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for an . . . independent candidate.” Both major parties, she asserted, used the “undeclared” war against Korea to create “colonial oppression” and placed the debt for it on the portion of American society least able to afford it: the working people. President Harry Truman, she exclaimed, had betrayed the country. He had supported injunctions against miners, broken a railroad strike on the eve of the Korean War, reneged on his promise to repeal the Taft-Hartley Law, and his and the Democratic Party’s record on civil rights was “miserable.”8 The time was overdue, she claimed, for labor to “have its representative in Congress to defend [its] interests at all times.”9

When Genora received official notification that her name was on the ballot, the mailman delivered it to Mrs. Sharpe, the Dollingers’ landlady. He said to her, “You know, you got the biggest Communist in the city of Flint living in your house.” Mrs. Sharpe replied, “No, she is not; she’s the biggest Socialist,” showing that at least one resident of the United States knew the difference between Communism and Socialism.10 Again, Genora barely registered in the voting booths. It became clear that her radical message to Michigan and America would have to be sent through means other than governmental office.

She attended the 1950 New York meeting of the SWP, identified herself as a waitress, and claimed that her name was Jeanette Lane.11 She explained that this was her Communist Party name, although she always avowed that she was not a Communist. She was, apparently, being facetious here. By the early 1950s, various Michigan state agencies and the FBI were scrutinizing the activities of the SWP, its personnel, and other groups that the U.S. attorney general had placed on its “subversive” list. To throw off the snoopers, both Genora and Sol (under the name Jerry Kirk, for example) used numerous aliases over the next several years.

She attended meetings of the predominately black Antioch Baptist Church in Flint and was elected to the executive board of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). These activities attracted the attention of government agencies because black activism in many instances was included in both state and national government’s definition of subversive activity.

Several reform groups (including the NAACP) wanted to bring internationally famous actor and singer Paul Robeson to Flint to speak for the local and national Progressive Party, headed in 1952 by Vincent W. Hallinan. The city fathers and citizenry made it clear that Robeson would not be welcome because of his political ideologies. Genora angrily told a local newspaper that the drive to keep Robeson out resulted from a fear campaign. It was an escalation of the witch hunt going on at the national level with HUAC and McCarthy—a seeping down of political uniformity to the local levels. Genora wanted to know if this outrageous act would go unchallenged, charging that “union leaders, who should know by now that the ultimate recipient of the whiplash of the witch hunt will be themselves, participate in this disgraceful undemocratic orgy.” Genora, acting as SWP spokesperson, wrote to the Flint Journal that the SWP supported the philosophies of neither Robeson nor Hallinan, but if the party had had enough space, it would welcome Robeson and his “progressive” ideas to Flint to “show how free speech is defended in practice.” Both Robeson and the Progressive Party, she argued, were too capitalistic, as shown essentially by Robeson’s success in movies, which reflected a “profit motive.” The SWP, however, fought for the “new society of Socialism that [was] sweeping across half the world and [would] eventually, and not too long at that, embrace the entire world.”12 This was not the only prediction Genora ever got wrong.

The SWP in Flint and other industrial parts of Michigan decided to flood the ballots with candidates for local and statewide elections. Genora let it be known that she wanted to run in the November 1952 election for state superintendent of education