Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy

This past Sunday, the good people of All Soul Community Church invited me to talk about my book, in place of where the sermon would normally go. The community was very welcoming and they were very receptive and affirming of what I had to say. Here is the non-sermon that I delivered on Sunday.

I wrote A People’s History of Grand Rapids for several reasons. First, I wanted to provide a counter-narrative to the official version of the City’s history, a history based primarily on Rich White men, most of whom identified as Christians, you know, the men who have their names on buildings all across the city. 

Second, I wanted to demonstrate that despite the conservative label that Grand Rapids gets, there is a rich history of organized resistance against oppression, whether we are talking about Indigenous people resisting Settler Colonialism, workers fighting against exploitation, the African American community engaging in the Black Freedom Struggle, community members opposing war, those fighting for environmental justice and those in the LGBTQ community resisting heterosexism, homophobia and transphobia.

Third, I want to write a book that adequately provides historical context for the various social movements throughout the history of Grand Rapids, that each of these movements were fighting against systems of power and oppression that I would argue are central to Grand Rapids, from its founding to the present. 

Lastly, I wanted to write a book for the current and future generations. I do a fair amount of organizing with young activist/organizers in Grand Rapids, and I wanted them to know that their actions are an extension of the struggle for justice that has been going on for two centuries in this community. Their resistance to current injustices is part of this powerful legacy of resistance. 

However, since the country will be celebrating Labor Day on Monday, I wanted to talk a bit about the legacy of radical organizing within the labor movement and the movement for economic justice. 

Again, despite the claims that Grand Rapids is conservative, there have always been workers that have challenged the Capitalist Class in this community. The first effort to organize around an 8-hour workday, was done by city workers in 1867. Remember, the whole point of a labor union is to democratize our workplaces, not just to fight for better wages.

In May of 1891, both cable and horse car workers went on strike for higher wages and union contracts. The street railway company began hiring scab workers immediately. As the week progressed, workers tried to keep cars from running, first by inducing others not to take their jobs, but later by blocking the cars directly. This was a tactic that falls under the strategy known as Direct Action. Direct Action is when people decide to take matters into their own hands to make change, rather than just appeal to those in positions of authority or those in power. This is why I chose that quote from the great freedom fighter Assata Shakur, where she said, “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”

The reading for today was a summary of the great 1911 Grand Rapids Furniture Workers Strike. It is important to note a couple of other things about that strike that was not included in the reading. Also, I would encourage people to read Jeffrey Kleiman’s book entitled, Strike!: How the Furniture Workers Strike of 1911 Changed Grand Rapids. 

Not everyone in a position of power took the side of the furniture barons. The Catholic Bishop of Grand Rapids, Bishop Joseph Schrembs, spoke out against the injustice being done to the workers. He said, “I consider the present labor situation in our city as a most deplorable one from every point of view. I would welcome and hasten the day when compulsory arbitration will force men dealing with their fellow men to let fairness and justice come to their own through reasonable methods rather than through the cowering of men’s hearts through the cruel pangs of hunger of their wives and children.” 

Such a demonstration of solidarity did not come without a cost. Because he sided with workers, the Vatican had Schrembs reassigned to the Diocese of Toledo.

Now, the 1911 Furniture workers strike did not end in victory, but it did pave the way for future labor organizing and it demonstrating the importance of solidarity and community care that workers and their families participated in. Just 1 month after the strike ended, 10,000 people marched in the Labor Day parade, which was about 10% of the population of the city at that time. This doesn’t even include the people greeting them along the parade route, cheering for them and thanking them for their courage.

In addition, it is important that we recognize that the Furniture Barons were so threatened by the strike, that they decided to change the City’s Charter in 1916. During the strike, Grand Rapids had a 12 ward political system, with many of the wards divided along ethnic lines – German, Polish, Lithuanian, Dutch, etc. The Furniture Barons put forth a ballot initiative to change the 12 war system into a 3 ward system and to end having a strong mayor to a mayor that would be nothing more than a glorified commissioner. The initiative passed and the Capitalist Class won that round of class warfare, thus consolidating political power in the city.

Another theme in my book is the idea that when people take bold action or engage in radical imagination, it tends to open up new spaces for other people to do the same thing. What I mean by Radical Imagination is best said by the great Puerto Rican poet, Martin Espada, who stated, “No change for the good ever happens without it being imagined first, even if that change seems hopeless or impossible in the present.”

At the end of 1936, autoworkers in Flint did something that had not been seen in the US, they engaged in a wildcat strike, where workers occupied the factories and would not allow production to happen until they won their demands. The wildcat strike was so successful that is was repeated all across the country, even in Grand Rapids. Workers at the Kelvinator refrigerator and domestic appliances factory were victorious in their fight to unionize in 1937, because they used a wildcat strike model.

However, after WWII, with the anti-communist purges brought on by the McCarthy Hearings and then the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which made it illegal for workers to go on strike, the labor movement became less militant. On top of that, most of the mainstream labor groups began to redirect union dues to fund Democratic Party candidates, which has not affectively won them any significant labor battles over the pas 60 years. 

Some of the labor complacency changed after the Reagan years, as more and more labor rights were being undermined. In 1994, when the Clinton Administration adopted the North America Free Trade Agreement, there was a massive relocation of manufacturing jobs to Mexico, which gutted union membership. Two years later, the Clinton Administration adopted the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which essentially dismantled much of the welfare system that provided a safety net to working class families. 

It wasn’t until the WTO protests in 1999 in Seattle, that the labor movement and economic justice struggles were beginning to gain attention. In Grand Rapids there were campaigns to challenge global trade policies, efforts to expose the realities of sweatshops that made our clothing and increased efforts to shine the light on service workers that have been exploited for decades. Now we know about efforts among Amazon and Starbucks workers to unionize their workplace, but it is important that these current campaigns were because of worker groups like the IWW, which first began a campaign to unionize baristas at Starbucks in 2006. More importantly, this campaign to unionize Starbucks baristas began in Grand Rapids.

I wanted to end by saying that over the past four decades of being part of social movements and researching this two century history in Grand Rapids, that when injustice exists, there are always people who will rise up to fight it. I have also seen long lasting relationships blossom between people who have engaged in these struggles for liberation. While at times it may seem like we are not making the necessary changes to create more freedom and justice and equity, please know that you are part of a long standing tradition of fighting for collective liberation, even when we don’t see an immediate outcome. 

People I have met in the struggle for justice want to win, but what I have witnessed is that when people engage in these struggles they are transformed because of the struggle. While I was in Chiapas, a young Mayan told me, “my people have not only endured 500 years of oppression, we have never lost sight of who we are as a people.” In the end, maybe that is enough. 

“It is better to die on your feet fighting, than to live on your knees in submission.” Emiliano Zapata