• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 872 0

” and their educational programs reflect a “sham and waste of money.” Class sizes were too large, there were not enough textbooks, and a third of the students dropped out of school before graduation. Los Angeles city schools, she said, “had the worst reading scores” in the entire country and were not educating children for life in a complex industrial society. Members of school boards, however, seemed not to care. Made up primarily of “capitalists,” she declared, they have “made us pawns in this struggle.”2

With an affiliate of the council called the “People’s Lobby,” Genora set up petition drives to get citizens behind antismog laws after a young student died, presumably from pollution. “How many other children who are developing asthma and cancer and heart conditions are dying—really of the smog and pollutants to their young bodies?” she asked. Nearly 10,000 signatures were obtained in one day. They set up petition booths at shopping centers throughout the city. Genora reported that “we are witnesses to a number of older people who come up to our petition tables with tears in their eyes and tell us they are dying of emphysema.”3 Some shopping center directors tried to block the tables, and the group, represented by lawyers known as “Nader’s Raiders,” went to court against them. The People’s Lobby won as the court decreed that “owners [of shopping centers] may not rely on their private ownership to justify blanket prohibitions on First Amendment activities.”4 The collection of these signatures helped pave the way for the ultimate passage of California’s strict antismog and pollution laws.

Genora lamented a lack of sensitivity by school administrators and police departments. The former acted too quickly to send troublesome students (she herself had been a “troublesome” student) to special classes or even camps until they straightened out. Genora believed it better for delinquent students to stay within the community, where they would have a better chance at rehabilitation. A group of fourteen students peacefully demonstrated at a high school. The principal called the police, who arrested, booked, and fingerprinted the students. This action was outrageous, according to Genora and her colleagues on the Los Angeles Advisory Council. Another time a principal had the police round up 109 “incorrigible” students for offenses ranging all the way from “sassing a teacher to being tardy.” The obviously ineffective principal got the police to do his job for him. Little wonder, then, that for several weeks in 1970, starting in mid-April and ending in late May, a majority of teachers were on strike in Los Angeles. Genora and Sol strongly supported them: “We commend the striking teachers . . . for their courageous actions in refusing to allow the deterioration of our schools to continue.”5

Genora stood picket duty during the strike—as did Sol and a large number of students in the system—and opened her home on Queen Anne Place as a place for the striking teachers to hold daily union meetings. The Dollinger house became striking teachers’ headquarters, with Genora serving sandwiches and cold drinks, and offering a “comfort station.” Students, as well, flocked to the standard. Genora and Sol’s son, Ronald, thoroughly favored the strike and helped to further its interests any way he could. This was heady stuff; it was wonderful, Genora thought, to be back in the midst of a strike and walking picket lines again.6 She thrived on controversy.

Her work with the Los Angeles school systems made her publicly known in the city—through television and newspapers—which in turn led to additional reform activities. Genora now frequently responded to questions from various authors on the role of women in the 1937 sit-down strike. As the women’s liberation movement intensified, the requests grew almost too numerous for Genora to handle. She was affronted by queries over the telephone but did make many personal appearances. One such occurred at the 1970 meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Los Angeles. Stanford professor Staughton Lynd