• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 907 0

one event in particular: “One of the highlights of the evening was the speech of a young wife of a striker who blasted police for firing on unarmed women and children. It shamed the police temporarily into not shooting promiscuously into the strikers.” The “young wife,” of course, was Genora Johnson. Her speech also had the effect, insinuated Kraus, of causing the citizens of Flint to ask whether or not their police, supported by tax money, were not in fact shooting down taxpayers themselves. Some bystanders who came to the scene began shouting, “We don’t pay you to shoot down people.” “This night,” wrote Kraus, “will be remembered long in the history of the labor movement both in Michigan and throughout the country. It was almost unbelievable.”39

Shortly after the Battle of Bull’s Run, the Michigan American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called a special meeting at Flint’s Durant Hotel to hear the strikers’ side of the story. The ACLU invited Genora to speak. “I went directly from the picket line. . . . My shoes were old and muddy. My hair was stringy and I was tired and exhausted.” She explained the conditions of work in Flint as she saw them and described Bull’s Run. She got a standing ovation.40

There were strong forces against the strike. First and foremost was GM itself. The Flint Alliance made up of chamber of commerce followers thoroughly objected to any and all labor organizations. Much to Genora’s consternation, Flint churches also opposed the strike. The pastor of her own church, Court Street Methodist, adjured his flock into an antistrike position. Her father, Raymond, said he was ashamed to continue going to this church because of her activities in the strike. She later reported that it had been the pastor at Court Street who signed up her father in the Ku Klux Klan. Because of her pastor and congregation’s attitude, she explained, she discontinued all of her relationships with the Methodist Church.41

Genora thought that a force was needed to counterbalance the antiunion biases in Flint.42 She had heard that there were 40,000 GM workers in Flint (80 percent of the adult population in 1936),43 with thousands out on strike. Surely such numbers could not ultimately be ignored. Genora formed what became known as the Women’s Emergency Brigade, or EB, designed distinctly as a paramilitary group to help the Flint sit-down strikers.

The day after the Battle of Bull’s Run, Genora called for women to join as a part of the strike rather than as a supplement to it. More than 100 women enlisted, and within a fortnight the EB had more than 400 members.44 Genora was quickly elected as captain, not wanting to be general (for reasons she never made clear). She selected five lieutenants (Ruth Pitts, Fisher Plant One; Nellie Besson, A.C. Sparkplug; Sybil “Teeter” Walker, Redman Parts Plant; Inez Chapman, Fisher Plant One; and Tekla Roy, whose husband was fired from GM for wearing a union button) to help her run the group. Most of the officials of the EB either worked in GM plants themselves or had men in their family who did. They let it be known from the beginning that their work would not be in the kitchen; it would be on the front lines of the battlefield.

On January 19, 1937, the WEB was established in Flint, Michigan. Members of the press were called in, and they took photographs of this first meeting. After a few remarks from Genora and some other women, the meeting went “into a showing of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.”45 This movie personified the auto workers’ adversarial relationship with GM: Chaplin becomes a “part of the mechanical process. He continues to turn nonexistent bolts after the assembly line has shut down.” Watching the movie caused one Flint striker to exclaim, “Where you used to be a man now you are their cheapest tool.”46 The women wore red berets and red armbands with “EB” sewn into them as official insignias. There was to be no mistaking who they were. When the Women’s Auxiliary membership shot up to 1,000 and the EB to 500, Genora became concerned: “We had a little grandmother in her sixties that