Genora dollinger biography of barack

Jackson says his objectives for writing this biography were comprehensive in nature: l. To examine the postwar attacks on unionism and the growth of governmental strictures because of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. To explore the decline of the socialist groups throughout the country and explain why they declined. To explain the growth of a generation gap between older and younger unionists and discuss why Genora Dollinger and her followers believed there was a need to revitalize radical unionism.

To offer some explanations of why mainline historians tended to bypass union and feminist participants like Genora Dollinger and of how things began to turn around in this respect by the ls. This book accomplishes all of the above and more. Jackson has a particular gift for studding his work with all kinds of facts and figures and doing that in such a way that facts and figures never seem heavy or heavy-handed.

He has a lively, energetic style that keeps the narrative flowing. This was exemplified in the legendary sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, when strikers occupied the GM plants. The striking workers needed food; they also needed information and advance warning on what management might be up to. The Women's Emergency Brigade, formed during the Flint strike, proved indispensable to the union effort more than once.

The milk drivers wanted to join but we didn't have any union of milk drivers. We didn't have any union of store clerks or retail clerks. So they all came down to the main headquarters where our amalgamated local took in all of them.

Genora dollinger biography of barack

People were joining the union all over the city, whether they worked in an auto plant or wherever they were working. We would get calls all the time like, "J. Penney girls want to sit down. They want to strike. Then we had the Women's Auxiliary members go down after we saw that it was going to be all right and talk to those workers about labor history and about what we were trying to achieve.

Those were the roles women played. There were also many altercations on the picket lines, where sometimes women would come out and help. We didn't always carry the clubs because they were heavy, clumsy things to walk around with on a cold picket line. But we all carried a hard-milled bar of soap in one pocket and a sock in the other. That way, we couldn't be charged with carrying a weapon.

But if somebody was creating trouble on the picket line, we'd slip that bar of soap into the sock and swing that sock very fast and sharp. It was as good as a blackjack. I've had wonderful experiences in working with people, and I have found that sometimes the people who talk the loudest and act the bravest are the ones you can expect the least from.

Sometimes, when there was a fight on the picket line you'd see a big, healthy man dive under a car! Yet you'd see other small men or you'd see women take a stand. Breaking the Stalemate "General Motors will not be obligated by contract to a principle that the corporation does not approve even though that principle is now a federal law.

Across the nation, fifteen plants of General Motors were on strike, but we were making no progress. GM and the union had begun negotiations a few days after the Battle of Bulls Run but GM was stalling and bargaining in bad faith. The company tried to start a back-to-work movement with their anti-union Flint Alliance, and they tried to use the courts to stop the picketing and evacuate the plants.

This was the same strategy that they had used against the Toledo auto strike in It became quite difficult for some people to keep going. Every day the union was getting out bulletins and organizing the picket lines, trying to encourage people, to inspire them. We knew that something drastic had to be done and soon. Everyone knew that if we could take Chevrolet Plant 4, we could win the strike.

Plant 4 was the single largest unit in the whole GM complex. It produced engines for all Chevrolet automobiles across the country and for export, too. If we could stop production there, we'd hit General Motors right in the pocket-book. But no one knew how to do this because Plant 4 was very heavily guarded. This next part has never been written up in history.

My husband, Kermit Johnson, worked in Plant 4 and was the leader of the strike committee for Chevrolet. One night he came home from work with a greasy little piece of paper in his hand. He said, "You know, I've figured out how we can take Plant 4. Plant 8 is located here. Plant 6 is there. Those plants were all around Plant 4. The problem is that General Motors has recruited professional Pinkertons, plant protection and organized vigilantes.

It will be one big slaughter unless we distract them from that area and give ourselves time to barricade the plant. And if you've ever been inside one of those plants, you'll know the doorways are as big as the side of a house. They're huge, long structures. It would take some time to barricade the doors and to weld the openings shut to prevent an attack by the police.

So they needed to create a distraction to buy time. When Kermit took his plan to the Socialist Party to get support, Walter Reuther and his group in Detroit were opposed to it. They were afraid that we hadn't had enough experience to carry through a plan like that. So our Socialist Party was split and the plan was voted down. But that was only after Walter Reuther came in and talked against it.

Walter had a little more experience in Detroit and he'd been over in Russia, so some of the Socialist Party members deferred to him. What did we know in a little backwater town like Flint? Reuther came in and hammered against it, real hard, and they voted it down. After that, I didn't know what to do. I went home and wrote a two-page, single-spaced letter appealing to Norman Thomas to help us.

Norman Thomas was a great speaker for socialism and a wonderful writer, but he didn't know anything about the day-to-day problems that went on in the Socialist Party. Trager came to Flint on January 21 and I got all of the militants that I could get to talk to him to convince him that we should adopt Kermit's plan. Trager saw the workers trudging up to the big auditorium on the third floor where they were being shown movies like Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, with everybody laughing.

Other workers would come up and say, "What the hell is this? What are our orders for today? Where are our plans? What are we going to do? When we had our meeting, Trager decided that Kermit had a valid plan and there was a valid reason why we should carry it out. Walter Reuther was still opposed but he had to defer to the Labor Secretary. But he told Kermit that if the strike was lost it would be his fault.

The vote was taken again and this time, it carried. Kermit and Roy Reuther were assigned to take the plan into the general strike committee to be approved and developed there. The rest is written up in history. We've tried so hard to trace that letter I wrote to Norman Thomas, but after the strike Frank Trager went to work for the United States government, I've forgotten in what capacity.

I think he may have mislaid it or destroyed it. I was always very sorry about that because if it hadn't been for that letter I don't know which route the strike would have taken. I do know we wouldn't have had that dramatic, decisive victory in the General Motors strike. Kermit's plan was adopted by the strike committee. We knew there were some informers in the union meetings so a "secret" meeting was held with people who were going to shut Plant 9 and a couple of the suspected informers.

That's how we let the company think that Plant 9 was going to be struck. We wanted GM to put all its guards on Plant 9 and leave Plant 4 free to be taken. Kermit's plan was scheduled to be put into action on February 1 during the afternoon shift change. I had the Brigade out there, marching up and down in front of Plant 9. When the police saw the Brigade, they came and formed a line.

At one point, the police pulled their revolvers and threatened the union men on the outside because they knew the plant police were taking care of the men inside. There was a newsreel truck that happened to be there at the time, and I told the women, "Raise your clubs. I think General Motors got hold of those pictures some way. I never knew what happened to them.

When Plant 9 started shutting off some of the machines, the police began to tear-gas and beat the men. Then we heard a glass break, and we saw the head of Tom Klasey look out. Blood was streaming down his face and he was yelling, "They're gassing us in here! For God's sake, they're gassing us! We used our clubs to smash the windows out so the men inside could get some air.

Those men took an awful beating and by the time the ambulances came to carry them out, General Motors thought that they had squashed that one. But I knew what was happening at Plant 4 half a mile down the street, so I dismissed the Brigade and sent them back to headquarters. Then my five lieutenants and I sauntered down to Plant 4 gate to see what the hell was going on.

We didn't make it obvious in any way. When we got there we saw some big fights. Union men were throwing out the scabs and some of the foremen, and they said, "Hold that gate. Hold it, don't let the police come through here! They wanted to push us aside. We said, "Over our dead bodies. We asked them, "What would you think if your genora dollinger biography of barack was out here with us and you were in that damn plant?

What would you think? Wouldn't you expect your wife to defend you and fight for better conditions for you? This is what feeds the people of Flint. Just as it was beginning to look risky for us, we saw the Emergency Brigade marching towards us, singing "Solidarity Forever" and "Hold the Fort. The successful occupation of Plant 4, which joined the occupations at Fisher 1 and 2, broke the resistance of General Motors and negotiations began in Detroit.

We still maintained the picket lines and the security of the plants. The areas that weren't controlled by the union were controlled by the National Guard. The National Guard kept everyone away from the Chevrolet embankment. If you came down Chevrolet Avenue and you looked up at the buildings there, you'd see guardsmen with their machine guns pointed right down the street.

The Brigade went to help the women from the kitchen get food into Plant 4 the first night, but we couldn't get by those guards. I started talking to one of these young boys and his finger was actually trembling on that trigger. We didn't fool around with them because they were all excited. They thought this was a big adventure - what the hell, shooting a couple of people.

It was war. But the governor declared that the strikers were to be fed. However, General Motors had turned off the heat in Plant 4 and they had no cushions. Fisher Body plants have cushions and materials for seating and so they were much easier to hold. Not only that, the huge motorized genora dollinger biography of barack lines at Fisher Body 1 meant we genora dollinger biography of barack strong enough so that the picketers and sit-downers could get out if they wanted to and go across to the union restaurant to contact people.

They could even have their families come into the plant for a little while and get them back out again through the big front windows, because they were guarded by the union. At Chevrolet you couldn't get out. GM used all kinds of tactics to break that sit-down. They sent in notes that some members of the strikers' families were very sick.

One man was told his father was dying, and so he left. They had doctors come in saying that some little cough was very dangerous-a contagious disease. But Kermit was a very strong leader and he managed to keep the men together. This time it was General Motors that was stymied. On February 11 they signed a peace agreement recognizing the UAW as representative for the auto workers.

And on March 12 the first labor contract was signed. A Blow Against Racism "An injury to one is an injury to all" Black workers did not generally participate in organizing the union. They used to say at our Socialist Party headquarters, "It's bad enough being Black without being Red, too. Racial prejudice was so pervasive. Many workers had come up recently from the deep south thinking that Blacks should get off the sidewalk when they passed by.

We couldn't eat in the same restaurants. Blacks just wouldn't be served in any restaurant in Flint. Out of 12, workers employed by Chevrolet, only were Black. Fisher 1, Fisher 2, Chevrolet, all ten plants of Chevrolet, hired only White men on production. Black men were allowed to work only in the foundry of Buick and as sanitation workers, cleaning up the men's toilets in the other plants.

Black men had no hope of ever getting a raise or getting a job promotion. At first, the southern white workers didn't know what to make of it. All they could say to him was, "What the hell are you doing here? You haven't got any job to protect". When the food came in, he took his share and went around the corner because Blacks and Whites never ate together.

This embarrassed the rest of the sit-downers. The first night, when it came time to sleep, there was only one clear table and one blanket. Who was going to have the blanket and sleep up off the cold cement plant floor? The strikers voted that because Roscoe Van Zandt was an older man, he should have the blanket and sleep on the table.

Then they began to talk to him. Before that, Black and White workers never got to know each other because it was a period of intense discrimination. Being a socialist, Kermit helped those workers get a good, anti-racist education in those 14 days before the strike was settled. When it came time for the victory parade, the strikers voted for Roscoe Van Zandt to carry the flag out of the plant.

After the strike was over, there were some honorary meetings for Roscoe Van Zandt in the Black community, and I was a featured speaker. That was a different experience. You say a few sentences and then you have to wait for "Amen, Amen, you said it sister! Believe me, before that speech was over I knew how to say something and pause to let them express their feelings.

These were the older generation that felt we had won a victory for them, even though they couldn't actively participate. Conditions for Black workers improved greatly after the strike. Oh, yes! They were now in the union, of course, and they could begin to afford to own their own homes, buying them at so much a month. They took great pride in what had been accomplished by the strikers.

Their sympathies were with us all of the time. The Sweet Fruit of Victory "Faintly, in the distance a mass of men was moving. A wisp of song caught all of us waiting there and it grew as the strikers marched forward. That song of victory drew everyone together as the Fisher 1 men marched through downtown and across to Chevrolet Avenue where they descended the hill and met the triumphant shouts of the Fisher 2 and Plant 4 men.

Searchlight, February 3, Following the strike, the auto worker became a different human being. The women that had participated actively became a different type of woman, a different type from any we had ever known anywhere in the labor movement and certainly not in the city of Flint. They carried themselves with a different walk, their heads were high, and they had confidence in themselves.

They were not only mentally different, but physically different. If you saw one of those women in the beginning and then saw her just a short period after going through this experience, learning and feeling that she had things she could fit together in her life, it would be an entirely different woman. Not only that, but relationships within the family became much stronger.

The kids understood why their parents were leaving them so often and why they had to go through a period of deprivation. It was not easy on them. The teachers in the schools were not in favor of the strike, and they showed it in many ways. Of course, in that period of great upheaval, the union couldn't do anything about what the teachers were saying in the schools.

You couldn't take care of all the problems that cropped up at the time. But after their parents had this great victory, the children knew that their dads had won. It was mainly dads because it was mainly men in the plants, but their mothers had helped. Among the working class, it was a lot better. Conditions also changed inside the plants.

The foremen were tip-toeing around, being very careful. Every time something came up that couldn't be settled, or the workers got a tough foreman who told them, "Go to hell," they'd shut down the line. The men were so cocky, they'd say to the foremen, "You don't like it? It was very pleasurable to think that these men were not afraid of the boss anymore.

They got a raise in their wages, and they weren't always followed to the can where somebody would step in to check how many cigarette butts were in the toilet. They became human beings to a degree even though they were still under the jurisdiction of a big corporation which controlled their lives. There was still the speed-up and other problems like that.

But in the family itself, which interested me most, it used to be that when a young man or a young woman got to the age where they were to graduate from high school the whole family celebrated because that was the glorious end of their education. As conditions and wages improved in the genora dollinger biographies of barack, workers were able to have a more settled home life and raise families.

The children did better in school, and they got to the point where they could go to college. After a few years of saving, the parents had the money to send them to colleges and universities. That's the period, in the 40s and 50s, when the college system began to proliferate across the country because of workers being able to send their kids.

There was so much pride in the family: "My son is studying to become a doctor or a lawyer. And so the whole family was changed. I think that was the biggest change of all. For the first time the children became very proud of their fathers and their mothers. They had gone through this big struggle to make it better for everybody, to put enough food on the table, to have enough clothes, and to have pride in school and the possibility of going on to colleges and universities.

There is something else that has to be emphasized: the fringe benefits that workers got from winning the strike, hospitalization and medical care, and in some contracts, dental and eye care. I have neighbors across the street who are Black retired auto workers and they get all that. All of these fringe benefits were something the workers never dreamed they could have when they first got recognition.

Little by little, the strength of the union was able to get these benefits, and as a result, many other employers had to give them. Unionists set the standard. The victory of GM workers set off a wave of union organization across the country. This wave grew to encompass the entire auto industry, including Chrysler and Ford. Then steel workers organized, then rubber workers, glass workers, and finally even professional, commercial, and service workers.

They gained confidence after our victory because if we could force the largest industrial giant in the whole world to its knees, then they could win, too. This was the realization of John L. The initials CIO stood for power. You'd see posters in homes and posters on cars proudly proclaiming, "I am the CIO. I've never known of anything else as powerful, even government agencies that were set up to help people.

The government's Works Progress Administration WPA program helped a lot of poor people, and those letters were well known. But the CIO was an especially magical set of letters. What else changed? Workers felt that they had the right to run for political office if they wanted to and they did. Many of the later legislative people in the state of Michigan and other political posts were either strikers themselves, if they were young enough, or the sons of former strikers.

The whole nature of the city changed. The rich, of course, never forgave and never forgot. They blacklisted those that they could get away with blacklisting, and it was especially easy when it was a woman like me, a political organizer who was right at the center of things. And I was right in the middle of it, there's no question about that. After the strike was over, everybody in Flint knew who I was.

Fighting Racism For White workers from the recent south, racism was something that was very strong. They had nasty attitudes like "You wouldn't want to get too close to them. Your daughter might marry one. We socialists kept on educating and writing articles in the union paper and doing everything that we could to argue against racism. Certainly, all the socialist auto workers had the right understanding.

The success of the union eased things for Blacks but racism was still there. That was the hardest struggle of all. We threw out the president, the one they called "the downtown man" because he would go and report everything downtown. We threw him out and elected Edgar Holt, a Black Buick worker who was a graduate of Wilberforce University, to be president.

He was a good orator with a wonderful personality-a very inspiring man. When the city council voted down the Fair Employment Practices Commission, we organized a mock funeral with a casket in a hearse. A black minister in his robe marched with casket bearers wearing white gloves. This funeral procession wound through the city of Flint to stop at the bridge of the Flint River.

We took the casket out, proclaimed "The burial of FEPC", and tossed the casket over the bridge into the river. Then the minister gave a long sermon using a loudspeaker. It was something for people downtown shopping and going through the city to see a demonstration like that. When you throw a casket over the bridge into the river, people stop to see what is happening.

We always dramatized the actions we organized so we'd get a lot of publicity. Otherwise, it was the policy of a company town like Flint to keep everything quiet. There was no news coverage of working class people's lives, of what they were doing or thinking, and so you had to be dramatic to get attention. Organizing the Unemployed The people on the bottom of the economic ladder who had become so completely demoralized, the people who felt they had no hopes, no help, no one who gave a damn about them-you could see that person stand up straight.

We've got fight in us. They didn't give us any money. I guess they didn't know what we were going to do and if they couldn't control it all the way down, they didn't want to fund it. We did organize a very militant union. Many WPA projects were street repairs. They used to call it "digging holes" and ridicule the workers. These projects kept men and their families barely eating, just barely eating, because the wages were so little.

I was the secretary of Local 12 because at that time a woman wasn't supposed to be president, even though she may have all the ideas. The main organizers were the men who were digging in the streets and the women who worked on the canning projects. We had regular meetings and we had all kinds of projects. We had library projects. There wasn't office space in the main building for the library project I was working on at the time, so we were put in the building that housed the water department facilities of the city.

The city officials were very worried about what we were doing. One day we picked up the local paper to read that a leading communist of Flint was in a position to poison the city's water supply. It was a big story about me! Once again we were facing that big Red scare. Fortunately I knew the head of the WPA. She was a feminist from Britain from the Labor Party.

She knew who I was and she knew my record, so she immediately got the whole project transferred to another building. The other officials in the WPA wanted me off the job and out of their hair. They wanted to fire me. But she held firm and transferred the whole project. Local 12 brought in the unemployed people that had almost lost hope.

The politicians were taking away milk from the children, instead of giving them more milk which they should have been doing. And they wouldn't give any surplus food to the hungry people. Homes were being repossessed and they were taking the women and children and putting them into one big shelter with the men in another. They were actually splitting up families.

They would set furniture out in the street, but we had crews that would set the furniture back in and try to protect it. That became a lot of hard labor without any results so we started organizing big demonstrations. We would burn an effigy of the relief manager, the head of the welfare department, and we'd give out statements. We finally decided to let the whole city of Flint know what was happening.

We had a demonstration and announced that we would hold a "Death Watch. Across from the welfare building there was a big park with a lot of beautiful trees. This park also happened to be across from one end of Buick Motor Car Company, which was rehiring workers to go into automobile production after the recession. We put big signs up on each corner of the park inviting the public to come out to see poor people with hungry, starving children-to watch people die.

We had whole families down there in great big army tents that we had procured. And we tapped into the street wires so that they had electricity at night in their tents. Mothers were down there washing out diapers in tubs and hanging them up on ropes we strung between the trees. They built fires in large oil drums to keep warm and to heat water.

They would cook their meals out there and heat their water to wash clothes and bathe their babies. 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. You'd see cars driving around slowly to view what was happening.

This was very bad publicity for the city. It hit the state capital and finally it hit Washington. Washington opened up surplus food to the people in Flint who were on the relief rolls. And they stopped separating families when they repossessed their homes. The police did threaten us. But many union people came to hang around the periphery of the park.

We also had union men in the park putting up clothes-lines and doing whatever they could to help. On top of that, in the Buick plant we had a lot of UAW members that had just gone back to work. They knew the power of the union. The windows of this plant came down fairly low so the men could look right out into the park. Pat Murray, the chief steward in there, issued a statement: "If any cops come up anywhere within the district, we're going to come out with our pipes and our hammers and our wrenches, and we'll take care of them.

It was an exciting period. It took a lot of work and a lot of time and a lot of militancy, but it achieved results. The people on the bottom of the economic ladder who had become so completely demoralized, the people who felt they had no hopes, no help, no one who gave a damn about them-you could see that person stand up straight. They would get up and speak for the first time.

Unemployed people found their voice and their strength. It was a wonderful experience, not only for the people that helped, but for the people who were doing it- for everybody. It is the hardest thing in the world to organize the unemployed. They need strong backing. The strongest backing comes from the established unions, especially those who've had success in a strike.

They feel that they have power. Once you see that in a worker or a number of workers, it's something you don't forget. They've been changed from people who have been kept down constantly to people who feel they have strength. They have knowledge and the ability to make changes. Before that, they'd only see the overpowering bureaucracy of the union and the overpowering bureaucracy of the government over their heads constantly with police and badges all around them.

But when they have a great victory in a labor struggle, then they begin to feel that they are just as powerful and strong as their opponents. That's the way that socialism will come in this country-when workers realize that they do have the numbers and the strength and the talents and the abilities. All of the creative things that workers come up with in a strike are usually original, because it pertains to the situation you are in right at that moment.

You'll have people offering one suggestion after another, and they will discuss it together. The organizing process is very inspirational. Personally Speaking "It's not that I was born a heroine. It was a question of growing up in a company town where people were going without food and children were going without health services. These families were in dire need.

That wasn't the concern of General Motors. They just wanted to get their production out. If you were living in a company town, you would feel that, and you would do the same thing.