The first Pulitzer Prize ever given for a photograph went to a picture taken outside the Ford Rouge plant on 3 April 1941. Milton Brooks of the Detroit News was waiting with other photographers near the gates, two days into the strike that finally forced Ford to the table. When a strikebreaker crossed the picket line, eight men with fists and clubs closed around him as he pulled his coat over his head. Brooks got the picture, hid his camera under his coat and ducked into the crowd. "A lot of people would have liked to wreck that picture," he said. Ford had held out longer than any of its rivals. General Motors and Chrysler recognized the United Auto Workers in 1937, the same year Ford's Service Department beat Walter Reuther and Richard Frankensteen on the Miller Road overpass, where another Detroit News photographer, James Kilpatrick, saved his plates by hiding them under his car seat. The 1941 strike, set off by the firing of union committeemen, shut the Rouge for about ten days. In May the workers voted for the union, and on 20 June Ford signed a contract with the UAW, the last of the Big Three to do so. Brooks's prize, awarded in 1942, went to a picture of union men in the act of beating someone, a hard image for a movement on the point of winning.
Getting there
42.3076, -83.1558
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop is an audio tour guide app that tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
