Genora Johnson Dollinger

Genora Johnson Dollinger

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​The Joan of Arc of Labor

Genora (Johnson) Dollinger came from a prosperous background, as a young woman she established the Flint Chapter of the Socialist Party and became one of the organizers of not only the Sit-Down Strike, but the all-female paramilitary force known as the Emergency Brigade.   
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The Genesis of Genora

Genora was born in April of 1913 and came from an upper-middle-class old Flint background. Her father, Raymond C. Albro, was related to some of the earliest settlers of Flint, including the Carpenters after whom Carpenter Road is named and the Jarvis family who’s street namesake has been reduced to a short job near 12th and Fenton Road. There even was a street named Albro Circle in Flint at one time. He was a photographer for forty years in Flint at his shop Albro’s Photo Shop located at 104 S. Saginaw St. as well as a landlord who built apartment buildings and rented houses. Her mother, Lora, was from the Three Rivers area of South Michigan which is why Genora was born at her mother’s family’s house in Kalamazoo but raised in Flint.  

She attended a private school but left her senior year to marry a GM line worker named Kermit Johnson. Genora was first exposed to labor rights through an odd job she had picked up assisting a pediatrician they lived next door to on Detroit Street. She described the moment that opened the door to labor organizing for her in an oral history recorded by the University of Michigan Flint in 1978. 
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An American Guardian edition from April 3, 1931

“One time a newspaper came in that was called the American Guardian by the Ameringer Brothers, out of one of the western states. The doctor said, "That damn Red literature!" He made such a fuss that naturally I was inquisitive and I picked it up and brought it home. Dad Johnson and I discussed it together and we subscribed and that became part of our literature too. We formed, together with others, the Flint Branch of the Socialist Party of America."  --Genora Johnson

​Kermit and Genora had a baby but soon after Genora contracted TB “in an unusual way” and began treatment first at Hurley Hospital. She spent her long convalescence reading everything she could about worker’s rights, laying the foundations for her future. When she was released from Hurley Hospital she was 18 years old, a mother, and an ardent socialist organizer.

1937. Roy Reuther addresses a crowd of strike supporters outside of a closed General Motors plant durnig the Sit Down Strike, Flint, Michigan; Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

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Organizing and Activism

Party headquarters were located in the Pengelly building, so known after the owner, the eccentric and beloved Father Pengelly who owned the building as well as administered to the spiritual needs of his flock next door at St. Paul’s. The Pengelly building is today a modern low rise building and the home of the Ennis Center for Children at 3rd and Harrison, but in the early 20th century Pengelly rented the space to not just the Socialist Party, but the Communists and the Proletariat party. It was at the Pengelly building that the Reuther brother’s finally found a venue that would host them in Flint, invited by Genora herself. 

​The building had a kitchen and much of the cooking for the economic victims of the Great Depression was done in Pengelly by members of these leftists groups. There was a single telephone for the groups to share as well as a single printing press for the production of pamphlets and posters. There are rumors that a tunnel connected the church and the building though this was most likely done to move food from the kitchens into the church rather than anything nefarious. The Pengelly building would eventually become the unofficial headquarters of the Sit-Down Strike. 

Genora was working in activism before the Sit-Down strike. She organized a Youth League of High School children who would pass out newspapers and pamphlets. These were crucial tools of communication because, as one Sit-Downer put it, “They [General Motors] controlled the Flint Newspaper, the radio, everything. People don’t remember what it’s like to live in a company town anymore.” Genora also bemoans how little press they received in the Flint Journal and emphasizes how much organizing was done through word of mouth and underground publications. 
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And it was dangerous work. Men who discussed organizing recalled the “professional beatings” they’d receive outside of beerhalls, masked as drunken brawls. Flint police and General Motor’s own hired "police force" would drive organizers out of the city and beat them with clubs. GM agents would also regularly infiltrate organization meetings and everyone in participation would have a pink slip waiting for them in the morning. Genora recalls going to “dinner parties” where the lights were on upstairs, music blaring, but the tables were empty. Everyone was shivering in the cellar trying to decide what to do next.

The Brutal Summer of 1937
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Something had to be done and soon. The brutal summer of 1937 saw men passing out on the line and being ejected from the building or just left on the floor for others to work around, while the temperature in the factory soared to over 100 degrees. Foreman would stand by timing line work, demanding that they move faster or be replaced by the dozens of jobless milling around the yard waiting for someone to be fired. The heat, the threat of loss of livelihood, and the incessant pace were blamed for more than one man going mad and attacking his foreman. Workers were forbidden to speak to one another during lunch breaks in case they should organize. If machines broke down you were required to spend the day in the sweltering shop while they were being repaired, but you were only paid for the time that the machines were running. The heat in the factory was brutal but nothing like in the paint curing rooms where mostly black workers literally baked, their backs blistered by the furnaces.  

Life in the factories was intolerable for women as well. Nellie Besson, another organizer and Emergency Brigade soldier, described a woman losing two fingers to a machine. The foreman told the women not to tell Nellie, knowing that she was “firey”. “Of course,” she recalled, “Everyone I met told me about it before I got into the door. Her fingers and blood were still on the machine when I got there.”  There was also a great deal of sexual harassment and abuse. Similar to the Esau System experienced by the wives of miners in West Virginia, women working the plants were expected to give up their bodies as a way of maintaining their pay, especially if their husbands had been injured or where otherwise out of work. This base exploitation of women’s desperation to feed their families during the Great Depression led to an entire department of women catching a venereal disease from a single foreman. 
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Genora notes that women outside of the factories were also deeply affected by General Motors management and working conditions as well. The favorite pastime of all GM workers was universally the visit to the beerhall at the end of a 12-hour shift.
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“Women were affected by this more than the men. You know, the men could get out. They could get drunk. They could talk about a few things and cuss and swear. Women had a gnawing fear during this period. They didn't know what this terrible, terrible force was that was preventing their husbands from providing a living. And why some of the husbands were getting beaten up and getting in trouble and all they could think of was stay out of trouble; stay out of trouble, you know. And of course I was talking all this time. Talking to people, "We've got to do something."  --Genora Johnson

The morning after the Battle of the Running Bulls, note the line of women with bats lining the street. Behind them are the windows they smashed out previously. The University of Michigan - Flint, Genesee Historical Collections Center

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Fighting Back and the Emergency Brigade

The fightback started in late December of 1937. As every good Flintstone knows the striking workers of Fisher Plant #1 halted production and occupied the building. The strike was actually planned to begin in 1938, when Governor Frank Murphy who was known to be sympathetic to unions, was going to start his administration but events at a factory in Cleveland forced the organizers to move sooner. Kermit and Genora were front and center, Kermit was even elected to read the demands of the workers in the factory to start off the occupation and would eventually lead the strikers at Chevrolet Plant #1.
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While men occupied the building, women did what they could from outside. Genora organized the Women’s Auxiliary before the Emergency Brigade. The Women’s Auxiliary was dedicated to supporting the strikers inside the factories with food and supporting the families of strikers and other factory workers put out of work by the strike. The Women’s Auxiliary did everything from delivering groceries and meals to caring for the children of the men and women working the strike to passing out alternative worker’s newspapers and trying to convince some suspicious wives to support the Sit-Downers.  General Motors had spread the word that the Women’s Auxiliary was made up of “entertainers” bought and paid for by powerful communist entities. To battle this smear campaign Genora sent older Women’s Auxiliary members and kept the Youth League at home. 
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The Emergency Brigade was born out of necessity on the night of January 11, 1938 - The Battle of the Running Bulls. Flint Police and General Motors goons were attempting to smoke the Sit-Downers out with tear gas. When members of the Women’s Auxiliary attempted to open the gate to deliver food the police and enforcers surged forward and a melee followed in the street. Women from the Auxiliary were caught in between the two forces. Genora rolled up in the “sound car” - a car with a PA system mounted on the top used by organizers for speeches, songs, and announcements - in the middle of all this with Victor Reuther at her side.
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  “Finally, I got up in the sound truck and I called the police, "Cowards, cowards, shooting into the bellies of unarmed men and firing into the mothers of children".  And everything became quiet on both sides of the line. And I appealed to the women, the spectators on both sides, "Breakthrough those police lines and come down here and stand beside your husbands and your brothers and your uncles and your sweethearts".

In the dusk, I could barely see one woman walking down the battle zone. A cop grabbed her by the coat and she went right out of that coat and this was in freezing weather and she just kept right on coming. And as soon as that happened there were other women who followed down, then more men. And there was a big roar of victory.

From that night, I decided that women could form an emergency brigade and every time there was a threatened battle, we could make a difference."​  --Genora Johnson

This may be the movie interpretation Genora left us with forty years after the event, but nonetheless the Emergency Brigade was formed and they were a true force with which to be reckoned. The men in the factory were dedicated to nonviolence, but the women who stood between the Sit-Downers and the lines of police and spectators were discretely armed. A force that varied between 50 in the beginning and 350 women at its height, armed with clubs, planks of wood, pipes, socks filled with soap, and even horsewhips hidden beneath long winter coats.

They held the line, putting their bodies in the way of violence for the cause and standing out in their uniform of red berets and red arm bands. Nellie Besson remembered it this way,
 
“Genora talked to me and asked me if I would be willing to be a lieutenant and she had some kind of a thing wrote up “if our sister died even, we were supposed to go right on.” You know, if the one next to us fell we were supposed to carry right on anyway. And I didn’t let my parents know that I did that, that I signed that paper. If we were out someplace and faced with tear gas or anything else and one of us fell we were to continue right on regardless. Truthfully, I don’t think any of us realized the danger we were in. At least we didn’t let it get to us. We saw that there was such a need for women that would gladly give their life, because that is practically what they asked us to do. We faced teargas and we faced rocks and we faced police and we faced National Guard and General Motors goons and everybody else.”

Weapons of the Emergency Brigade - University of Michigan-Flint, Genesee Historical Collections Center

Emergency Brigade members celebrating the end of the Sit Down Strike University of Michigan-Flint, Genesee Historical Collections Center

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But the Emergency Brigade would not last past the end of the strike. Genora ended up back in a tuberculous sanitarium, this time Ingham County, within a year of their victory  Genora was very conscious when she created the Brigade, avoiding words like “Ladies” or “Women’s” so that their role in the fight wouldn’t be ignored but in the end even the Emergency Brigade had to stick to the script of only existing to support the male strikers. Without relegating themselves to a support role, Genora bitterly remembered saying they “would have been talking to the wall.” After the strike and for decades following it, their role was downplayed as mere cheerleaders for the courageous men—or worse, hysterical women who got in the way. In the first book written about the strike, The Many, and the Few by Henry Kraus, Kraus portrays the women who bravely faced police fire at the Battle of Bulls Run as “...hysterically castigating the police.” Even internal UAW publications began to refocus women to “home” and “support” roles almost immediately.

Documentary: With Babies and Banners: Story of the Women's Emergency Brigade (1979)

With Babies and Banners:
Story of the Women's Emergency Brigade (1979)

In 1979, the documentary, “With Babies and Banners,” interviewed the women of the Emergency Brigade. The groundbreaking forty five minute documentary, directed and produced by a woman, was nominated for an academy award for best documentary feature as well as winning awards at different film festivals. The movie focuses on Genora and her five “Lieutenants.”  Filming these elderly women recounting war stories from their early twenties helped to revive the role of women in the Sit-Down Strike from “just” wives with coffee and baloney sandwiches, back to young women sporting baseball bats and taunting the National Guard.

See "With Babies and Banners" on YouTube

Genora’s story doesn’t end with the eventual success of the 44 day long Sit-Down Strike. She became the organizer and secretary of UAW Local 12, WPA and Unemployed Union, UAW-CIO before being run out of Flint. After being blacklisted and unable to find work, she moved to Detroit and ended up at The Briggs Manufacturing Company where she became Chief Steward of UAW Local 212, an all-women’s department in the company’s main plant. It was in Detroit where she was beaten badly with a lead pipe in her own bed. It was later revealed by Senator Estes Kefauver’s Investigating Committee that the Mafia, hired by corporate leaders, was responsible for this and other beatings of UAW officials and the shooting of UAW President Walter Reuther and his brother, Genora Johnson’s friend and Battle of the Running Bulls witness, Victor Reuther. Throughout her life she remained committed to fighting injustice wherever she saw it - fighting for civil rights and civil liberties, opposition to the Vietnam War. Never one to hide her political leaning no matter how much of a target it made her, she ran for a seat in the Michigan State Senate as a Socialist in 1952. She never stopped marching, writing, and protesting in support of the working class. 

Written by Colleen A. Marquis

About Colleen:  She is an archivist at the University of Michigan-Flint, in the Francis Willson Thompson Library.  She is also a board member of the GCHS, serving as the Archivist.

The majority of information for this article was collected from the Labor History Project at the University of Michigan-Flint which interviewed 77 people involved in the Sit Down Strike, everyone from organizers, to foreman, to fry cooks who served both sides, to police. The transcripts of most of the interviews are available on the Digital Collections website for the Genesee Historical Collections Center. “With Babies and Banners” is available in full on YouTube and is absolutely recommended to learn more about these women and this period of time. 

Want to learn more?

Genora Interview Transcript: https://www.umflint.edu/archives/genora-johnson-dollinger

Finding Aid for the Labor History Project including more transcripts: https://www.umflint.edu/archives/labor-history-project

Digital Archive University of Michigan with photos, transcripts, and more: 
https://digitalarchives.umflint.edu/

With Babies and Banners : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa75V-tdBko&t=822s