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family’s preparations for residence in Detroit. Genora and Ronnie stayed behind in Flint while Sol took care of numerous technicalities relating to his new job. He had to go through a training program for several weeks and was put up in a Detroit hotel room, with his new employer footing the bill. Sol’s starting salary was $6,500, more money than he had ever made before. Remaining in Flint, Genora maintained her activities in the worlds of justice and reform. She and her NAACP colleagues responded to numerous complaints from the black community. Some teachers at the Martin School in Flint played phonograph records of the “Little Black Sambo” stories to their pupils. The offending records were removed. At Franklin D. Roosevelt High School, a teacher referred to the head of the school as a “nigger principal.”3 The teacher was reprimanded. A dance studio in Flint segregated a four-year-old African American student from her white classmates. The NAACP, through the city attorney’s office, forced the studio to change its practices. A bar at the corner of Cornelia and North Saginaw refused to serve African Americans until the NAACP, led by Genora, stepped in. A grocery store owner on St. John’s Street was chastised when he fired all the African Americans working there because he “could not trust colored people.” Racial matters even got into the death business in a case known as Spencer v. Flint Memorial Park Cemetery. A black man, J. M. Spencer, bought lots from George Hamann, and at first the cemetery officials refused to make the necessary transfers of ownership titles. In another incident, a black citizen of Flint, Edward Hall (alias Calvin Williams), was found to be a fugitive from a Georgia court (for unspecified offenses). He was placed in the Flint jail to await extradition to Georgia. Genora and NAACP colleagues, determined that Hall not be sent back to a “Georgia Chain Gang,” spent much time and money fighting his extradition. Because there had been no black jurors in this case, extradition was not granted and Hall stayed in Michigan.4

Genora savored a letter from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. expressing his gratitude for the work of the Flint NAACP. In a NAACP newsletter she announced plans for a statewide boycott of the Woolworth stores, “in solidarity with our brave and courageous brothers in Dixie.” If blacks could not sit at lunch counters in North Carolina’s Woolworth stores, reform-minded people should protest at every Woolworth outlet in the country. Organized demonstrations against Woolworth took place in Flint, Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Lansing. Genora and her coworkers called for “sympathy marches” throughout the country, and there were several of these, all the way from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles. Genora forcefully told her followers that “if Woolworth practices Jim Crow in the South, we can buy dime store items elsewhere.”5

“Genora and activity went hand in hand,” an admiring Sol said of her. “There was a restlessness that I attributed to an inheritance from her Puritan ancestors. The idea of staying home, cooking, sewing, washing and ironing were alien to her nature, although she was a good cook and could sew her own stylish clothes.” She was a natural organizer. “If a project she was engaged in ended,” Sol said, “she sought out a new one. The word ‘defeat’ did not exist in her vocabulary. She had enlisted in the cause to . . . change the capitalistic system. Genora was prepared to make any sacrifice to accomplish that goal.” Despite Socialist commitment, Genora maintained an affiliation with the Unitarian Church. She had joined, not particularly for religious reasons—although her membership did show the FBI’s statement about her and God to be libel—but because of the intellectual content of its services and public-forum meetings.6 Anything and everything that furthered the cause to which she had dedicated her life was fair game for Genora Dollinger.

The greatest activity in the early 1960s that the Flint NAACP and, to some extent, the national organization engaged in took place in Monroe, North