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By Root 949 0

—and refused to move all night long. Of course, they later received the opprobrium of friend and foe alike for their timidity, if not cowardice. Genora used the men’s room.17 Fisher Two’s restroom entrance had swinging doors: one for entry and one for exit. Genora remembers a man coming out as she was going in, and his habits were so ingrained that, right in the midst of the conflict, he tipped his hat to her.18 Refreshed and washed, Genora Johnson came out of Fisher Two and resumed her role as number one strike supporter. “They [the police] were firing buckshot and rifles at me” she said; it was at this point that she realized, “This is for real.”19 Fortunately, she was wearing a leather helmet, so the hits were mostly symbolic. She saw a friend, Fred Stevens, a Socialist and a president of the local bus drivers’ union who had come to Fisher Two to help the sit-downers, jump over a pool of water that turned red as he was shot in the leg. Other bleeding men passed by her.20 One eyewitness to these events was Robert Morss Lovett, a stockholder in GM. He wanted to see for himself how his “property” was faring at the hands of the sit-downers. “I saw . . . holes in the glass [of Fisher One] and dents in the metal sides. I thought these indicated wanton violence against my property, and asked how it occurred. Gun fire by the police, was the answer.” These shots had been fired toward the second floor of Fisher One, “endangering the lives of my employees, whom I was beginning to like though they were on strike.”21

These sights infuriated Genora as much as Mr. Lovett, but mostly she railed against the indignity of being fired upon. She ran up to a youthful Victor Reuther, who stood by a car with sound equipment in it. He had been using it to bolster the morale of the strikers. Now he told Genora that the batteries were running down, and it appeared that the strike action was going to be lost. “Please, Victor,” she asked, “if they [the batteries] are going down, let me speak.” She said to the police and other law enforcement officials, “Cowards! Cowards, shooting unarmed and defenseless men!”22 And then she spoke to the women of Flint, most of whom, up to this time, had been spectators (among some 3,000 on the scene) of the confrontations:23 “Women of Flint! This is your fight! Join the picket line and defend your jobs, your husbands’ jobs and your children’s homes!”24 Further: “Do you know that these cops who are cowards enough to fire into unarmed men are also cowards enough to fire into the mothers of children? There are women down here. There are mothers of children down here that the cops have been firing into. I am making a plea for all of you women up there [in the crowds] to come down and stand beside us. . . . Break through please. For God’s sake, come down here and help us.”25 And they did—nearly a thousand of them—one by one at the start. The first woman was grabbed by a policeman and she pulled out of her coat, but then the women joined hands and walked down the hill toward Fisher Two. The police dared not shoot a woman, especially in the back.

Some histories, including Sidney Fine’s brilliant study, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937, refer to this situation as the “Battle of the Running Bulls.”26 According to some eyewitnesses, however, this is misleading.27 The slang term for policemen in many areas and subcultures, including labor, was “bull.” The insinuation in Fine’s book, and others, was that the police or “bulls” left the confrontation in flight. This was not exactly so. They had guns and did not have to run. The women marching on Fisher Two apparently inspired a lot of better instincts that day, and the police and deputies holstered their guns and walked away. They did not wish to be remembered as the killers of children’s mothers. The more accurate title is the “Battle of Bull’s Run,” Genora later said, although who coined the phrase is problematic. It was actually an “echo from the past.”28 Genora had heard stories all her life about the Civil War; after all, it had ended only forty-eight years