Dave Moore made life better for all workers

Dave Moore, shown in a photo taken in February 2009, helped lead what became known as the Ford Hunger March in 1932. In the black-and-white picture in the background of this photo, Moore is the striker holding the picket sign in the 1967 strike at Ford Motor Co. Photo: REBECCA COOK

“Those few of us who are still here will never forget and never apologize. … If we had to do it again, I for one … would do it again and with even more intensity.”

Dave Moore,
March 6, 2007, interview

For Dave Moore, the legendary labor icon who died Oct. 26 in Detroit at 97, it was always about justice, about making life better for all workers. Period.

Moore dreamed big.

“When I wake up the day after the election and Obama wins, then I will know that this country has begun to take a turn for the better,” he said a few days before Election Day 2008, adding: “And this is what Obama needs to do: have the people behind him. I believe the key to his campaign lies with the working people.”

A founding member of UAW Local 600 and one of the first African Americans to hold union office, Moore was born April 6, 1912, the sixth of nine children. He and his family left South Carolina and moved to Columbus, Ohio, when he was 13. They moved to Detroit in 1928.

Moore hired in at Ford Motor Co. in Dearborn, Mich., in the 1930s. Like most African-American autoworkers at the time, Moore worked in the foundry, inhaling soot throughout his shift and blowing black residue out of his lungs by day’s end.

It wasn’t long before he joined other activists, including former Detroit Mayor Coleman A. Young and the Rev. Charles Hill, pushing for African Americans to be on equal terms with white union members.

At the historic Battle of the Overpass in May 1937, Moore saw then-UAW President Walter Reuther and others get beaten by Ford’s thugs. He and other African Americans had been left out of organizing because many of their white colleagues didn’t believe they should get equal pay for equal work. Black workers who had come to Detroit for the $5-a-day offer, felt loyal to powerful owner Henry Ford. But those same workers also wanted better pay and safer working conditions.

Moore became active with the Detroit-area’s Unemployed Councils, which mobilized people to fight hunger and home evictions. “They grew out of desperation: the hunger, the poverty, the suffering, the death, the untold misery that working people were going through, especially black people,” Moore said in a 2007 interview.

On March 7, 1932, Moore helped lead what became known as the Ford Hunger March. Thousands of unemployed workers and their supporters marched to the company’s River Rouge plant for jobs and food, demanding housing relief from the winter’s cold, access to Ford’s hospital for free health care and a shorter workweek to share available jobs.

Tragically, five union members were shot and killed in the march, which was met with tear gas and police. No charges were ever filed.

The workers’ unity overcame racial divisions Ford tried to provoke, and eventually opened the door to the founding of the UAW.

And their deaths had a profound effect on Moore’s life. “Five young people in the bloom of life, in their teens and early 20s, just beginning to see life, were lying dead on Miller Road,” he recalled. “I was a changed man because of what I saw that day. It changed me in my thinking.”

Moore continued to rise in the ranks of Local 600 and was later elected to leadership positions. Dismissed from his elected position in 1951 during McCarthyism’s peak, he was reinstated in 1963 and eventually appointed to the UAW International staff and assigned to the union’s National Ford Department.

Jennifer John