Women occupying Detroit’s Yale and Towne Lock Co. during the ’37 wave of sit-down strikes valiantly defend their barricades before being overwhelmed by tear gas and hundreds of cops.

‘Detroit Police Beat 100 Women After Setting A Trap’ by Frank Marquart from Socialist Call. Vol. 3 No. 110. April 24, 1937.

DETROIT. One of the most vicious demonstrations of police brutality on the part of a particularly brutal police force occurred in Detroit on the afternoon of Wednesday, April 14.

Encouraged by the assurances of Governor Murphy that no violence would be used against them, 100 women and 30 men employed in the Yale and Towne Lock Company continued their sit-down strike while waiting for negotiations to begin.

Trapped

Suddenly 700 police and deputies arrived before the plant. The workers rushed to their defense. The women barricaded themselves in the second floor of the plant. All the gates were locked and barricaded. Chief Deputy Sheriff McGrath then read a court order and asked the strikers to leave. They left the windows to vote and shortly returned to announce that they would not leave.

Immediately the deputies began an attack against the one-story section of the plant in the rear. They placed a ladder against the building and started climbing to the roof. Workers guarding the roof attempted to stop them and the deputies opened fire with their tear gas guns.

The air was filled with flying missiles-tear gas bombs from the deputies and locks, rocks and other small objects from the strikers.

Mix Signals

Shouts and laughter went up from the strikers as the police, attacking from the front, were scattered when deputies in the rear of the plant overshot the building and dropped tear gas among the cops. The entire neighborhood was shrouded in tear gas vapor. The deputies drenched the building with the gas.

At one point in the battle the  strikers offered to come out of the plant and the police agreed to a truce.

Double-Cross

Then while the workers prepared to evacuate, the police rushed the plant and began clubbing the men and women indiscriminately. Several women who had locked themselves in the storeroom came in for special cruel treatment. Overpowered, the strikers were loaded in patrols and taken to jail where they were promptly finger-printed.

“The Sheriff and Police Department have evidenced in this action their attitude toward labor in this city. The automobile workers of Detroit will never forgot the needless bloodshed and brutality of the police and deputies. As for the strike, it is still very much on,” said Homer Martin, President of the United Automobile Workers of America.

Socialist Call began as a weekly newspaper in New York in early 1935 by supporters of the Socialist Party’s Militant Faction Samuel DeWitt, Herbert Zam, Max Delson, Amicus Most, and Haim Kantorovitch, with others to rival the Old Guard’s ‘New Leader’. The Call Education Institute was also inaugurated as a rival to the right’s Rand School. In 1937, the Call as the Militant voice would fall victim to Party turmoil, becoming a paper of the Socialist Party leading bodies as it moved to Chicago in 1938, to Milwaukee in 1939, where it was renamed “The Call” and back to New York in 1940 where it eventually resumed the “Socialist Call” name and was published until 1954.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/socialist-call/call%203-109.pdf