The Swing State Power Brokers

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Speaker 2 Do you think that I really would be here in front of the Judiciary Committee of the United States to testify on the qualifications of the Chief Justice after 27 years of trying lawsuits?

Speaker 2 If I wasn't absolutely sure that I interviewed Bill Rehnquist because voters pointed him out?

Speaker 3 In the summer of 1986, the Senate held hearings to confirm William Rehnquist as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Speaker 3 And some of the most dramatic moments of the hearings didn't have anything to do with his previous 14 years as an associate justice on the bench.

Speaker 3 Instead, it was about something that happened years before he was even a judge when he was living in Phoenix, Arizona, in the 1960s.

Speaker 2 We saw Mr. Rehnquist drive up.

Speaker 4 There was a group of young Republicans. I saw him there and I saw him approach at least one voter, and if my memory is correct, two.

Speaker 3 Witnesses say they saw William Rehnquist, who was a well-known attorney at the time, at polling places in the early 1960s.

Speaker 3 The witnesses said Rehnquist was there to challenge the eligibility of some voters.

Speaker 2 He approached the line on the outside of the polling place.

Speaker 4 He said, pardon me, are you a qualified voter to this black gentleman? And the man said, yes. And he said, do you have any credentials to indicate that you are? And the man said no.

Speaker 4 And he said, well, then perhaps there's a question whether or not you're qualified.

Speaker 6 Was he harassing voters?

Speaker 7 Yeah, he harassed one right in front of me.

Speaker 3 What did he do?

Speaker 4 Asked him to read a card. Read something from the Constitution.
I kept looking at it. I thought he was going to stick it in my face.
I'm going to stick my fist in his mouth.

Speaker 3 During the hearing, William Ruhnquist denied any claims that he harassed or intimidated any voters.

Speaker 8 Yes, I do deny that.

Speaker 8 I deny that. Yes, I do deny that.

Speaker 3 But he did acknowledge that he gave legal advice to Republicans who were at the polls challenging voter eligibility, and that in some cases he showed up at the polling places himself.

Speaker 3 He called it an election day program. Others called it a ballot security program.

Speaker 9 Rankwist was sworn in as Chief Justice, and the nation moved on.

Speaker 9 But that so-called Election Day program had taken on a life of its own, becoming a national strategy whose legacy still reverberates today in the bigger fight over controlling the vote.

Speaker 10 Some key states are still debating and battling over brand new election rule changes.

Speaker 9 A big, big case from the Wisconsin Supreme Court restoring ballot drop boxes.

Speaker 3 Also in Arizona, though, the Supreme Court just reinstated a voting law there regarding proof of citizenship.

Speaker 12 Georgia's election board today approved a controversial new rule to require hand counts of all ballots at polling polling places.

Speaker 9 In the end, this election will come down to who votes, which is why there are a number of new state laws both restricting and expanding voting rights and access.

Speaker 9 There has also been a rise in voter challenges.

Speaker 3 In a tight presidential race, which polls show is virtually tied, it truly feels like any little bit of power that can be leveraged, big or small, will help one side or the other.

Speaker 3 Every single vote will count, especially in the battleground states.

Speaker 15 In the last four years, the integrity of Arizona's election system has sustained the power.

Speaker 3 There have been more than 100,000 challenges to voters in Georgia since the last pass

Speaker 3 to the White House goes through Wisconsin.

Speaker 16 Pennsylvania is absolutely critical.

Speaker 3 Battleground North Carolina takes a lot of time to

Speaker 3 Arab American voters in Michigan can sway the election.

Speaker 9 On this episode of Through Line from NPR, we're going to tell you some stories from two battleground states that we've all been hearing a lot about lately, Arizona and Michigan, to show you how some of today's political dynamics were seeded.

Speaker 9 First, the story of how a future Supreme Court justice helped launch a program to challenge voters at the local polls in Arizona, in a county that's become a hotbed for election conspiracies about voter fraud.

Speaker 9 Then, how a 1973 labor strike led by Arab Americans in a Michigan factory town sparked a political movement that could play a major role in the election this November.

Speaker 3 Coming up, two stories of building power from the top down and the bottom up that have both changed American elections.

Speaker 17 Hi, this is Carol Daly from Phoenix, Arizona, and you're listening to Through Line from NPR.

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Speaker 11 Part 1:

Speaker 13 A Flurry of Fists

Speaker 14 Rehnquist agreed to the interview with the New York Times. He told me, under duress.

Speaker 14 We told him, we're going to do a profile of you, whether you cooperate or not.

Speaker 9 Nearly two years before William Rehnquist became Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John A.
Jenkins was trying to get an interview with him.

Speaker 14 I am a journalist based in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 9 And he wrote a book called The Partisan, The Life of William Rehnquist.

Speaker 11 He replied with a letter, Mr.

Speaker 14 Jenkins, I'd like to meet you.

Speaker 14 And why don't you come in and we'll decide when you get there whether or not this is an interview we can do.

Speaker 9 This was a big deal because William Rehnquist didn't really do a lot of interviews and he had a reputation for being a bit of a loner on the court.

Speaker 14 He frequently was the only person in dissent on a case.

Speaker 9 So John goes into the interview thinking that this might be his only shot.

Speaker 14 I took my tape recorder, I had my notes prepared, I had my questions, I went in, and I just set the recorder up. We just started talking.

Speaker 9 John wanted to know why Rehnquist was often the only judge dissenting on a case. But when the conversation started flowing, he says they jumped from one idea to the next.

Speaker 14 And when their time was was up, he said, okay, you can schedule another interview, but try to be more organized next time.

Speaker 9 After the interview, John met with his editor to game plan what they were going to actually do with the story.

Speaker 14 And she told him, what you need to do is you need to understand the origins of his conservatism.

Speaker 9 And digging into these origins, it started revealing why Rehnquist was so sure of what was right and wrong, so unflinching in his values, and believed so strongly in what the Constitution said that he was willing to go to great lengths to protect it.

Speaker 14 William Rehnquist is born in 1924. He lives in Shorewood, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee.
Shorewood, Wisconsin, is all white.

Speaker 14 And Shorewood High School is all white.

Speaker 9 And it's here inside Rehnquist's high school that John can see from the beginning.

Speaker 14 He is deeply ideological.

Speaker 18 Yesterday, December 7th,

Speaker 19 1941,

Speaker 19 a date which will live

Speaker 19 in infamy,

Speaker 19 the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

Speaker 3 William Rehnquist was a senior in high school when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and he got involved.

Speaker 3 He helped organize a school assembly called Wake Up America and was active in a patriotic group called United States of Young Americans.

Speaker 14 And he signs up during high school to be a block captain to report subversive activity to the FBI in case it exists.

Speaker 3 After he graduates, Rehnquist enlists in the Army and serves until the war ends. Then he comes back, gets his law degree from Stanford.

Speaker 14 First in his class.

Speaker 3 And then he lands a clerkship with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who was a strong advocate for First Amendment rights and civil liberties.

Speaker 14 So he just had a supreme self-confidence.

Speaker 3 And it was during his clerkship with Jackson, five months in, where Rehnquist would show what kind of conservative he was.

Speaker 14 1952.

Speaker 14 He's 28 years old. Brown versus Board of Education is now in front of the court.

Speaker 14 And Rehnquist, he writes a memo to Jackson in which he is telling Jackson, you don't have to vote for this.

Speaker 14 You don't have to vote with the majority. There is a more principled stand.

Speaker 14 Just got a couple of questions for you, and I hope we can get to them pretty quickly.

Speaker 4 Do you mind if I tape record audio?

Speaker 3 We got a hold of John's last conversation with William Ruhnquist before his article in the New York Times magazine was published in 1985.

Speaker 3 In the phone call, John asked him about a similar memo he'd written around the same time regarding a voting rights case.

Speaker 4 as a sociological watchdog to rear up every time private discrimination raises its admittedly ugly head.

Speaker 3 John reads some more, and then he asks,

Speaker 4 Would you subscribe to that today?

Speaker 4 I just can't answer a question that kind of picked a paragraph over the phone

Speaker 21 and

Speaker 4 asked me yes or no.

Speaker 4 Well, I would be happy to

Speaker 4 stop by and show you the entire memo. It's just a one-page memo with three paragraphs.
Well, I think that would help.

Speaker 4 We're in oral argument.

Speaker 4 I'm going to have to go in about two or three minutes.

Speaker 3 Later, in his confirmation hearing, Rehnquist would try to deflect answering any questions directly about his views on integration, including the memo about Brown v.

Speaker 3 Board, which he said reflected Jackson's views, not his.

Speaker 2 Doesn't the memo that was written, that you wrote, doesn't it have language indicating that you were indicating your views, not Justice Jackson's views?

Speaker 22 Yeah, I suppose one could read it either way. The eyes and it certainly could have been mine rather just looking at it as a text rather than Justice Jackson's.

Speaker 3 In the end, Brown v. Board was unanimous in its decision to end school segregation.
Jackson had voted with the rest of the court. And to many, Rehnquist had shown his cards.

Speaker 14 Rehnquist believed that

Speaker 14 integration was a matter of personal choice and it should not be forced on anyone. And he also believed that it was a matter for the states to decide, not the federal government.

Speaker 14 It was your classic conservative position.

Speaker 3 A position that would help Rehnquist establish himself as an ideological purist among a new group of rising Republican stars.

Speaker 9 How the hell does he end up in Arizona?

Speaker 14 He has almost one criterion of where he wants to relocate.

Speaker 9 It has to be warm.

Speaker 14 Milwaukee and Shorewood, Wisconsin are very, very cold. He doesn't like it.

Speaker 9 And that lands him in Phoenix, Arizona, as he described in a graduation ceremony in 1999.

Speaker 23 I put my worldly goods in my 1941 Studebaker champion coupe and drove to Phoenix by way of my hometown in Milwaukee.

Speaker 14 Phoenix is something of a frontier town.

Speaker 18 As I came out of the mountains to the northeast and descended to the Salt River Valley, I saw a thermometer on a bank which registered 110 degrees.

Speaker 14 The streets emanating out of the main part of town are still unpaved.

Speaker 9 Rehnquist joined a small private practice.

Speaker 14 He's already coming to Phoenix with his conservative philosophy fully baked.

Speaker 9 Like many other cities across the country at that time, Phoenix was reckoning with Jim Crow laws and an emerging civil rights movement.

Speaker 9 And Rehnquist was part of a new conservative voice that pushed back. When the Phoenix City Council passed an anti-discrimination ordinance, he wrote a letter to the editor and spoke at the meeting.

Speaker 14 He got noticed and he was effective.

Speaker 9 Rehnquist was encouraged to get involved with politics, and that meant extra scrutiny of voters in precincts that leaned Democrat. Republicans believe that many of them were voting illegally.

Speaker 24 We in the Republican Party think that it is un-American for persons to attempt to vote in violation of the law.

Speaker 24 We are surprised that your party does not desire to manifest the same interest in correcting illegal voting procedures.

Speaker 27 I charge the Republicans with using Mississippi tactics in Arizona to try to thwart the minority vote in the state.

Speaker 9 Republicans said some people used vacant lots to register their addresses, or they hadn't lived in Arizona long enough to vote. So to challenge these voters.

Speaker 28 They would target mailings, they would say from Democratic precincts, but they were very predominantly communities of color.

Speaker 28 And if the mail came back as undeliverable, they would send challengers to the polls to challenge their eligibility.

Speaker 3 Which brings us to November 6, 1962.

Speaker 3 Election Day.

Speaker 3 Voters lined up at an elementary school named after civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune. The precinct was predominantly Hispanic and black.

Speaker 28 Two white Republican voter challengers, one of whom was allegedly Rehnquist, I'm quoting now, confronted black and minority voters at the Bethune Un School voting precinct on November 6, 1962.

Speaker 3 This is Tova Wang.

Speaker 28 I am the director of research projects in democratic practice at the Ashe Center at Harvard Kennedy School, and I've written a book called The Politics of Voter Suppression, Defending and Expanding Americans' Right to Vote.

Speaker 3 We asked Tova to read excerpts from an FBI background investigation that was requested for Rehnquist's confirmation onto the U.S. Supreme Court.

Speaker 28 They displayed a card with an excerpt from the Constitution and asked blacks and minorities to prove they were illiterate by reading the excerpt aloud.

Speaker 14 We the people. The allegation was that he was showing up himself at polling places and challenging voters in order to form a more perfect union.

Speaker 14 Asking them to read establish justice.

Speaker 28 The activity discouraged the black voters who then did not vote.

Speaker 21 Blessings of liberty.

Speaker 28 As the day progressed, Democratic poll watchers became incensed and telephoned party officials and law enforcement personnel, many of whom arrived at the scene and attempted to dissuade the Republican challengers.

Speaker 21 Finally, a scuffle ensued and the Republicans departed.

Speaker 3 The Arizona Republic called it a flurry of fists.

Speaker 9 William Rehnquist doesn't seem to have been involved in a scuffle. He would later deny it, but said he would sometimes show up at precincts and provide counsel as an attorney.

Speaker 9 Under Arizona law, the different political parties were allowed to send delegates to the polls to challenge voters who they suspected were voting illegally.

Speaker 9 But election officials were the sole judges of a voter's qualification. So the question was, were Arizona Republicans going too far to challenge voters?

Speaker 28 Voter intimidation and interfering with someone's right to vote, if it crossed the line into that, then it was a problem.

Speaker 9 And according to one FBI interview, the plan was to clog polls in heavily minority Democratic precincts.

Speaker 28 By sending an army of challengers to the polling place at peak voting periods and thereby intimidate some voters and scare them away from voting or frustrate voters by causing such a time delay that they would give up and leave without voting.

Speaker 3 What was happening in Phoenix, Arizona was a field test for something much bigger, an operation that would be launched two years later during a presidential election.

Speaker 3 Coming up, the strategy to challenge voters goes national.

Speaker 31 Hey, this is Douglas from Arizona. And you're listening to True Line from NPR.

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Speaker 33 from this moment, moment,

Speaker 33 united and determined,

Speaker 33 we will go forward together, dedicated to the ultimate and undeniable greatness of the whole man.

Speaker 13 Part 2,

Speaker 13 Operation Eagle Eye.

Speaker 33 Together we will win.

Speaker 3 While William Ruhnquist was making a name for himself in Republican circles in Phoenix, another Arizona man had been rising through the ranks.

Speaker 26 I accept your nomination with humbleness, with pride,

Speaker 33 and you and I

Speaker 33 are going to fight for the goodness of our land.

Speaker 33 Thank you.

Speaker 3 Barry Goldwater was born in Arizona before it was even a state.

Speaker 3 He had run his family's department store before running for the Senate in the 1950s and had become a popular voice advocating individual freedoms, limiting the federal government's power, and he launched the modern conservative movement.

Speaker 34 They say Barry Goldwater is against civil rights.

Speaker 3 He opposed social welfare programs and believes school integration should be left to the states.

Speaker 34 Laws are not the whole answer. The real answer is in the hearts of men.

Speaker 3 In 1964, when he was nominated as the Republican presidential candidate, he became the foil to the Democrats Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Speaker 34 A strong voice, a clear choice.

Speaker 11 Goldwater.

Speaker 3 Goldwater and Rehnquist were part of the so-called Arizona Mafia, a small political powerhouse that had made a name for itself within the Republican Party. And there was a lot at stake.

Speaker 3 LBJ was promoting the Great Society, which was a radical government planned to end poverty and racial injustice.

Speaker 3 Earlier in 1964, the 24th Amendment was ratified, outlawing taxes as a condition for voting in federal elections, and the Civil Rights Act would be passed that summer.

Speaker 14 Rehnquist convinces Goldwater

Speaker 14 that he should oppose the Civil Rights Act that is going to become law, and he should vote against it in the United States Senate.

Speaker 7 Now, in this summer of 1964, the Civil Rights Bill is the law of the land. In the words of the president, it restricts no one's freedom so long as he respects the rights of others.

Speaker 9 The momentum was in the Democrats' favor heading into the election. But the National Republican Party had a plan.
It would become known as Operation Eagle Eye.

Speaker 28 The director of Eagle Eye, Charles Barr, told the media, including the New York Times, that he expected to challenge or deter from voting 1.25 million voters all across the country.

Speaker 9 Republicans had already claimed that the 1960 election, four years earlier, was stolen. Operation Eagle Eye was the response.

Speaker 9 It was the same blueprint Rehnquist and his Republican colleagues were accused of using in Phoenix, dating back to at least 1958. Send mailers to Democratic precincts.

Speaker 9 If the mail got kicked back, challenge those potential voters at the polls.

Speaker 28 The Republican Party was not at all hiding what they were trying to do at the time.

Speaker 9 So on the day of the 1964 presidential election, the New York Times reported Republican officials saying 100,000 trained Republican workers were in 35 key cities across the country.

Speaker 9 Operation Eagle Eye was underway. Voters by the hundreds, perplexed and downright scared, were snarled yesterday in Partisan Poll Watching, Miami Herald.

Speaker 36 You may have heard of something called Operation Eagle Eye.

Speaker 9 This is a campaign ad that Democrats released before the 1964 election.

Speaker 36 Well, a better name for it would be Operation Evil Eye.

Speaker 4 Mexicans and Negroes complained to elections officials that they had received anonymous phone calls warning them of challenges at the polls.

Speaker 36 The New York Times. It has been launched in nearly every state in the Union.

Speaker 35 The Federal Bureau of Investigation was asked to investigate handbills distributed today in Negro precincts to create delays, confusion, and fear. Well-dressed persons will not be challenged.

Speaker 36 Warning, you may be voting illegally.

Speaker 35 Only the kind of guy you can buy for a buck or a bottle of boots.

Speaker 4 Washington Post.

Speaker 36 I hope you will not be one of its victims.

Speaker 9 By this time, Goldwater's vote against the Civil Rights Act at William Rehnquist's urging had become a symbol of just how far right his conservative values were.

Speaker 9 Even within his own party, Goldwater was seen by some as too extreme, and Republicans started abandoning him. But not Rehnquist.

Speaker 14 Now he's basically screwed up because of the instructions and tutoring that he's been getting from this great constitutional expert, William Rehnquist.

Speaker 14 And so by the time of the election, there's only a few people that are helping address stamps and raise money and so forth. And Rehnquist is the guy.

Speaker 9 Just to be clear, Operation Eagle Eye did not deliver Goldwater to the presidency.

Speaker 30 The voice of the people was heard in the land.

Speaker 30 68 million citizens of the United States go to the polls to exercise their cherished franchise, and an overwhelming mandate is handed to Lyndon Baines Johnson, who becomes 36th President of the United States.

Speaker 30 The man who was thrust into office through the hand of tragedy.

Speaker 3 Goldwater loses. Big time.

Speaker 3 Rehnquist writes his concession speech.

Speaker 34 Congratulations on your victory. I will help you in in any way that I can toward achieving a growing and better America and a secure and dignified peace.

Speaker 34 The role of the Republican Party will remain in that temper.

Speaker 3 Goldwater went back to the Senate and was re-elected until he retired in 1987. The run for president marked the height of his national fame.
But William Rehnquist was nowhere near the pinnacle of his.

Speaker 14 Here's the thing that I think is important important to know.

Speaker 14 William Rehnquist was a very complex human being.

Speaker 14 He does not care what anyone else thinks of him.

Speaker 14 He is willing

Speaker 14 to be

Speaker 14 defeated on an issue

Speaker 14 rather than compromise

Speaker 14 in a belief that later he will be able to

Speaker 14 prevail.

Speaker 3 Rehnquist was playing the long game. He was nominated to the U.S.
Supreme Court in 1971 at just 47 years old.

Speaker 3 During his confirmation hearings, the allegations of voter suppression came up, but there wasn't enough evidence to support them.

Speaker 3 Then in 1986, when he was being confirmed for Chief Justice, new witnesses stepped forward, including a former assistant U.S.

Speaker 3 Attorney named James Brosnahan, who, along with an FBI agent, was called to the Arizona precinct.

Speaker 2 I saw William Rehnquist, who was known to me as an attorney practicing in the city of Phoenix. He was serving on that day as a challenger of voters.

Speaker 2 That is to say, the conduct and the complaints had to do with his conduct.

Speaker 3 Even with the new eyewitness accounts, it was their word against Rehnquist.

Speaker 37 As to harassing or intimidating, I certainly do categorically deny any, any time, any place.

Speaker 3 William Rehnquist served on the U.S. Supreme Court for 33 years until his death in 2005.
When he was Chief Justice, more federal laws were struck down than any previous court.

Speaker 3 He was considered one of the most successful Chief Justices ever, all while staying true to his conservative values.

Speaker 3 In 2000, he was part of the majority that voted to end the Florida election recount, handing a presidential victory to Republican George W. Bush.

Speaker 9 Today, Phoenix, Arizona, where William Rehnquist rose through the ranks of conservative politics, has changed a lot.

Speaker 9 Maricopa County has been one of the fastest-growing counties in the country, and its diversity helped flip the state for Joe Biden in 2020.

Speaker 9 Since then, Maricopa County has been at the center of election fraud conspiracies.

Speaker 2 Arizona is refusing to remove illegals from voter rolls?

Speaker 16 A cauldron for conspiracies and misinformation.

Speaker 9 They think that this election is being stolen from the

Speaker 9 story about Rehnquist challenging voters in Phoenix that went national with Operation Eagle Eye has become like many stories about mass voter challenges across the country.

Speaker 16 700,000 challenges to voters across the country so far.

Speaker 9 A mass voter challenge lawsuit in Georgia was dismissed.

Speaker 3 Will there be voter fraud?

Speaker 9 All of a sudden in certain states they found all these votes.

Speaker 3 The pig pen project that's filing all of these mass challenges in the state of Nevada.

Speaker 16 Thousands of voter registrations in Denton County.

Speaker 10 Eagle AI, or as its founder calls it, Eagle Eye, is software developed by a Columbia County, Georgia doctor named John W.

Speaker 5 Rick Richards Jr. Eagle Eye promises to streamline and speed up the process, creating challenges at volume.

Speaker 9 There has been no evidence to support claims by Republicans that the 2020 election was stolen or that Democrats stuffed the ballot box with illegal votes.

Speaker 9 Nevertheless, Republicans have said they plan to have hundreds of thousands of poll watchers across the country in November. Democrats plan to have election observers as well.

Speaker 9 Tova and others say the real harm to democracy is preventing eligible voters from casting

Speaker 28 I think, in a lot of cases, that the organizers have to

Speaker 28 work harder to get over some of these obstacles and get people to voting.

Speaker 28 I suppose a tiny silver lining of what's going on today is that organizers are really taking a tremendous lead in trying to protect and

Speaker 28 support our democratic process.

Speaker 3 Coming up, we go to Michigan to see how people in one immigrant community built power in another way.

Speaker 39 I'm Audrey Sparshue from Detroit, Michigan, and you're listening to Thru Line.

Speaker 39 I love your show. Thank you for helping us to make sure we don't forget about things that have happened in the past.

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Speaker 3 Michigan is now a must-win for Vice President Kamala Harris. Good afternoon, Detroit!

Speaker 36 The Democrats are worried about Michigan.

Speaker 3 Michigan, y'all know how to win.

Speaker 36 They have seen erosion in the numbers there.

Speaker 40 I'm thrilled to be back in the great state of Michigan with thousands and thousands, and I mean lots of thousands of them.

Speaker 9 Michigan was always going to be a battleground state. It flipped for Trump in 2016, then it flipped for Biden in 2020.
And in this election, one group could play a crucial role.

Speaker 38 Michigan's Arab American population tops 300,000, the largest in the U.S.

Speaker 38 And in Dearborn, that community is now the majority.

Speaker 3 And they could potentially help decide the outcome of the election.

Speaker 3 Arab Americans aren't the biggest voting bloc in Michigan. Around 300,000 residents identify as having Middle Eastern and North African ancestry.
But these are numbers that can decide the state.

Speaker 3 And right now, it feels like their vote is up for grabs.

Speaker 38 What's unfolding in the Middle East is the primary concern for tens of thousands of voters in that battleground state.

Speaker 6 Free, free, free Palestine!

Speaker 21 Free, free, free Palestine!

Speaker 3 Since the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attacks on Israel and Israel's war on Gaza, Arab Americans in Michigan have been putting pressure on the Democrats, whose policies they blame for feeding the violence by supporting Israel.

Speaker 9 Michigan is getting a lot of attention this year, like it does every time a presidential election rolls around.

Speaker 9 But the work the state's Arab Americans have done to build political power began decades ago in the neighborhoods and factories that helped make the state reliably Democrat for years, where labor organizing laid the groundwork for political organizing.

Speaker 3 Part 3: The strike.

Speaker 3 Ismail Ahmed arrived in the U.S. at 10 years old aboard a massive overseas freighter that he was working on.
The ship had come from Egypt, and when it docked in New York City, he walked off that ship.

Speaker 41 Nobody asked him a question.

Speaker 3 This is his son speaking, also named Ismail Ahmed. By the 1950s, Ismail's father had moved the family to Detroit because what they had found in Michigan was community.

Speaker 3 When the Ahmed family arrived, thousands of Arab Americans already lived in the Detroit area.

Speaker 3 Many of them landed in Dearborn, which is 20 minutes outside of Detroit, in a neighborhood called the South End. And as this small community grew in numbers, it would also grow its political power.

Speaker 15 The South End neighborhood is this little sliver of land sandwiched between the Ford Rouge factory and the city of Detroit.

Speaker 26 And what is now the city of Dearborn to build the crown jewel of American industry, the Ford Rouge plant.

Speaker 41 It was the largest industrial complex in the world.

Speaker 15 You can see it from miles away.

Speaker 18 At its height it had 90,000 workers.

Speaker 3 Ismail Ahmed is a longtime activist in Dearborn and the co-founder of the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services.

Speaker 41 You would put glass and steel at one side and out would come cars, full-blown cars.

Speaker 3 The factory was the whole reason a community had blossomed in Dearborn. In the 1920s, when it opened, it drew people from across the country.

Speaker 15 And if you were newly arrived to America and you were told that, you know, you could make $5 a day, you know, you would get on a train and you would go to Detroit.

Speaker 9 This is Sally Howell. She's a professor of history with a focus on Arab American studies at the University of Michigan, Dearborn.

Speaker 15 It was the auto industry that pulled these Arab Americans just like it pulled so many other immigrants to Detroit.

Speaker 9 Dearborn was a city of immigrants. Ismail's neighbors, a blend of Lebanese, Yemeni, Polish, Italian, Irish, and German people.
Ismail was part of a thriving community that was both Arab and American.

Speaker 9 But during his childhood in the 1960s, this idyllic little slice of American life between the Rouge factory and Detroit came under threat.

Speaker 15 There was another company that was located just right there on the other side of the neighborhood.

Speaker 9 The Edward C. Levy Company would take the byproducts from the Ford factory and use it to make asphalt and other materials for building roads.

Speaker 15 And so this was a very successful relationship between Levy and Ford.

Speaker 9 These two companies weren't always the best neighbors to Dearborn residents. They would drive these big trucks through the south end between the factories.

Speaker 15 Open bed trucks, just with this industrial waste just, you know, spewing from the top of it.

Speaker 9 People started protesting.

Speaker 15 Saying you can't drive your big trucks through here. So the mayor of Dearborn, his administration, they were tired of the complaints of the people in this neighborhood.

Speaker 9 So City Hall thought, hey, we could kill two birds with one stone here.

Speaker 15 The city decided to rezone the neighborhood for heavy industry.

Speaker 9 Expand industry, make Ford and Levy happy, and push all the people who lived there, who had been complaining, out of the South End.

Speaker 9 And so Dearborn's Arab Americans knew they had to fight back.

Speaker 15 The city would send a bulldozer to tear down a house and you would have a human chain of women and their children blocking the street, not allowing the bulldozer to go by.

Speaker 15 They were really trying to defend the neighborhood one block at a time or one house at a time.

Speaker 3 At the same time that the South End was rallying to save their neighborhood, Dearborn's Arab auto workers were getting active in the factories too.

Speaker 36 But it's a sunny day in Dearborn.

Speaker 41 I started working in the Rouge planet.

Speaker 11 A brand new car eager to go is on the way to its new owners. Built to order, built to order, built to order.

Speaker 41 I started out on the assembly line.

Speaker 6 Now, at the time that you were working, what do you remember about general working conditions? Horrible.

Speaker 3 These are interviews from people who worked inside the auto plants. The state of the assembly lines was often dire.

Speaker 20 10 hours, seven days a week, not even

Speaker 34 with very severe hand, arm, leg injuries.

Speaker 42 I mean, the safety conditions don't even exist.

Speaker 25 And if it stays the way it is now, then the workers are going to steadily be losing life and limb, and the company doesn't lose anything.

Speaker 41 And in all the plants, Arabs and African Americans had the very worst jobs.

Speaker 15 They were being discriminated against. They weren't allowed to complain or make trouble.

Speaker 41 In some ways, we always had much in common with the African American community.

Speaker 3 During the Civil Rights Movement, when Detroit was a hotbed of black activism, movements started in the factories, organized by black workers.

Speaker 3 Movements like DRUM, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

Speaker 3 These movements wanted better working conditions and more rights for black workers, and they folded Arab auto workers into their organizing too.

Speaker 15 And so this alliance was formed in the factory.

Speaker 3 By the 1970s, Dearborn had changed. There were now second and third generation Arab Americans.

Speaker 3 The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act had loosened immigration restrictions, and conflicts in the Middle East had led more Arabs to resettle in Dearborn, including Palestinians.

Speaker 3 There were more university students from Arab countries too. And all of these changes were, in turn, changing the resistance in the South End.

Speaker 15 They were all resisting the city of Dearborn. That was sort of the thing that pulled everybody together.

Speaker 15 You know, this was in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war where Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, the Sinai.

Speaker 15 So people sort of transposed the conflict into the neighborhood, you know, okay, so we're being displaced. Israel's occupying the West Bank and taking this territory away from us.

Speaker 15 And then here in America, the one neighborhood where we have a foothold, people are trying to take things away from us here too.

Speaker 9 In 1971, the community decided to take their fight to the courts. Two years later, in August 1973, a district judge in Michigan issued his ruling.

Speaker 3 The court finds that the city and its officials have taken plaintiffs' property without due process of law.

Speaker 9 It was a huge win for the community. But just a few months after the court's decision, Arab Americans and Dearborn would be rocked again.
This time, on a global level.

Speaker 11 It is an all-out war.

Speaker 9 On October 6, 1973, Arab forces from Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack to recapture territories that Israel had taken in the 1967 war.

Speaker 20 President Nixon has instructed Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to contact all parties involved in the fighting and try to arrange for a ceasefire.

Speaker 26 While the fighting rages in the Middle East, supporters of both sides in this country are engaging in fundraising efforts.

Speaker 9 Back in Dearborn, the 1973 war was big news.

Speaker 41 It shot through the community like a tidal wave.

Speaker 9 Dearborn knew it had to be heard.

Speaker 15 They started organizing big demonstrations in Dearborn to call attention to what was happening overseas.

Speaker 9 And by this point, they had momentum. Ismail and other activists could build off the organizing infrastructure they created while saving the South End neighborhood.

Speaker 41 We all worked in different auto plants. and agreed to put together an Arab Workers Caucus.

Speaker 3 The first meeting of the Arab Workers Caucus had about 70 representatives from nearly every auto plant in Detroit.

Speaker 3 It was during this meeting they decided to focus their attention on one major action, the funding of what Ismail called the murder of their brothers and sisters back home.

Speaker 11 The Israelis are running out of reserve weaponry,

Speaker 26 and they must turn toward the United States for assistance.

Speaker 3 The Arab Workers' Caucus found out that their local UAW had bought over $300,000 in Israeli bonds, and the national union owned even more.

Speaker 3 This meant that Ismail and the UAW's estimated 15,000 Arab members were spending money to support Israel in what they saw as a violent occupation.

Speaker 15 So these are your dues.

Speaker 15 How is the UAW spending your money?

Speaker 41 And so a divestment was the only right thing to do.

Speaker 3 They took out an ad in the Detroit Free Press.

Speaker 3 Purchase of Israeli bonds is regarded by these workers similarly as would a UAW investment in racist South Africa would be regarded by black workers.

Speaker 3 The organizers of the Arab Workers' Caucus gained support and backing not by just focusing on what was going on in the Middle East, but also how workers in the plants were being treated.

Speaker 3 In this way, they were able to amplify their organizing power. And how did the UAW respond?

Speaker 41 We petitioned the UAW

Speaker 41 and got no progress.

Speaker 41 Then we found out that Leonard Woodcock, the president of the UAW, would be given an award

Speaker 41 and so decided

Speaker 41 that we would

Speaker 41 try to put together a walkout strike and, with that, call for a demonstration.

Speaker 25 A call to action.

Speaker 25 Rank and file union members and their supporters are called on to participate in a peaceful assembly to protest this arbitrary purchase by the UAW of Israeli bonds on the occasion of an award ceremony for UAW President Leonard Woodcock.

Speaker 15 So they organized a wildcat strike.

Speaker 3 A wildcat strike. Basically a strike by unionized workers without the permission of the union.

Speaker 3 So Ismail, along with other members of the Arab Workers Caucus, began organizing in their respective plants.

Speaker 41 We've spent over a month organizing in all of those plants.

Speaker 3 And in the days leading up to the strike, workers handed out flyers and even placed ads in local newspapers.

Speaker 32 Is the UAW leadership acting in the interest of its members?

Speaker 9 Michigan Chronicle.

Speaker 3 On November 28th, 1973, around 2,000 workers at the Dodge main plant walked out.

Speaker 41 Now, I was laid off during that time.

Speaker 41 So I wasn't in a plant and I was outside the gate of Dodge truck.

Speaker 41 when I watched workers come out and they weren't only Arab workers.

Speaker 9 There were black workers too.

Speaker 15 So it was again one of those situations of black-brown solidarity.

Speaker 9 Later that evening, protesters gathered outside the building in Detroit where the award ceremony for UAW President Leonard Woodcock was taking place.

Speaker 10 No more bombs, no more bonds.

Speaker 29 Outside, about a thousand Arabs picketed the building entrance, protesting the UAW purchase of some $750,000 in Israeli bonds.

Speaker 9 Woodcock snuck into the building through a back door to avoid the protests.

Speaker 9 While accepting his award, he announced that the UAW was trying to work with labor unions in Israel and Egypt in the hopes of bringing them together for a peaceful resolution.

Speaker 9 But later, UAW's Secretary-Treasurer Imal Mazi said that the Israeli bonds were a good investment and that air protesters were aligned with communists.

Speaker 3 The workers who protested and walked out of the factory put their jobs on the line, put their livelihoods at risk for this bigger political cause.

Speaker 41 And in many cases, many of the workers still didn't quite understand what was going on, to be frank, because of language issues and other things. But they took the chance anyway.

Speaker 41 I mean, it's a job-threatening. It was family-threatening for them, and yet they felt strongly enough to do it.

Speaker 3 And the wildcat strike strike left its mark?

Speaker 41 I think for two reasons. One, it was big enough,

Speaker 41 so it would have meant the mass firing of,

Speaker 41 you know, critical workers.

Speaker 41 And also, they didn't want to make a bigger deal out of this than it already was.

Speaker 41 And so after that, we began to talk more with the UAW.

Speaker 41 Leadership changed. And I think convinced them that, yes, they should get rid of the bonds.

Speaker 15 The UAW did sell off some of its bonds. It didn't sell them all.

Speaker 15 And their wildcat strike was so successful that they really did become a threat to the leadership of the UAW in the period.

Speaker 41 In fact, an Arab American became the president of the UAW.

Speaker 15 It was an incredibly empowering moment in the history of Arab American activism.

Speaker 41 It was the Arab community becoming its own and being recognized as a political force.

Speaker 15 They started running for city council. They started running for the school board.
They started demanding that the city pay attention to the needs of their newly arriving immigrant community.

Speaker 3 In 2023, Dearborn became the first Arab-majority city in the U.S.

Speaker 3 Ismail Ahmed knows that his community has political power, and he's seen it become a driving political force not just in Dearborn, but across the entirety of the state and now the country.

Speaker 41 There's not a ticket in Michigan that doesn't have an Arab American on it, ever.

Speaker 41 It's just part of the formula.

Speaker 3 That's it for this week's show. I'm Ran Dabdit Fattah.

Speaker 9 And I'm Ramteen Arab Louis. And you've been listening to Through Line from NPR.

Speaker 3 This episode was produced by me.

Speaker 9 And me, and

Speaker 3 Lawrence Wu, Julie Kane, Anya Steinberg, Casey Minor, Christina Kim, Devin Katayama, Sarah Wyman, Rachel Horowitz, Lina Muhammad, Irene Naguchi.

Speaker 3 Thank you to Johannes Durgi, Nina Puchalski, Puneet Motiwala, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

Speaker 9 Thanks also to the Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Maryland.

Speaker 3 Voiceover work in this episode was done by Devin Katayama, Emily Mior, Kenny Colston, Jonathan Bastion, Sandia Dirks, Ryan Muzzie, Sarah Wyman, Lawrence Wu, and Anya Seinberg.

Speaker 9 Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. The episode was mixed by Maggie Luthar.

Speaker 3 Music for this episode was composed by Ramteen and his band Drop Electric, which includes Naveed Marvy, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani.

Speaker 9 And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, write us at throughline at npr.org.

Speaker 3 Thanks for listening.

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