The Forgotten Battle of East Lansing - East Lansing Info

In 1937, clashes between Michigan State College students and auto union members organizing a labor strike erupted in East Lansing. (Courtesy of MSU archives) With 3-foot-long concrete reinforcing rods in their hands, students at Michigan State College took to the streets of East Lansing on Monday, June 7, 1937, to push back an invasion of Lansing labor union members, kicking off the one-day — and oft-forgotten — Battle of East Lansing. (Perhaps if it had a catchy folk song sung by a local Peter, Paul and Mary-type group, future generations would better remember it?) Recounting these events nearly five decades later in an interview with labor historian Ken Germanson, Lester Washburn, president of  United Auto Workers union of Lansing — Local 182 — said the trouble started when the union had racked up a series of wins. Lansing was a major automobile producer, with the 52-acre Oldsmobile assembly plant on the south side, the Fisher body plant on the west side and the city’s own REO Motor Car Company plant in the neighborhood to which it gave its name. Earlier in 1937, the latter was the site of a four-week sit-down strike that led to the recognition of UAW Local 182 as the chief collective bargaining representative for the autoworkers. “We were being too successful as far as organizing was concerned in that town,” Washburn said in the 1986 interview. “Everybody wanted to join the auto workers. One night, we had 19 people come in the hall and ask for a union; Capital City Wrecking Company. They wreck buildings, sell used lumber as well as new lumber. They had 25 employees. 19 of them come in and ask for a union, we give them one that night, elected officers, set them up.” The next morning, however, Capital City Wrecking Company fired the six newly elected officers and refused to recognize the union. According to Washburn, what followed was a court fight and a strike. The legal battle found the union trying to prove that the company had violated its rights and the National Labor Board Act of 1935. The judge issued a temporary injunction against the union until he could rule. The strike was staged by employees of the wrecking company and their UAW brothers from other local shops. Men would picket the company when they weren’t working their own jobs, and the auxiliary organization — made up of the wives of the union men — set up a tent to serve coffee and doughnuts to the strikers. In the interview, Washburn said some authorities felt the strike violated the court’s injunction. At 2 a.m. Monday, June 7, 1937, Lansing police pounded on the Washburns’ door to arrest him and his wife, Nevah, but the union leader was on a train back from Detroit. His wife was home with their three young children, all under 10. Nevah and Lester Washburn. (Courtesy of family) Nevah was arrested and left her children with a neighbor. Several labor union leaders and their wives were rounded up that night by the Lansing Police Department. When Washburn returned to Lansing about an hour later and found out his wife was in jail, he hurried to a pay phone — he said police had cut the telephone wire outside their home before serving the warrant for their arrest — and started waking people up. He gathered with other leaders who had escaped arrest and, within the next few hours, the UAW had declared a Lansing Labor Holiday. Approximately 15,000 union members would not report to work that day to protest the arrests. The union members and their supporters took to the streets in a parade led by a gravel truck, Washburn recalled in the 1986 interview. In a 1965 issue of Michigan History magazine, writers Albert A. Blum and Ira Spar described the labor holiday. “They forced the closing of stores, factories, and theaters; halted all traffic and even picketed police headquarters, the city hall, and the state capitol,” they wrote. “The police force was completely immobilized while the workers paraded in the streets, their numbers growing each minute as more and more workers emerged from the closed stores and factories. Some sang ‘Solidarity Forever’ while others carried clubs, sticks, and two-by-fours. By early afternoon, just about everything that could be closed was closed because of the effective action of Washburn’s ‘flying squadron.’” A labor strike on June 7, 1937 turned into a series of clashes between union members and Michigan State College students. (Courtesy of MSU archives) A UAW history from 2024 reports that the “flying squadron” was akin to the Minute Men of the early United States: militant and ready to strike at a moment’s notice. The UAW Local 182 Flying Squadron wore blue and gold overseas caps embroidered with the group’s name, according to Blum and Spar’s 1965 article. Washburn said union stewards “invited” Lansing merchants to close down, and it was likely the Flying Squadron members who spread the word. “Some of them may have gotten a little rambunctious,” he said of their invitations. “But there were no complaints or windows broken.” In the next day’s issue of The State Journal, Washburn would say he had not given permission for union members to expand the holiday beyond Lansing’s borders, but carloads of union men started traveling east on Michigan Avenue into East Lansing and Okemos. Laurence White’s family had moved to East Lansing from Indiana and his father was an engineer at Oldsmobile. The family lived at 546 Meadowlawn in the Glencairn neighborhood and 10-year-old White had a front row seat to this June battle.  He wrote about his experience in 2010. He said the union men blocked all major street intersections in East Lansing while “small groups of men convinced downtown merchants to lock their doors in honor of this holiday.” Blum and Spar wrote that restaurant and business owners initially mistook the men for representatives of a veterans group because they still donned their Flying Squadron caps. “But many Michigan State College students, overhearing the arguments between the unionists and the businessmen, quickly perceived the situation as a challenge to their sovereignty and to their eating places,” they wrote. White said all the stores along Grand River closed, including the State College Book Store, an operation then run by MSC faculty and under the direction of College President Robert Shaw. However, in a report to Time Magazine that appeared in the June 14, 1937, edition, Editorial Director Robert D. Burhans of the student newspaper Michigan State News said there was one exception. “These first 60-odd men closed all stores along the main street with the exception of one,” Burhans wrote, “a pocket in the wall known as Jim Brakeman’s Bootery, [the] ‘smallest shoe store in the world.’ Jim, a 250-lb. former State footballer, does not close under just any order. And the student body likes Jim pretty well.” A photo of Jim Brakeman from the 1935 Michigan State College yearbook. Brakeman helped lead the 1934 MSC football team to an 8-1 record and was indeed well loved by MSC and East Lansing. When the camera store on Grand River reopened, The State Journal reported that it quickly sold out of film as students took countless pictures of the exciting events in their small town. It was after 4 p.m. when the town’s restaurants and businesses began closing. White remembered that word of the “intrusion” had spread to Demonstration Hall, where Sgt. James Atchison had dismissed his ROTC class. This group of young men, clad in uniform, were the first students the union men reportedly saw. Blum and Spar wrote that some of the union men mistook the ROTC students for members of the National Guard because of their uniforms. According to The State Journal, MSC students of all affiliation began to gather around the traffic light at Abbot Road and Michigan Avenue, with 500 assembling quickly to break the logjam of cars. The students were now fully in charge of East Lansing. Reports vary on how violent the altercation became. All sources agree that students began pulling union men from their vehicles. At least one automobile was flipped by students, and between eight and 20 men were thrown into the still-chilly water of the Red Cedar River. “Egged on by their coed cheering section,” Blum and Spar wrote, “the students struck gently at first by shouting, ‘You may be able to run Lansing and Flint but you can’t run East Lansing,’ but then followed an onslaught of physical force as they charged…The outnumbered unionists stood their ground for a while, but soon began to back away from the staggering student attack. The scholars dragged eight strikers to the Red Cedar River and promptly tossed them into the cold and dirty stream for what one student called ‘a much needed cooling off.’” The State Journal printed a photo the next day of wet, demoralized union men emerging from the river. An unnamed alumnus years later told Blum and Spar that the scene resembled “The Battle of Bunker Hill and a Mardi Gras all rolled into one.” Another student, Gerald Cox of Detroit, spoke on behalf of the students when talking to The State Journal. “The student body isn’t going to allow the union to come to East Lansing and tell stores and restaurants how they shall run their business,” he said. “The students depend too much on these restaurants and eating places to allow them to close. The union may have the right to organize and carry on their bargaining and otherwise maintain their rights, but other people have rights, too.” ROTC instructor Sgt. James H. Atchison. (From 1948 MSU Yearbook) The State Journal’s Tuesday edition reported that students took over the duties of directing traffic, with the “battle sector” extending from the intersection of Grand River and Michigan Avenue opposite the People’s Church westward to Harrison Road as the students pushed the union forces three blocks toward Lansing. Students held hands to form a human blockade, and several Lansing workers were slightly injured after being pulled from cars and thrown to the pavement.