Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [13]
Genora’s mother, Lora Fuller, was the cultured member of the family. Born in Three Rivers and a graduate of the Chicago Conservatory of Music, she taught piano lessons in Flint. While a music student in her youth, Lora had lived in Chicago with her aunt, Genora Wilcox. The experience was so positive that Lora decided that her first daughter would be named Genora. Throughout her pregnancy, Lora knew that the baby would be large (Genora, at birth in March 1913, weighed ten pounds). Her mother was a midwife in Kalamazoo, and Lora was comfortable in having her deliver her own granddaughter.
In her earlier years, Genora remembered her father, Raymond Albro, as loving and caring, but as time passed, he became increasingly offensive, especially after having too much to drink. After the Buick foundry in Flint was built in the early 1920s, many blacks arrived from the South, settling in the Thread Lake area, and antiblack sentiment grew.15 Raymond Albro exhibited it. Each time he took Genora and her brother and sisters for a ride through the north end of town, he made them crouch down, presumably because he was afraid they would be attacked by blacks as they rode through the colored districts of Flint, Michigan. Even then, at a tender age, Genora wondered, why—what’s the problem? The question stayed with her for the rest of her life and helped considerably to turn her into a reformer. Later in life, she joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to promote fairness and equality for blacks and other minorities. Her motive in joining the NAACP was to improve racial relations, but, in all probability, a subconscious response to her father’s attitude toward race played a part.
Ray became a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the mid-1920s, a time in America when this group claims to have reached its height in membership. A proprietor of his own photographic shop, and in time branching out to operate several of them, Ray apparently thought that black migrants in the 1920s posed a threat to Flint society. Genora’s relationship with her father helped her to become not just a reformer but an aggressive one. Ray apparently believed that a man was a superior being, with rightful power over his wife and children, even to the point of beating them from time to time. He made no secret about being disappointed when his firstborn was a girl. The detestation she felt for her father escalated as she grew older. “I felt . . . that never would I take a second place, in so far as I could help it, to any male—any boy, or any man.”16 She came to hate the machismo that her father displayed. A real man, she felt, was “kind and warm and affectionate and never macho.”17
Jarvis Albro, Genora’s brother, named after his paternal grandfather, worked for Chevrolet Gear and Axle in Saginaw, Michigan, but gained statewide attention by singing in a barbershop quartet. Like Genora, who had an alto voice, he always sang during festive occasions, especially at Christmas. Genora’s sisters were Barbara and Beatrice, the two youngest in the family. Genora’s father often commented on the odd family he and Lora had produced. Barbara married Dial Clifton, a “hillbilly” from Missouri who worked with AC Spark Plug and was a union man. Beatrice married Oscar Coover Jr., whose father, a confirmed Trotskyist, had spent some time in jail.18
Times had proven so well for Ray Albro in the booming 1920s that not only did he expand his photography business, but he also built a house on Garland Street—in an affluent neighborhood—for his family, with two apartments attached to rent. He made an attic apartment in the third floor of the house where, later, his rebellious daughter and her husband lived, causing a number of family rifts.
In due time, Genora was enrolled at Stevenson Elementary School in Flint, and she made some basic decisions that influenced her later life. One student never had the equipment the teacher asked him to bring: things like pens and paper on which to draw and write essays. The teacher failed to understand