Flint audiotours

Flint made the automobile industry, and in 1936 the industry pushed back. For 44 days, General Motors workers occupied the Fisher Body Plant No. 1 on Kearsley Street in what became one of the most consequential sit-down strikes in American history. The UAW won recognition, wages rose across the industry, and the modern labor movement was born in a factory on the Flint River.

This is also the city where Buick Motor Company was founded in 1903, where William Durant assembled the pieces that became General Motors, and where the Dort Highway and industrial corridors once hummed with the machinery that put the country on wheels.

The Sloan Museum and Planetarium on Kearsley Street keeps this story honest, including the decades of decline that followed the industry's withdrawal.