Although she was born in Arkansas, Willa moved with her family to Flint as a child. She graduated from Northern High School and obtained degrees from Michigan State University and Eastern Michigan University. She married Elmer Hawkins, who worked for General Motors, and they raised two children, a son and a daughter, while she worked for the Flint schools as an educator and as the principal of Bunche Elementary School for 17 years, retiring in 1990. Willa had always been a staunch supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, but a fire was lit in her in 1963 when she traveled by bus to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to participate in the March on Washington. There, she heard Martin Luther King Jr. give his famous I Have a Dream speech. “It fueled me to become a warrior of sorts,” she said. “I worked my way through a sea of people right to the front of the crowd.”
Once a well-known and oft-visited site, Stepping Stone Falls and its history has dimmed in the public mind.
Throughout MCM’s exploration of General Motors’ history, we’ve focused on the inchoate beginnings of what was later the model of efficiency and the power of precision. But who enacted this change? Who made the name of General Motors synonymous with industrial production? Answer: Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.
James H. Whiting was born in Torrington, CT in 1842. He served in the 23rd Connecticut Infantry during the Civil War and afterwards made his way to Flint. In 1882, he became manager of the Begole, Fox & Company lumber mills, whose anemic outputs resulted from the severe depletion of timber surrounding the town. Whiting was charged with converting the firm from a processor of raw material into a manufacturer of finished wooden products, enabling the company to survive the death of the lumber industry. Whiting rose to the challenge, establishing the town’s first incorproated business, The Flint Wagon Works, that same year. Some years earlier, William Paterson had begun producing high quality carriages, and while the Flint Wagon Works began by manufacturing farm wagons, wheels and axles, it would eventually enter the carriage business as a competitor to Paterson; both would be surpassed in that venture by the Durant-Dort Carriage Co.
