What the Eyes Don't See

by Mona Hanna-Attisha

I guess historic crimes and ethnic cleansing would have ruined the theme park vibe, so there was a lot about Flint that wasn’t part of the show. The designers of AutoWorld wanted us to focus on the prospects ahead for Flint, not on the past. The sunny future was shown in an assembly line of robots, which should’ve been taken as a dire warning about the city’s future, not a vision of utopia.

  As it turned out, we got to AutoWorld just in time. In a matter of months, it turned out to be a gross disappointment, especially to its investors. Nobody showed up, except maybe my family. By December of its first year, AutoWorld was open only on weekends. By January, it closed completely. Over the next decade, it flickered on and off, opened and closed sporadically, each revival more pathetic than the last.

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  THE NEXT THING I remember about Flint was Michael Moore’s career-making documentary, Roger and Me. It came out in 1989, when I was thirteen—just finishing eighth grade and living in Royal Oak. My family couldn’t wait to see it—and we rented it from a video store as soon as it came out on VHS.

  The movie, set in Flint, got a lot of attention, particularly in Michigan. Moore pioneered the social-justice gotcha documentary. And almost everyone got behind the way he went after Roger Smith, the CEO of GM, for closing the Flint plants.

  My dad was a loyal GM engineer but also an old-school lefty, so he was torn about Moore’s movie. He didn’t want his company to look bad, but his sympathies were always with workers and workers’ rights. As a professional engineer, his job at GM was outside the collective bargaining process, but he never lost sight of the fact that his wages and benefits—including his pension and gold-plated healthcare plan—were the result of the standards that had been set by the tough United Auto Workers (UAW) negotiations.

  At thirteen, I picked up on his mixed feelings about Roger and Me—and came away with my own. Other than the seriously disturbing scene where a very cute rabbit is slaughtered on camera—beaten by a lead pipe—the most memorable part of Roger and Me for me was Moore’s chronicling of AutoWorld: he showed how AutoWorld offered a rose-colored-glasses view of GM and the rise of the automobile. In so doing, he opened my eyes to how wishful thinking can be used to obscure the facts, leaving out inconvenient truths and lessons.

  The years following Moore’s movie were unkind to the city. The word Flint alone came to stand for the ravages of deindustrialization, what’s left behind when a giant corporation abandons its birthplace and workers, outsources jobs abroad, and installs robots on the assembly line. By the time I got to the University of Michigan and studied environmental science deeply, I knew more about the tragedies of the auto industry: traffic accidents and fatalities, air pollution, global lead poisoning, dependence on fossil fuels that caused conflict around the globe—and even the way cars often encouraged Americans toward a soulless suburban existence. And global warming.

  In medical school, I did my clinical training in Flint. I hadn’t been there since AutoWorld, and it wasn’t the failure stories that brought me. I was fed up with the bad press, the depressing stats, and the photos of industrial ruin. While the auto industry had truly used and discarded the city and cast it adrift, I knew there was so much more to it. And I knew I wanted to practice medicine there.

  I came to Flint for its hope, but also for its lessons, both terrible and beautiful. Flint from its beginnings has been a place of extremes, where greed meets solidarity, where bigotry meets fairness, and where the struggle for equality has played out. Flint is where many people have been pushed down and many have risen. And where many have fought the good fight—and won.

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  LONG BEFORE CARS WERE made there, and as soon as the Ojibwa natives were unceremoniously driven off, Flint was a center of fur trading and lumber. This led, for logistical reasons, to the manufacturing of carriages, which led to the manufacturing of cars.

  General Motors traces its roots to a carriage factory built in Flint in 1880—the Durant-Dort factory. It made its first successful foray into cars in 1908 with the opening of a Buick factory. As the demand for cars mushroomed, so did GM. Flint was home to GM’s auto parts plants and the AC Spark Plug and Delphi Automotive Systems divisions. In 1913 a huge Chevy plant opened. Two Fisher Body plants opened in Flint, by then a growing center of industry, and later GM built Buick City, a 235-acre state-of-the-art manufacturing complex, in northeastern Flint. At one time, GM’s original Buick plant was the largest factory in the world.

  The boom continued, fueled by World War II, when GM built tanks at a Grand Blanc plant just outside Flint. And south of the city, in the Willow Run Assembly near Ypsilanti, more bombers were built in a month than all of Japan built in a year.

  Immigrants from Europe and the Middle East, from Poland to the Levant, moved to Michigan’s industrial centers, including Flint, for jobs and a new life as wartime production expanded. Unemployment was 0.6 percent during the war. Women were given work, often clerical, but the war created opportunities for line jobs and higher pay, transforming America’s workforce and society.

  Between 1915 and 1960, more than six million African Americans, hoping to escape Jim Crow in the South, came north for those expanding employment opportunities—and during this Great Migration many were drawn to Flint, even though the hiring practices and working conditions of the auto industry were unjust. Black workers were segregated to the poorest-paying, most insecure, lowest-skilled jobs, often the dirtiest and most physically difficult. The high-paying trade jobs were usually off limits to them.

  Antidiscrimination initiatives put in place by FDR and the UAW made it easier for black Americans to rise out of low-skilled jobs, despite fierce opposition by white workers, who felt threatened. By the war’s end, no place on earth had more auto plants and auto employees—or a more racially diverse workforce—than Michigan’s industrial cities. Ford Motor’s centralized hiring tried to be color-blind, which gave it the highest rate of African-American employment in the country. But at GM, decisions were made by individual plant managers, which resulted in many fewer African Americans in their plants.

  Housing was segregated in Flint, a situation created and enforced by many factors. Federal housing policies set up barriers of affordability and discrimination that made it difficult for African Americans to take part in the postwar housing boom. Restrictive racial covenants were legal and common, encouraged by GM. These covenants explicitly stated that “homes could not be leased to or occupied by any person or persons not wholly of the white or Caucasian race.” A typical one said, “No negroes or persons of negro extraction (except while employed thereon as servants) shall occupy any of the land.”

  Real estate agents enforced the boundaries, and newspaper ads for apartments were unabashedly race-centric. Local banks, following federal loan guidelines, kept blacks in rentals, which were in limited supply and controlled by landlords looking to make as much money as possible for their unimproved apartments. Black families had to double up, sometimes triple up, in order to afford rental units. And that meant overcrowding. Only two residential areas of Flint were “designated” for blacks. One had notorious industrial pollution—it was literally adjacent to the Buick plant, where the housing stock was poor.

  As historian Thomas J. Sugrue explains so well in The Origins of the Urban Crisis, a study of race and inequality in nearby Detroit, white violence also enforced racial segregation. The white riots of 1943—in reaction to the building of the Sojourner Truth Housing Project—left forty-three people dead. For blacks, the message was loud and clear: moving to a white neighborhood might endanger your life.

  SIGN POSTED AT THE SOJOURNER TRUTH HOUSING PROJECT, 1945

  While schools were segregated, at least the ones in Flint were some of the best in the country. Charles Stewart Mott, GM’s largest shareholder, controlled and funded Flint’s public school system for some forty years, until the 1960s
, through his foundation, which is still active today. Mott conceived of and created a top-rate community school system that integrated public schools, recreation programming, health and dental care, and children’s camps. He envisioned a full-service one-stop system that cared for children in a comprehensive way. This innovative approach to community schooling heralded a public school golden age, an idea that gained momentum and was eventually exported to three hundred school districts across the country.

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  OVER THE YEARS, I heard a little bit about Flint’s labor history from my GM dad, but my brother taught me so much more. His passion for labor history, like his loud laugh, is infectious. As soon as he heard that I’d be doing my clinical training in Flint, he began sharing what he knew. In his eyes, the story of Flint is the story of social change in industrial America—where sit-down strikes and protests were organized, and where unions and management hashed out collective bargaining agreements that would guarantee workers better wages and safer workplaces—and dignity.

  It was Mark’s stories that gave me the idea of making sure all the new pediatric residents at Hurley started off their first year with a tour of the city during their Community Pediatrics rotation—to learn the neighborhoods and what made Flint Flint and how it forged such loyal and proud people.

  The residents are driven along the main drag, under the “Vehicle City” sign that still adorns Saginaw Street. They see the remnants of the once massive Buick City and try to imagine a time when tens of thousands of workers clocked in and out. They also see Sitdowners Memorial Park, located near the corner of Atherton and Van Slyke, across from the current GM Truck Assembly plant. That’s where they learn a different source of Flint’s fame: workers coming together and taking action.

  It happened almost as soon as GM began making cars. Fortunes were being made, but autoworkers were not given rights or paid for overtime, routinely put up with excessive heat, endured dangerous jobs, and were treated as if they were expendable and subhuman. Injuries on the factory lines—like lost limbs and fingers—meant no pay while they recovered and often no compensation for medical costs or permanent disability. Workers soon started to organize and demand higher wages and better conditions—as well as workplace safety measures. They organized a strike at the Studebaker plant in 1913 and another at Fisher Body in Flint in 1930.

  The idea of a national union was a far-off dream until 1936. That’s when things changed—and led to “The Strike Heard Around the World,” or the epic Flint Sit-Down Strike.

  A sit-down strike is exactly what it sounds like. Instead of mounting a conventional strike, picketing outside a workplace, the employees barricade themselves inside a plant and refuse to leave—stopping all production. It was a creative, radical, and subversive act, not to mention totally illegal.

  And that’s what happened in Flint on December 30, 1936, when workers occupied GM’s Fisher Body Plant No. 1, demanding that the company recognize the UAW as their representative in negotiations. Retaliating, GM plotted to turn off the heat in the plant, in hopes of freezing the workers out.

  The sit-down strike went on for a couple of relatively quiet weeks. Then on January 11, 1937, the guards at Fisher Body Plant No. 2 cut off the strikers’ access to their food supply—and then, with guns and tear gas, attempted to force them to leave. They refused and fought back, throwing two-pound hinges at the plant guards and drenching the Flint police with water from firehoses. The event was later called the “Battle of the Running Bulls.”

  Another critical moment in the strike happened a couple of weeks later, on February 1, when Flint strikers creatively devised a plan to seize the giant Chevrolet No. 4 plant. Knowing that company spies would be undermining them, they tricked the company by announcing they would be striking at Chevrolet No. 9—and when GM fell for that, the strikers switched directions and occupied Chevrolet No. 4 instead.

  This expansion of the strike effectively shut down GM’s industrial output nationwide. Only after newly elected Michigan governor Frank Murphy refused to use force against the strikers—and even sent the National Guard to protect them—did President Franklin Roosevelt demand that GM recognize the UAW and end the forty-four-day strike.

  My favorite union organizer has always been Genora Johnson Dollinger, a serious socialist who became a critical strategist during the Sit-Down Strike—and fundamental to its success. She organized the Women’s Emergency Brigade and rallied women and children to sustain, support, and protect the strikers. She had to be physically dragged from her protests, which gave her the nickname the Joan of Arc of Labor. After being blacklisted in Flint, Genora kept organizing in Detroit—where she was a victim of a lead pipe attack—went on to work with the Michigan ACLU, and later led marches against the Vietnam War and helped found Women for Peace. Her tenacity and her ability to rally support for the labor movement helped make generations of workers’ lives better.

  What followed these labor victories was later called the Grand Bargain. In return for the workers’ labor and loyalty, the company would pay them living wages and provide decent benefits. This Grand Bargain went on to encourage growth and the rise of immense prosperity, allowing workers to share in the consumer economy they helped create. The result was a thriving new middle class who could afford to buy the products of American industry, especially its cars.

  THE CHILDREN OF FLINT SIT-DOWN STRIKERS, 1936–37

  What began in Flint—a negotiated relationship between industry and the working class—went on to influence the wages, benefits, and working conditions of working people throughout America. It was in Flint that the middle class, and some would say the American Dream, was truly born.

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  THE MORE I LEARNED about Governor Frank Murphy, the more I loved him. Michigan has had its share of high-profile governors who went on to become national leaders, but nobody compares to Murphy. He was a true progressive reformer who was called a New Dealer before there was a New Deal. During his two years as governor (1937–39), Murphy defended autoworkers during the Sit-Down Strike and supported recognition of the UAW—during his term alone, the UAW grew from 30,000 to half a million members—and thereby risked his political future. Painted as a villain by congressional conservatives, Murphy drew the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which held one of its first meetings in Michigan to investigate the causes of the Sit-Down Strike. The committee blamed Murphy for Michigan’s “state of anarchy,” and Flint’s city manager accused him of treason.

  Murphy’s vision of a just world caused him to lose his bid for reelection, but the strength of his convictions and leadership placed him in national positions almost immediately. As U.S. attorney general from 1939 to 1940, he established the civil liberties section of the criminal division of the Justice Department. And after FDR appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1940, Murphy championed outsiders, underdogs, minorities, and the underserved. In 1944, in his dissenting opinion in Falbo v. United States, he wrote lines that have inspired my belief in government as a force for good: “The law knows no finer hour than when it cuts through formal concepts and transitory emotions to protect unpopular citizens against discrimination and persecution.” On behalf of another group of “unpopular citizens,” he referred to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II as the “legalization of racism” in his dissenting opinion in Korematsu v. United States. The first justice to ever use the word racism in a Supreme Court opinion, he went on to employ it seven more times before it disappeared from court opinions for two decades.

  Throughout his short life—when he died at fifty-nine, thousands of newly organized workers and union members lined the streets of Detroit to pay their respects—Murphy showed tremendous courage. In 1925–26, when he was a judge, well before he achieved national recognition, he presided over what was billed as the trial of the century. A black physician in
Detroit, Dr. Ossian Sweet, had dared to move his family from the black ghetto to an all-white working-class neighborhood. Racist whites attacked and invaded Sweet’s home. One of the rioters, a white man, was killed in self-defense, and Dr. Sweet was charged with murder.

  To defend him, the NAACP brought in the great trial lawyer and showman Clarence Darrow, famous for his defense of Eugene V. Debs in the 1894 Pullman railway strike. Judge Murphy, feeling that the trial would be an important test of justice and liberalism, assigned himself to the case, which led eventually to Dr. Sweet’s acquittal.

  A battle for justice was won, but the rest of the story isn’t so happy. Dr. Sweet’s notoriety led to the deaths of several family members and ended his career in medicine.

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  THE GRAND BARGAIN—AND THE PROSPERITY of the postwar years—expanded the middle class but also meant more housing stock was needed, especially those cookie-cutter starter homes that people wanted to live in. The suburbs became an easy answer. GM launched a strategy of acquiring large swaths of land in the emerging areas around Flint, where taxes were lower. It would build plants there, modern manufacturing facilities, and at the same time solve the housing crisis. The suburban exodus of manufacturing resulted in a suburban exodus of residents.

  That exodus was mostly white, particularly during the fractious early days of school desegregation and busing. First, the Supreme Court outlawed racial housing covenants, and then came its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregating schools. The momentous 1967 riots in Detroit and Flint seemed to scar whites with images of rebellion and destruction. Flint citizens passed a groundbreaking fair housing ordinance in February 1968 by forty-three votes—followed just a few months later by President Lyndon Johnson’s federal Fair Housing Act. Together, these events left Flint reeling from the effects of extreme white flight: when an African-American family moved into a neighborhood—often in the face of intimidation and threats—white families moved out en masse, anxious that their property values would decrease.