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“come alive.” On the whole, however, African Americans did not trust Socialist representatives of the UAW. Charles Denby wondered why “the [Socialist Workers] Party had no resolution on the Negro question. They had one on Trade Unions, on the American question, on Europe and many other subjects. . . . The leadership never mentioned that Negroes had ever done anything progressive.”34 Nevertheless, Genora exuberantly wrote to Sol that she was “so hyped up” after this meeting that she felt like “cooing, and I don’t know how to coo with only a piece of paper and pen in front of me.” The only two things she’d never had enough of, she said to Sol, were “you and black olives.”35

Detroit was a buzzing city during the war, “open” twenty-four hours a day. By order of the federal government, a worker could not unilaterally move himself or herself to another job, in effect freezing most laborers into their positions. The only way for them to move up to obtain a better-paying job was to get themselves fired. The job market was so good that they would be reemployed almost immediately.36 Thus there were numerous, deliberate wildcat strikes, or walkouts as the union called them, illegal by government definition. Many of those who participated were fired, and they got better paying jobs elsewhere. The wildcat strike became an instrument for working people to show their disapproval of unions who entered into no-strike pledges for the duration of the war. With the no-strike pledge, labor and management promised the government to work in harmony as long as the war lasted. The companies, though, according to labor opinion, did not live up to their side of the bargain. They used all sorts of techniques (such as speedups, denial of time-and-a-half by cutting out Saturday shifts, forced work on nonwar products, shortened lunch periods, and following workers on toilet breaks) to violate at least the spirit if not the letter of the law. The movement against the no-strike pledge was greatest in Detroit because the vast hinterland was “more conservative and so much more controlled by the [FDR] administration.” Neverthe less, the opponents of the no-strike pledge could secure no more than a third of the votes for its removal.37

The most vocal opposition to the no-strike pledge came from Trotskyists in the SWP (with only 110 members in the UAW) and from the Workers’ Party, led by Max Schactman. To acknowledge the no-strike pledge, they believed, was to recognize the legitimacy of the war itself. At the 1944 UAW convention in Grand Rapids, the main subject was the no-strike pledge. Walter Reuther wanted a “reaffirmation” of the pledge until Germany was defeated. The subject was so intense that fistfights broke out on the convention floor.38 Genora was caught up in the activities of wildcat strikes and no-strike pledges. She spent much time as chief steward listening to worker complaints that dealt with what they considered unfair labor practices. Most of the workers in Genora’s department were women, who worked in “cribs,” or sections with chicken-wire partitions. One was a “navy” crib, another “army,” and a third “marine,” all working on different parts for the planes and tanks as they were being built. Each crib was restricted, but it was easy for someone in army to see what was happening in navy. Genora was upset at the way crib foremen treated women. They kept speeding them up on the assembly lines, teasing them about menstrual periods, and, in particular, targeting women who had just left school or their households to work at Briggs.39 Many of these foremen had come up from the assembly line; they knew how it worked and, once arriving at their new positions, got everything from it that they possibly could. “Bring ’em on, bring ’em on,” became one of their mantras, meaning a speedup beyond some workers’ capacities. “I’ll tell you,” said one GM veteran, “it was just like what you’ve seen in . . . chain gangs and prisoners. They [the foremen] just about operated that way.”40

Genora called a wildcat strike over these and other grievances. Her first