Marching with us.

‘Joe York, Murdered in the Class War’ from the Daily Worker. Vol. 9 No. 59. March 10, 1932.

JOE YORK, 19-year old Detroit Organizer of the Young Communist League, is dead. He was cold-bloodedly shot by Henry Ford’s gunmen, while acting as a leader in the Ford Hunger March Monday. This is the same Henry Ford who has been acclaimed as the “Saviour of the American Youth,” for his Trade School.

Comrade York was born in a mining town in Ohio, the son of a miner, today a member of the National Miners Union. He went to work in the mines when he was 15. After the 1928 strike, he left for Detroit, the “city of prosperity,” to work in the auto shops there, and take responsibility, as the oldest of 5 children, to support the family back home, which was blacklisted and starving.

For two years he worked in the auto plants. In March 1930, after the March 6th demonstration, he joined the Young Communist League. In May of that year, the Y.C.L. decided to break the terror in Hamtramck, a city controlled by the General Motors Corp. A street meeting was held which was brutally smashed by the police. Comrade York was beaten up and jailed for putting up a militant fight to defend the speaker.

When the Flint strike broke out in Flint, Michigan, though a new member in the Young Communist League, York went to Flint in spite of the terror. The same night that he arrived he was arrested and spent some time in jail. During the next year he was very active in the Y.C.L.

At the Sixth Convention of the Y.C.L. (July, 1931) he was elected to the National Executive Committee of the League. In August, 1931 he was elected as District Organizer of the Detroit League. In this winter’s fight for bread in Detroit, York took a leading part. In the unemployed protest demonstration, he was arrested together with other leading comrades of the Y.C.L. in the city.

A young auto worker himself, he took his place in the front ranks of the Ford Auto workers who marched on the plant to demand relief from the millionaire Ford who got rich on the toil of the sweat of 12 year old boys in his Trade School. For this act, York was murdered.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1932/v09-n059-NY-mar-10-1932-DW-LOC.pdf