Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [20]
Since New Year’s Eve 1936, some 2,000 automobile workers at the GM plants in Flint had been striking, many of them adapting the sit-down technique (i.e., just sitting down at their places of work and doing nothing; in effect, closing down the plant) to air their grievances.5 Both outside lines as well as inside sit-downers complained about police harassment and taunting of the picketers. Walter Bergman, a Detroit professor sympathetic to unionism, telephoned some clergy friends and talked them into coming up to Flint to join the picket lines. If police saw the clerics, Bergman reckoned, they would back off out of respect for the church. The plan worked: the police, while not stopping their harassment, reduced it.6 Sometimes GM representatives and Pinkertons infiltrated the picket lines in an attempt to provoke violence among the strikers. Some jujitsu experts were hired by GM to flip a man onto the pavement to make it appear that a unionist had done it. Men and women fought police and plainclothesmen on Kearsley Street. One woman received a seriously twisted arm by a policeman and another’s face turned black and blue from a beating by the “authorities.”7
Rumors had it that newly installed governor Frank Murphy might call out the National Guard, although there had been no overt violence during the twelve-day standoff.8 On January 2, 1937, GM won an injunction against the sit-downers; the UAW, however, invalidated the order when they showed that the judge in the case was a major GM stockholder. Six days later, as an omen of things to come, GM announced that it would cut off the heat (it was sixteen degrees above zero, Fahrenheit) in the plant and would not allow any more food deliveries. Hundreds of policemen gathered directly in front of Fisher Two, on Chevrolet Avenue, fully intending to drive out, first, the picket lines, and then the sit-downers. Neither picketers nor sit-downers numbered more than a hundred persons.9 In late afternoon a large number of UAW men tried to enter Plant Two to bring food, despite GM orders, to the barricaded strikers. The plant protective force denied them entry. The captain said he had lost the key to the entrance. The Union men gave him a count of ten to find it; when nothing happened, they took down the door themselves. As Life magazine reported, “It was a shouldering, pushing affair, and none were injured. The door lock was sprung and food brought in.”10
At this minor confrontation, the uniformed men surrounding the plant fired buckshot and tear gas through the second story windows where the strikers were located; occasionally, a rifle was discharged. Simultaneously, numerous law enforcement officials tried to get through piles of overturned cars Chevy workers had left on the grounds leading to Plant Two. The police were met with paving stones raining down on their heads, as well as auto-door hinges (some of which weighed well over a pound), causing a retreat and keeping the picket lines intact. As this battle raged between police and striking sit-downers and picketers, the event got full coverage from the newly developed techniques of radio reporting. Households all over Flint—and, for that matter, Michigan and a fair part of the country itself—heard of the confrontation; many listeners had husbands, sons, fathers, and brothers in the midst of the battle. Much to the chagrin of the police and deputies, Flint citizens began to converge on the battle site. One such listener was a diminutive—at five feet four inches—slim woman with an alto voice (which carried a long way) named Genora, whose husband, Kermit Johnson, worked for GM and had taken a leading role in calling the strike in the first place. Genora reported, “This was my first experience with violence. I had heard about it. I had read about it. I thought I knew how to act under such