General Gordon Baker Jr., a longtime Detroit revolutionary, labor activist, troublemaker and family man, died Sunday of congestive heart failure at Henry Ford Hospital. He was 72 and lived in Highland Park.
Baker -- General was his first name -- was fired from two auto companies, was once arrested for booing the national anthem and in 1965 refused to be sworn into the Army, a Free Press profile noted in 1986.
As Jim Schaefer writes Friday in the Free Press, as a young autoworker at Dodge Main in the 1960s, Mr. Baker perceived a racial imbalance in the United Auto Workers union. Black faces were missing from leadership, and black issues were missing from the priority list. Mr. Baker helped formed the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement -- DRUM -- to challenge for change. DRUM didn’t last long, but it quickly caught the attention of the Chrysler executive suite and beyond.
Rory Gamble, director of UAW Region 1A, which represents 144,000 members in southeast Michigan, credited Mr. Baker’s work then and now for progress that includes minorities in leadership.
“I give him a lot of credit for that,” Gamble said Thursday. He called Mr. Baker “one of the most principled and dedicated brothers I ever met in this business. ... Everything he did was motivated toward making society a better place for all Americans.”
In 1968, Baker and fellow militants Mike Hamlin and Ron March, publishers of the Inner City Voice newspaper, agitated for change at Dodge Main. On May 5, 4,000 workers following the lead of DRUM shut down the plant in a wildcat strike that began a series of radical actions over the next couple of years that shook the auto industry, inspired black militants across the country and worried local and national political leaders and even the Wall Street Journal.
According to an account of that period, "Detroit: I Do Mind Dying," by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, what scared the establishment was the black revolutionaries' focus on "one of the most vulnerable links of the American economic system -- the point of mass production, the assembly line."
Chrysler fired Baker for acting as one of the strike's leaders, and he wrote an open letter to the company.
It said, in part:
Black people are expected by the Chrysler Corporation to purchase Chrysler finished products, but are brutally oppressed and overworked and harassed on the production lines.
Baker concluded that in firing him, Chrysler didn't understand what it had unleashed: "You have lit the unquenchable spark," he wrote.
