By David L. Lewis

This article first appeared in the January/February 1993 issue of Michigan History.

When Henry Ford died in April 1947 at the age of eighty-three, newspapers and magazines—including many African-American publications—were effusive in their praise of the automobile pioneer. Much African-American editorial opinion was summed up by the Journal of Negro History, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which declared that Henry Ford "endeavored to help humanity by offering men work at living wages and making it comfortable for them in his employment. In this respect he was a great benefactor of the Negro race, probably the greatest that ever lived."

Why was Henry Ford so helpful to African-Americans? Once clue involves William Perry, an African-American employed by Ford in 1888-1889. Born near Windsor, Ontario, Canada, where his descendants still live, Perry was hired by Ford to help clear timberland in present-day Dearborn, Michigan. While working in the woods, Ford and Perry, both twenty-five years old, manned a crosscut saw—a long, limber blade with handles at both ends that takes two people to operated. Perry and Ford spent many days working closely together, eventually developing a bond of friendship that endured over fifty years.

The significance of this friendship was later evidenced in a Ford jotting—made in a notebook many years later—stating that African-Americans and whites should work together with "the colored man [sawing] at one end of the log, the white man at the other." This observation was surely inspired by Ford and Perry's woodcutting days.

Ford began working in Detroit in 1891; Perry became a bricklayer about the same time. Perry, however, was forced out of his trade by a heart ailment in 1913. His disability notwithstanding, Perry still had to earn a living, and he arranged to see Henry Ford on 9 February 1914. By this time Ford was an internationally recognized industrialist, and his company was the world's largest, most profitable auto manufacturer.

After chatting in Ford's Highland Park, Michigan, factory office, the magnate and his friend spent more than an hour inspecting machinery in the powerhouse. At the end of the tour, Ford signaled the powerhouse superintendent and told him to put Perry to work. Mindful of his friend's heart condition, Ford also instructed the superintendent to see that Perry was comfortable in his job. William Perry became the Ford Motor Company's first African-American employee; he was the forerunner of hundreds of thousands to come, among them Joe Louis, Jesse Owens and Coleman Young.

In time, Perry became as much of a Ford fixture as the powerhouse whistle, partly because scrawled across his employment application were the words, "Mr. H. Ford is interested in this party." Despite his poor health and advancing age, as well as the company's mass layoffs during the 1920s and 1930s, Perry remained on the Ford payroll until his death at the age of eighty-seven years on 9 October 1940. He remains the oldest employee to have graced the company's active-service payroll.

At the time Perry was employed by Ford, almost all industry turned its back on skilled and semiskilled African-Americans. The elevation of a black individual to a foremanship or white-collar position was almost unthinkable. Generally, the only industrial jobs open to African-Americans were those that whites refused. Consequently, blacks increasingly worked as sweat laborers in the metal industries, where the jobs were dirty, hot and arduous. Moreover, African-Americans usually were paid less than whites, even if they held the same job classification. Then came Henry Ford.

The auto king placed African-Americans in virtually all of his company's hourly rated job classifications, including tool-and-die making—the most skilled and prestigious of plant work. In the process Ford saw to it that African-Americans and whites worked side by side and that all were paid the same wages for the same jobs. Eventually, Ford began promoting African-Americans to foremanships and other positions in which they supervised both blacks and whites. These African American supervisors were given sufficient authority to challenge plant managers and superintendents and to fire white foremen and managers accused of racial discrimination.

In 1919, Ford began hiring African-Americans for white-collar positions. The first such employee was Eugene J. Collins, a young Coe College (Iowa) graduate, who, within thirty minutes of having presented himself at the employment office, was running carbon and silicon tests on cast iron in the company's control analysis laboratory. Ford's employment of Collins was consistent with his general employment philosophy.

Henry Ford's views on employment were expressed in a 1919 policy statement: "we have learned to appreciate men as men, and to forget the discrimination of color, race, country, religion, fraternal orders, and everything else outside of human qualities and energy."

Ford practiced much of what he preached, and not only regarding African-Americans. In 1916 the company employed people representing sixty-two nationalities. The Ford Motor Company also employed more than nine hundred handicapped persons (some of them blind), six hundred ex-convicts and a number of former prostitutes. As a result, Ford had diversity of employment more than a half-century before such employment became commonplace.

Departures from the norm were not unusual for Henry Ford. This was the man who introduced the innovative Model T, created automotive-style mass production, doubled his workers' wages and launched a peace ship into the teeth of World War I—all before hiring large numbers of African-Americans and other minority groups.

Ford's interest in, and concern for, African-Americans was lifelong and expressed in a variety of ways. He strongly felt, for example, that blacks should be given greater educational opportunities. He built schools and churches for African-Americans in Georgia and Michigan, and spent more than $500,000—a large sum for the day—in the early 1930s to sustain and rehabilitate the largely black community of Inkster, Michigan. Starting in 1929, Ford and his wife annually attended services at St. Matthew's Episcopal Church, a black church in Detroit.

Ford also maintained a warm friendship with Dr. George Washington Carver, the great African-American scientist, and supported Dr. Carver's research. On several occasions, the magnate visited the scientist's laboratory at Tuskegee Institute (Alabama). Dr. Carver, in turn, visited Michigan to assist Ford in his research into nutritional uses for roadside vegetation (i.e. weeds).

In addition, at a time when few national radio programs featured black performers, Henry Ford insisted that his company's national symphonic radio broadcast—the "Ford Sunday Evening Hour"—present performances by such African-American artists as Dorothy Maynor and Marian Anderson, one of the most celebrated singers of her time.

In addition to treating African-American workers more equitably than any other large employer, the Ford Motor Company also hired blacks in much larger absolute numbers and percentages than any other U.S. industrial firm. During the 1920s and 1930s the percentage of African-Americans employed at Ford exceeded the ratio of blacks in the total Detroit population. In 1929, when 7.7 percent of Detroit's population was black, 8 percent of Ford's Detroit-area employment was black. In 1940, when blacks comprised 9 percent of Detroit's population, 11.5 percent of Ford's Detroit-area work force was black. Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company had their own affirmative action program for African-Americans four decades before the federal government stepped in to insure such programs.

The Ford Motor Company also had a unique hiring process for African-Americans. Most Detroit firms hired blacks through the Detroit chapter of the Urban League, the Employers Association of Detroit or the Michigan Employment Association. Ford's first African-American employees were simply hired at the employment gate or by Henry Ford and like-minded liberal executives.

Black employees hired by Ford executives enjoyed certain advantages. They usually were spared dismissal and plant-wide pay cuts during general layoffs and recessions. Moreover, African-Americans with executive backing advanced more rapidly within the company. Between 1905 and 1910, James Price worked in a tailor shop patronized by Ford executives, including Charles E. Sorensen, the company's manufacturing boss. After the firm doubled wages to five dollars per day in 1914, Price asked Sorensen for a job. Sorensen agreed. The following day Sorensen and Price met at the Ford Company's employment office at the Highland Park plant. The production chief told the young African-American, "Jim you're going to be the first colored man here to get a job that means something. I'm going to put you in charge of a toolroom. If anyone abuses, insults, or humiliates you, I want you to come to me."

Starting work at the handsome wage of $6.15 per day, Price advanced rapidly, beginning in 1917 when Sorensen called a meeting in Price's toolroom and ordered every other tool attendant to model his room "after Jim's system." In 1924, when the company's buyer of abrasives was fired for graft, Sorensen asked Price to clean up the mess. After doing so, Price became Ford's abrasives expert and the company's first African-American "star man," a designation which enabled him to wear a star-shaped badge awarded only to highly positioned, well-paid salaried employees.

In 1934, Price acquired the additional responsibility of purchasing the company's industrial diamonds. Until his retirement in 1947 he was generally acknowledged as one of the industry's outstanding buyers of abrasives and industrial diamonds.

Discipline problems among Ford's black and white employees triggered a new, supplemental employment system in 1918. Over lunch, Henry Ford outlined the problem to the Reverend R. L. Bradby, the pastor of Second Baptist Church, Detroit's largest African-American church. Impressed by Ford's concern over his workers' welfare, including problem workers, the minister asked the magnate, "How long do you keep a man before you wash your hands of him?" Ford replied, "We're here to save the devil."

Following the luncheon, the Reverend Mr. Bradby was asked to recommend high-caliber black workers to Ford's employment office. He also was invited to help settle black-and-white disputes arising within the plant. Simultaneously, the minister was given a pass to all of the firm's buildings; he became an inseparable part of Ford's African-American employee relations for the next two decades.

By 1923, at a time when five thousand African-Americans were working in the Rouge plant, another African-American minister, the Reverend Everard W. Daniel, was asked to supplement the Reverend Mr. Bradby's work. As pastor of St. Matthew's Episcopal Church, whose membership included a large percentage of Detroit's African-American intelligentsia and businesspeople, the Reverend Mr. Daniel was influential far beyond his congregation. Indeed, until his death in 1939, he was regarded by many Detroiters as the city's leading African-American spokesperson. With the exception of the Reverend Mr. Bradby, the Reverend Mr. Daniel was the black community's leading clergyman.

The Reverend Mr. Daniel also received a pass to Ford property; by 1925 he and Ford had developed a warm personal relationship. Ford, an Episcopalian, donated funds for St. Matthew's parish house, as well as annually attending at least one service at the church. Over the years, the Reverend Mr. Daniel often introduced visiting African-American leaders to Ford officials; on numerous occasions Ford asked him to represent the company at formal ceremonies, including the installation of presidents of black colleges.

Other African-Americans, besides the Reverends Mr. Bradby and Mr. Daniel, acquired the privilege of recommending black workers for employment. They included clergymen, physicians, businessmen, politicians and personal friend of Ford executives.

As a result of Henry Ford's high number of African-American employees, the Ford Motor Company gained great influence in Detroit's black community. Beginning in 1920, the company was the city's largest employer of African-Americans. There were years during the 1920s when as much as 47 percent of the black population was supported by Ford paychecks. It was little wonder that Detroit's African-Americans developed great loyalty to Henry Ford and his company.

Insofar as the average Detroit African-American was concerned, Henry Ford could do no wrong. His factories were the most efficient in the world, his products were unsurpassed, his business decisions were shrewd and his philosophy was unassailable. He not only was a great man—he was the African-Americans' best friend.

This loyalty to Ford was tested between 1937 and 1941, when the United Auto Workers (UAW) attempted to organize the Ford Motor Company's workers. Both Ford and the UAW sought African-American support; hundreds of Ford's black employees sided with the company in numerous pitched battles between company forces and union organizers. Moreover, blacks who rejected the UAW and remained loyal to Ford were applauded by Detroit's African-American community. One local black newspaper, for example, referred to an African-American Ford employee who had knocked down four unionists in a battle as the "uncrowned hero" of the fight.

The UAW, when trying to recruit African-Americans, boasted that it would unite workers regardless of race, creed or color. The union's arguments failed to persuade Detroit's black ministers, who collectively informed Henry Ford of the continued support. The union could not convince African-American workers that it would improve job conditions for them at Ford as long as the company employed almost twice as many blacks as all other UAW-represented auto manufacturers combined, and as long as Ford offered its African-American employees far better jobs than any UAW-represented company. African-American leaders advised their people not to "bite the hand which had fed them."

When the large River Rouge plant was struck in 1941, several thousand African-Americans (some estimates run as high as five thousand) remained inside the plant out of devotion to Ford. All but two hundred to three hundred of Ford's black employees remained loyal to the company through the end of the strike.

The UAW finally organized Ford, but without the cooperation of the company's African-American workers, who overwhelmingly voted against the union—as Ford had asked them to do.

Henry Ford and his company maintained enlightened employment policies toward African-Americans for as long as the auto magnate lived, and beyond. The Ford organization—thanks to its founder—has had a better black employment record than any other major firm on Earth during the past seventy-five years.

Measured by today's standards, one can argue that Henry Ford should have done what he did for African-Americans as a matter of course. Indeed, he should have done much more. But Ford must be considered within the context of his time; in that context he stood apart from all other major private or public employers of his day. To this day, he remains one of the greatest benefactors of African-Americans.

A Ford historian and Ford watcher for the past forty years, David Lewis is professor of business history at the University of Michigan.

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