Flint, Michigan in the Depression years was a company town: housing, business, law enforcement, and the courts were all in GM’s pocket. Immigrants and single young men, often recruited from the impoverished rural south, kept GM supplied with workers. The workforce was mostly white and male, and only 22% were classified as skilled. 

The work itself was relentless, brutal, and dangerous. Lye and lime dust settled onto skin and paint fumes filled the lungs. Many jobs required both speed and strength: lifting 300 hundred 50 pound flywheels every 30 minutes, or driving rails into 40-50 car bodies per hour. But the worst and dirtiest jobs in all the GM plants were in the foundry, shoveling coal into coke ovens and forges. Most of GM’s 4,000 African-American workers were assigned these “unskilled” foundry jobs.