NARRATOR
In the Depression years of the 1930s, workers in the great industries of America, in automobiles, rubber, steel, desperate to feed their families, rebelled against the powerful corporations that were dominating their lives. They formed unions, joined the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and, with or without the permission of their union leaders, went out on strike, facing police and armies and the National Guard. In 1936 they developed a new tactic, the sit-down strike. Instead of walking off the job, they stayed in the factories and created communities of resistance, defying their employers, the police, the courts. Women played a crucial part in those strikes. Here Genova Johnson Dollinger tells of the sit-down strike at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan.
GENOVA JOHNSON DOLLINGER
They used to say, “Once you pass the gates of General Motors, forget about the United States Constitution.” Workers had no rights when they entered the plant. If a foreman didn’t like the way you parted your hair—or whatever he didn’t like about you…he could fire you. No recourse, not nothing.
After the first sit-down started, I went down to see what I could do to help. [T]hey said, “Go to the kitchen. We need a lot of help there.” They didn’t know what else to tell a woman to do. I said, “You’ve got a lot of little, skinny men around here who can’t stand to be out on the cold picket lines for very long. They can peel potatoes as well as women can.” Instead, I organized a children’s picket line. The picture of my two-year-old son, Jarvis, holding a picket sign saying, “My daddy strikes for us little tykes,” went all over the nation. The next day, we decided to organize the women. We thought that if women can be that effective in breaking a strike, they could be just as effective in helping to win it.
I thought, “The women can break this up.” So, I appealed to the women in the crowd, “Break through those police lines.” In the dusk, 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 the coat and started walking down to the battle zone. As soon as that happened there were other women and men who followed. The police wouldn’t shoot people in the back as they were coming down, so that was the end of the battle. When those spectators came into the center of the battle and the police retreated, there was a big roar of victory. That battle became known as the Battle of Bulls Run because we made the cops run.
We didn’t know that nothing like that had ever been organized before, at least not in this country. We didn’t know we were making history. We didn’t have time to think about it.
After we sat down in Flint, which was the heart of the General Motors production empire, fifteen GM plants across the country went on strike. And the news went out about the role women could play. Following the strike, the auto worker became a different human being.