UAW Leader. Walter Philip Reuther’s father was a beer wagon driver and Socialist union organizer, who would facilitate debates for his sons, training them to think about social issues of the day such as yellow journalism, child labor, women's suffrage, and civil rights. He dropped out of high school and worked in a local factory to help support the family. He learned firsthand about inadequate worker safety when a die fell and severed his big toe. Age 19, he left Wheeling for Detroit and began work at Ford Motor Company. When Henry Ford retired the Model T in 1931, Ford sold the production mechanisms to Russia, and American workers who knew how to operate the equipment were needed. He began working in the auto plant in Gorky, Russia, frequently writing letters to the Moscow Daily News criticizing the many inefficiencies associated with how the communists operated the plants. After leaving Russia, he went to South Bend, Indiana to attend a convention as a delegate of the UAW. Upon his return he became president of Local 174 on Detroit's west side and led a strike against a plant which supplied parts to Ford Motor Company. The workers sat down in the plant refusing to leave until management negotiated with him as their representative. UAW Local 174's membership expanded from 200 before the strike to 35,000 within the next year. A strike against General Motors began on New Year's Eve, December 31, 1936 when the workers sat down in the plants and refused to leave. General Motors retaliated by turning off the heat in the plant. In solidarity with the Flint strikers, he led a strike at Detroit's Fleetwood Plant. 44 days later, General Motors signed its first collective bargaining agreement with the UAW. In March 1937, 60,000 Chrysler workers went on strike. After a four-week strike, Chrysler followed General Motors’ lead and negotiated its first collective bargaining agreement with the UAW. A month after the Chrysler signing, as he was passing out handbills at the Ford River Rouge Complex. He and three other UAW leaders were attacked by Ford employee "enforcers" who severely beat them. Time magazine published photographs with descriptions of how the union men and women were beaten. In 1940 the United States was producing fighter planes for the allies, but the production was slow and inadequate, and the US planned to take two years to construct new manufacturing plants to produce more planes. In response, he wrote a proposal to use the unused capacity of the auto industry to build 500 planes a day. President Roosevelt met with him at the White House to discuss the possibility of implementing his plan, and after the attack on Pearl Harbor, many of his proposals were implemented. He strongly supported the war effort and refused to tolerate strikes that might disrupt munitions production. He worked for the War Manpower Commission, the Office of Production Management, and the War Production Board. After the war ended in 1945, he led a strike challenging GM to increase workers’ wages without increasing the price of their new cars. After a 113-day strike, the sides settled on a pay raise. On March 27, 1946, he won the UAW presidential election, and negotiated contracts that included unprecedented standard-of-living increases for automobile workers. In 1949 he led the CIO delegation to the London conference that set up the International Confederation of Free Trade. He became president of the CIO in 1952, and negotiated a merger with George Meany and the American Federation of Labor immediately after, which took effect in 1955. In addition to being a leader in the unions, he was a strong supporter of the Civil Rights Movement. He marched with Martin Luther King, and when King and others were jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, he arranged $160,000 for the protestors' release. He served on the board of directors for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The Walk to Freedom was a march for civil rights held on June 23, 1963 in Detroit, Michigan. He mobilized support for the protest and donated office space at the UAW's headquarters for Martin Luther King, Jr. to organize the event. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was held in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, August 28, 1963. He persuaded the other organizers to hold the march at the Lincoln Memorial, as he believed the occasion would be more appropriate underneath Abraham Lincoln's statute. In his remarks, he urged Americans to pressure their politicians to act to address racial injustices. In December 1965, he visited Cesar Chavez and the striking grape growers in Delano, California. At that time, Chavez's struggle for workers' rights was little known to the American public, but his visit garnered national media attention. He contacted Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was on the Senate Labor Committee, requesting that Kennedy visit Chavez to learn about and support the farmworkers. Kennedy did so, and became the most visible supporter of the farmworkers' movement. On May 9, 1970, he, his wife May, and four others were killed when their chartered jet crashed. The National Transportation Safety Board discovered that the plane's altimeter was missing parts, some incorrect parts were installed, and one of its parts had been installed upside down, leading some to speculate that he may have been murdered.