Speech #890103285

Hardly anyone remembers. let alone sings. that song today. and few recall the emotions and events that made that piece of doggerel so patently false a picture of their city. In the 1920s a politically powerful Ku Klux Klan. said to be the biggest in the country. actually elected a mayor. In the 1930s the citys violent. depressionfanned insecurities produced the xenophobic. murderous Black Legion. while old Henry Ford was financing publication of an antiSemitic tract called "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and Father Charles Coughlin preached "social justice" and railed against the evils of "international Jewry." In 1937. Ford Motor Co. guards beat bloody two young auto union organizers. Walter Reuther and Richard Frankensteen. in the notorious Battle of the Overpass at the gates of the spectacular River Rouge plant.