Labor historians fell abysmally short in recording the final events capping the first major battle at the Flint Fisher Body Plant #2 in the sitdown strike of 1937. Among the notable historians who missed the final culmination of the battle between the strikers and the Flint Police was Henry Kraus, author of, The Many and the Few, and Heroes of Unwritten Story. They also include Sidney Fine, author of, Sitdown and Roger Keeran, who wrote, The Communist Party and the Auto Workers’ Unions.
It is not a matter of coincidence that all three male historians saw the strike through the male gender prism. They never sought out the role of the one female leader in the thick of the battle, yet, it was the active role of Genora Johnson that brought a successful conclusion to the battle; otherwise the continuation of the sitdown strike would have been imperiled.
In the May-June 1996 issue of Against the Current, I (Sol Dollinger) reviewed the various versions of the battle and delineated how the intervention of Genora Johnson Dollinger brought the battle to a successful conclusion. As the organizer of the 1,000 member Women’s Auxiliary, Genora refused to allow the male strike leaders to send her to safety as they did with the other women. She remained in the thick of the battle. The experience she gained from the BATTLE OF BULL’S RUN led Genora to organize the famous Red Beret, Emergency Brigade. The brigade was a para military force of 400 women armed with clubs to defend the strike.
The first oral history of the battle was recorded By Sherna Gluck in 1976 as part of a joint Wayne State University Labor and Urban Affairs and the Bentley Library of the University of Michigan.
Genora Dollinger: “Oh yes, we didn’t have any body contact. This was all shooting, you know. We had the water hoses from the plant and the hinges and the stones, that’s all. Those hinges were kind of heavy hinges, you know; the old car door hinges was a different thing. And they got loads of them downstairs, and they were upstairs on the roof firing them, too. No, we didn’t have any....the blackjacks would do no good; there was no hand to hand combat. Those cops had rifle shot and buckshot; there were fire bombs; and there were tear gas containers. We would run out and grab—the men were faster at that, they were better pitchers, I didn’t try anything like that—the tear gas canisters and hurl them back. And the fire bombs, they usually got those things— I mean they attempted to; the timing on those were very important.
“So that went on. This is all we had, that was all there was that goddamn night. Looking back on it, there were a couple of humorous incidents that occurred right in the midst of all this danger. Fisher #2 had swinging doors—one person’d come out and you’d go in—double doors. Habits are so ingrained that at one point when I was going through and a man was going out, he tipped his hat at me [laughter]. I never forgot that. I thought, of all things, you know, tipping his hat—in the midst of a bloody battle! And so anyway the battle raged. The sound car was down there and Victor Reuther was the primary speaker, and then he would pull in other men to make their appeals, and this went on and on. It never dawned on me to speak. In the first place this was primarily a man’s operation and I was down there to help out. Although I never thought too much about men and women when we were right there in the heart of the battle, come to think about it. But it never dawned on me—I’d never made any kind of public speech over a microphone—until Victor came back and told us that the battery on the sound truck was running down and we couldn’t get our message across [much] longer, to the crowds that had gathered at both ends of the battle area.
He said, ’Well, we may have lost the battle. The war is not lost but we have lost the battle.’
And I said to him, ’Well, Victor why don’t I talk to them over the loudspeaker?’
“Well, we’ve got nothing to lose’
“He had no great confidence this would help; men really didn’t feel that women could do too much— although we were good and wonderful women for wanting to help them.
“That’s when I got to take the mike, and again, circumstances you lose yourself; you go beyond yourself and think of the cause. I was able to make my voice really ring out on that night because I knew the battery was going down and we had only a few minutes left. That’s when i appealed to the women of Flint. I bypassed everybody else then and went to the women, and told them what was happening. That’s when I said, there are women down here, the mothers of children, and I beg of you to come down here and stand with your husbands, your loved ones, your brothers, your sweethearts.
“And when I made that appeal, it was a strange thing. It was dark too, but I could almost hear a hush. There was a general buzzing of the growing crowd at both ends. A hush came over the crowd the minute a woman’s voice came over the mike. It was startling! All night long [they hadn’t realized] there was even a woman down there. Then I saw—I don’t know, there were car lights or whatever it was in this darkness that we could see action going on up there, probably. maybe they were factory lights or something—police lights. But then I saw the first woman struggling and I noticed when she started to break through and come down, that a cop grabbed her coat— and this was in freezing weather, freezing weather, there were icy pavements and everything was frozen—and she just kept on coming. And as soon as that happened other women broke through and then we had a situation where the cops didn’t want to fire into the backs of women. When the women did that, the men came naturally and that was the end of the battle.”