Dollinger, Genora Johnson

DOLLINGER, GENORA JOHNSON (1913 -1995). The eldest child of Lora and Raymond Albro, Genora was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan and raised in Flint. In 1936-37, she played a pivotal role in the 44-day sit-down strike against General Motors that led to the unionization of the entire US auto industry.

At age eighteen, Dollinger helped to launch and played a leading role in the Socialist Party’s Flint branch. Anticipating a strike at General Motors (GM), the party local organized a League for Industrial Democracy chapter to connect activists working in different parts of the GM complex, to counter anti-union propaganda, and to discuss labor history and socialism.

On December 30, 1936, workers in Fisher Body Plant 2 downed tools and occupied the building. Workers in Fisher Body Plant #1 followed soon after. The day before New Year’s Eve, strikers faced intense pressure to return home for the holiday. As Dollinger watched men leave the plant with their wives, she realized that if women could be effective in defeating a strike, they could be just as effective in helping to win it. She proposed a Women's Auxiliary to organize family support for the strike.

The Women’s Auxiliary staffed a child-care center to free mothers for picket line duty, provided a first aid station with a registered nurse, made house calls to ensure families had enough to eat, and gave advice on how to manage creditors. Uniquely, it offered classes in women’s labor history and in public-speaking, so as to raise women’s confidence to speak up in union meetings.

On January 11, city police and county sheriff’s deputies tried to retake Fisher Body 2 by blocking food deliveries, turning off the heat, and shooting tear gas inside the plant. When these efforts failed, police fired bullets and tear gas into the crowd of picketers guarding the front of the plant. Workers fought back, overturning police cars to build barricades and hurling tear gas back at police. As the battle raged, Dollinger took the loudspeaker and verbally attacked the police, “Cowards! Cowards! Shooting into the bellies of unarmed men and firing at the mothers of children.” She appealed to the women, "Break through those police lines and come down here and stand beside your husbands and your brothers and your uncles and your sweethearts." She later recalled, “I could barely see one woman struggling to come forward. A cop had grabbed her by the back of her coat. She just pulled out of that coat and started walking down to the battle zone. Other women and men who followed. When those spectators came into the center of the battle and the police retreated, there was a big roar of victory.”

The following day, Dollinger organized the Women's Emergency Brigade, a quasi-military wing of the Women's Auxiliary prepared to defend strikers and picketers from attack. Women in the Emergency Brigade sported red berets and arm bands and carried heavy wooden clubs and blackjacks laced with car leather made by strikers in Fisher Body 1. In their pockets, they hid hard bars of soap that could be slipped into a sock and swung as a weapon.

News of the strike and the Emergency Brigade made the front page of the New York Times, and a French newspaper called Dollinger the "Joan of Arc" of organized labor. Despite fifteen plants on strike, GM refused to bargain. Something had to be done to break the stalemate. Dollinger’s’s husband at the time, Kermit Johnson, worked in Chevrolet Plant No. 4, the largest in the GM complex. Plant 4 was heavily guarded, so Johnson proposed a diversion that would draw the guards away long enough for workers to capture the plant. After Johnson’s plan was at first voted down, Dollinger pushed to get it adopted anyway, and the Emergency Brigade played a central role in its success. The occupation of Plant 4 compelled GM to recognize the United Auto Workers union and negotiate a first contract.

During the strike, Dollinger was treated for tuberculosis in her right lung. She recalled that “I was fortunate that the doctor who treated me was a socialist… I didn't stop to be sick. I was willing to go through anything for the strike. “\After the strike, she was sent on a union-sponsored speaking tour. During the tour she collapsed, and she spent the next six months in a treatment center where her infected lung was removed. On recovering, Dollinger helped to found and served as secretary for Local 12, the first union of unemployed workers to affiliate with the UAW.

Local 12 fought for material support for the unemployed, resisted evictions, and organized large, militant demonstrations. To increase public support for the unemployed, they set up a tent city for homeless families in a park opposite the Buick Motor Car Company. Patrols of union men defended the encampment. Dollinger recalled, “They were really living out in public. People came down to see what was happening. Great big signs on each corner of the park said, ‘This is the Death Watch,’ and ‘If you want to see people in the city of Flint die, here they are.’"

Because of her prominent role in the strike and her work with the unemployed, the auto industry blacklisted Dollinger. Unable to land a job, she moved to Detroit in 1941 with her second husband, Sol Dollinger. By this time, factories had begun hiring women to replace the men who had gone to war, so Genora Dollinger took a WPA course on how to operate industrial machines. Hired at Briggs Manufacturing Co., she was appalled at the terrible working conditions and rampant sexual harassment of the mainly female workforce. When she was fired several days after attending a union meeting, 18,000 workers walked out in protest. Promptly rehired, Dollinger a was elected a chief shop steward. She recalled that “there were more walk-outs at Briggs than anywhere else in the city of Detroit…we kept organizing walk-outs because the company never stopped trying to smash Local 212.”

In 1945, Dollinger served on a committee to investigate the physical beatings of prominent unionists. She soon became a victim herself, when two men broke into her apartment and severely beat her with a lead pipe. She was hospitalized for weeks with a concussion, fractured collarbone, facial nerve damage, and right-sided paralysis. Six years later, the Kefauver Committee determined that the Briggs beatings and the shotgun attacks on Walter and Victor Reuther had been instigated by Detroit auto executives in collusion with the Detroit Mafia.

On recovering from her injuries, Dollinger resumed political activity, helping to found the American Socialist Union in 1953. From 1960 to 1966, she served as an officer in the Michigan Civil Liberties Union. An early president of Women for Peace, she persuaded several Detroit union leaders to take a public stand against the US war in Vietnam.

In 1977, at the fortieth anniversary banquet of the Flint sit-down strike, Dollinger took the podium to condemn what she called "tuxedo unionism" with its bloated bureaucracy and neglect of social issues, including equal rights for women. In her words, “today, most unions have a bureaucratic leadership that does little for working people and keeps them in a state of passivity.”

To the end of her life, Dollinger remained a committed socialist in the firm belief that “the real solution to the problems of people in general and working class people especially is socialism, social ownership of the means of production…the way…for working people to achieve their liberation.” Inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Michigan Women's Historical Center. she was saluted by Victor and Sophie Reuther: “Genora is of the great tradition of Mother Jones who in an earlier generation was to the mine workers what Genora became to the auto workers. A living legend in her own time!”

Women's Labor History Film Project. With Babies and Banners: Story of the Women's Emergency Brigade. Franklin Lakes, N.J.: New Day Films, 1979.

Rosenthal, S., Striking Flint: Genora (Johnson) Dollinger Remembers the 1936-37 General Motors Sit-Down Strike. Toronto: ReMarx Publishing, 1995.

Dollinger, S. & G.J. Dollinger. Not Automatic: Women and the Left in the Forging of the Auto Workers’ Union. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.