the winter.
- Abolition of servicemen (spies, police, etc.)
- No foreclosures on homes of former Ford workers. Ford to assume responsibility for all mortgages, land contracts, and back taxes on homes until six months after regular full-time re-employment.
- Immediate payment of lump sum of $50 winter relief.
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WORKERS! ORGANIZE FOR DEFENSE AGAINST THE BOSSES’ TERROR DRIVE
Statement from the Communist Party USA
Daily Worker | March 8, 1932
The Communist Party calls on the American working class to rally, fight, and defeat the new wave of armed terror against unemployed and employed workers marked by the machine gun attack upon the demonstration of 5,000 workers yesterday at the Ford plant in Detroit.
Workers and workers’ organizations: Wire and mail your protests to the governor of Michigan, to Mayor Murphy of Detroit! Hold protest meetings!
Unemployed workers machine gunned yesterday in Detroit in a demonstration before the Ford plant—4 workers dead, among them the district organizer of the Young Communist League, and more than 35 injured. Of these, 3 are dying.
The billionaire Ford and Mayor Murphy—the “friend of the workers,” supported by the American Federation of Labor—united against unemployed and hungry workers.
Striking miners and organizers killed, kidnapped, and beaten in Kentucky and Tennessee—Harry Simms, organizer of the Young Communist League, murdered in cold blood—a reward of $1,000—dead or alive—posted for Frank Borich, secretary of the National Miners’ Union, by the Harlan, Ky., “Home Guard.”
The Kentucky-Tennessee mines ore owned by Ford, Rockefeller, Morgan, Insull—the biggest capitalists in the United States—the capitalists who are driving the American working class to a new slave and starvation level, the capitalists who are organizing war against the Soviet Union and the Chinese Revolution.
Michigan and Kentucky—the North and South. In both sections of the country, the wave of police and fascist terror against workers and their organizations breaks over strikes and demonstrations with a fury which coincides with a continual drop in production, with the rapid increase of mass unemployment, with the inflation policy of the government…,with the increase of taxation on articles of mass consumption, raising the prices and lowering the real wages of workers, with the failure of the capitalist rulers to find any other solution for the crisis than putting more and more of the burden on the masses—shooting and jailing them when they organize and resist.
The Communist Party says to the American working class, with all the emphasis it can command, that no more important task confronts our class today than the organization of mass defense against the terror and suppression drive of the billionaire bosses and their government.
Make the protest against the murderous attacks by police and factory guards of Ford and Mayor Murphy, the starting point for mass organization of the American working class in defense of its elementary rights to organize, strike, picket, meet, speak, and demonstrate against starvation and oppression!
Organize protest meetings at factory gates! Bring this issue into every union and fraternal organization! Organize demonstrations at other Ford plants and at the homes of Ford representatives and dealers!
This terror is part of the war preparations of the American ruling class. It is intended to cow the working class into submission to the entire war and starvation program of Wall Street government.
Unite the struggle against police and fascist terror with the struggle against imperialist war.
The American working class is faced with the necessity of defending its most elementary rights. The Communist Party of the United States calls upon all workers to unite for this basic struggle.
Starvation and slavery enforced by machine guns and jails will be defeated by united revolutionary struggle.
Defend the working class. Join the heroic struggle of Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennessee workers. Defend them and strengthen the whole working-class front by extending the struggle against terror and suppression throughout the country.
Organize for the overthrow of the capitalist system maintained by fraud, robbery, and murder!
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Mass Jailings to Whitewash Massacre of Jobless by Ford Gunmen
Daily Worker | March 9, 1932
DETROIT—An attempt to whitewash the wholesale murder of unemployed workers by Henry Ford and Mayor Murphy’s henchmen, mass raids and arrests are sweeping Detroit.
Forty-four workers have already been arrested and they are to be charged with “homicide, assault with intent to kill,” and with “criminal syndicalism.” With four workers dead, their bodies filled with bullets fired by Henry Ford’s gunmen, and 23 jobless seriously wounded because they took part in a hunger march to the Ford plant Monday, demanding jobs or unemployment relief, the entire armed forces of Michigan are being mobilized against the hungry masses.
A new reign of terror has been inaugurated by the hypocritical Murphy regime. The tortured workers are being tortured and third-degreed by the police department of the “liberal” Mayor Murphy, who rose to office by promising relief to the unemployed and who now, along with Ford, feeds them bullets.
This is the beginning of a colossal frame-up by the automobile bosses and their government to cover up, if they can, their savage slaughter of the unemployed, their deliberate and murderous assault on an orderly march of unarmed, hungry workers, who came to demand jobs or food from Henry Ford, who in 1931 coined over $44,000,000 in profits from their toil and sweat.
The frame-up dragnet which the Detroit police have flung out is aided by the Federal dicks of the Hoover hunger government, which itself followed the policy of threatening murder for the National Hunger March. Federal agents are working with the Detroit gunmen of Henry Ford seeking to round up leaders of the unemployed masses. The capitalist press declares that the bosses’ cops and private gunmen in Detroit are “searching” for William Z. Foster, leader of the Trade Union Unity League, who spoke at a mass meeting of unemployed workers the day before the Hunger March to the Ford plant took place.
Henry Ford’s plant in River Rouge is an armed camp. Not only are his private gunmen there, armed to the teeth with the very machine guns that spattered death into the ranks of the hungry unemployed, but Ford’s killers have been reinforced by the 125th Michigan Infantry that was mobilized in Detroit, and as the capitalist papers say, “is ready to swing into action.” This battalion, says the capitalist press, “includes three rifle companies, a machine gun company, and a headquarters’ company.”
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