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The Western Kentucky Worker | |
Feature Article
March 2005
Mayfield woman made labor history in the UAW
By BERRY CRAIG KEA-NEA/AFT-Kentucky MAYFIELD, Ky. -- Ermon Harp left western Kentucky looking for work, not a place in American labor history. She found both in Detroit, where she worked in a factory and joined one of the first-sit down strikes. The year was 1937. “They called us Communists -- and just about everything else you could think of,” said Harp. “But it didn't bother me a particle. We were the United Auto Workers, and we felt like we were doing right.” She felt that way until she died at age 97 in 1992. To the end, independence and self-reliance characterized the little grandmother with turquoise-blue eyes and soft white hair. Harp lived alone in a small white house in Mayfield, the Graves County seat. She did her own shopping. She planted a garden every spring. |
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She got herself to the First Presbyterian Church. Her daughter and son-in-law lived in town. Harp wouldn't allow either of them to take her to Sunday services. She called a cab.
Ermon Harp and her husband, Lube, were part of a mass migration of Kentuckians to Detroit seeking work in the auto industry in the 1920s. The Harps left Milburn, in Carlisle County, in 1922, after struggling to make ends meet on a hardscrabble farm.
Fifteen years later, she helped make union history. Was she scared when she joined the strike?
“Goodness no,” she said. “There was nothing to be scared of.”
There was, of course. UAW organizers and members were fired, blacklisted and even assaulted. The year Harp struck, Ford Motor Co. guards severely beat union activists including Walter Reuther, the UAW's president and guiding spirit for many years.
Historians credit the sit-down strike with helping pave the way for union organizing in American industry. The most significant sit-down strike began on Dec. 30, 1936, at General Motors plants in Flint, Mich., near Detroit. It lasted until Feb. 11, 1937.
The Flint-sit down “was the most pivotal strike in early UAW history,” according to the union. “It established the UAW as the sole bargaining representative for workers at the world's largest corporation and set the stage for organizing industrial workers across the United States.”
Harp‘s strike came soon after the Flint sit-down. “I had no idea that what I was doing was making history,” she said.
Harp had a head full of memories about UAW organizing drives. “Our people were getting beat up all over town. But nobody got hurt where I worked -- I guess it was because it was a small plant.”
Harp sat down on strike at the Advance Stamping Co. She was working on an assembly line, fitting together distributors for car engines.
Fifteen women and 48 men stopped working at their machines and wouldn't budge. “It all went off smooth as you please,” she said. “There was no rough stuff."
“People brought us hot food, blankets and pillows. We organized a square dance. Some of the men played cards, and we turned the radio on to a church service on Sunday.”
Harp saw her spouse during the day, but the strikers stayed in the plant. “We found some big barrels, put some boards over them, spread down our blankets and slept pretty well,” she said.
At about the same time of Ermon's sit-down strike, Lube Harp joined the UAW at a General Motors factory where he worked. Harp said she became “union all the way” at the plant where she worked before landing a job at Advance Stamping.
“I'd worked there 11 years, when the boss came in one day and said, ‘Ermon, come pick up your check. You're through.,'" Harp remembered."Later, I found out he'd given my job to his girlfriend.
“That's why I went union and why Detroit went union. It was because of things like that that weren't fair.”
