
          Union Power, Soul Power: The Story of 1199B and Labor's Search
for A Southern Strategy
          By Fink, LeonLeon Fink
          Vol. 5, No. 2, 1983, pp. 9-20
          
          Hospitals are one of the last centers of employment in the United
States to be touched by unionization. Efforts to organize hospital
workers had barely begun by 1960, and by the end of that decade, few
areas outside the biggest metropolitan concentrations on either coast
were under union contract. Along the East Coast, the first real
breakthrough had been the astounding success of New York's Local 1199,
Retail Drug and Hospital Employees Affiliate of the International
Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). In less than ten
years (19591968), some thirty thousand workers in the voluntary
hospital system of the metropolitan area had organized and raised the
minimum weekly wage from twenty-eight to one hundred
dollars. Primarily based upon low-skilled, black and Hispanic service
workers, Local 1199's achievement relied on three basic ingredients: a
genuine mobilization of the hospital workforce, preparation for a
militant and, if necessary, lengthy strike, and finally, a political
campaign aimed at arousing support for the workers from the
surrounding community, including the ultimate intervention of public
officials in favor of a settlement. 1199's combination of workplace
and community mobilization coincided with and directly reflected the
rising expectations unleashed by

the civil rights movements among northern blacks. Indeed, union
partisans had come to believe that the joining of "union power" and
"soul power" had unlocked the secret to a whole new tide of labor
organizing among America's poor and unskilled.
          Still, there was cause for skepticism. New York City was, in
several respects, peculiarly well-adapted to what had emerged as
1199's style of crusade-like organizing. Historically, hospital
management there had been more tolerant, public officials more
liberal, the black community better organized, the state more willing
to subsidize social services than elsewhere in the country.
          Drawing on an enthusiastic membership, 1199's leaders--such as
President Leon Davis and Director of Organization Elliott
Godoff--immigrant Jews who had entered the labor movement as left-wing
radicals in the 1930's, had learned to make the most of their
terrain. But could lessons learned in New York be applied
elsewhere?
          As it happened the first "national' test of the union power-soul
power strategy came in 1969 when a group of hospital workers in
Charleston, South Carolina sought 1199's protection. The formula which
had begun to pay rewards in the North suddenly came up against a new
antagonist--and one equipped with a time-tested record of resistance
to social change. The result--a 113-day strike at the Medical College
and Charleston County hospitals leading to approximately one thousand
arrests--was one of the most disruptive and bitter labor
confrontations since the 1930's. In the South it stands as a watershed
for Dublic sector labor relations.
          Union organization in the South as a whole had experienced a
precipitous decline since the ill-fated, postwar Operation Dixie
(1946-1953). In South Carolina, unionization had never made much of a
dent. While the state's non-agricultural sector included the highest
proportion of manufacturing workers in the South, this fact had not
rebounded to the benefit of unions. Indeed, during the 1960's, South
Carolina's percentage of organized workers hovered around seven
percent, lowest in the nation. Aside from a cluster of white building
trades and railway brotherhoods, its fifty thousand union members were
concentrated among black longshoremen l and the black labor force of a
dwindling tobacco industry. Anti-unionism was one issue which bound
Upcountry industrialists, like the J. P. Stevens Company of the
Greenville-Spartanburg area, together with their usual political
competitors from Lowcountry Charleston. A statewide business and
political consensus reinforced a right-to-work law and an official ban
on public employee strikes with an extra, unofficial anti-union
vigilance. Even state port authority workers who had possessed a
statutory right to collective bargaining since 1962 had not been able
to secure official recognition.
          The origin of the labor troubles in Charleston may, on one level,
be understood as the political climax to postwar economic and social
change in the area. At a time when the city of Charleston, on the back
of defense, trade and tourist dollars, showed signs of shaking off a
long history of stagnation and lethargy, the fruits of recovery
trickled down unevenly to the city's residents. Forty percent of black
families in the Charleston area lived below the poverty line according
to the 1970 census, with another ten percent living just barely above
this measure of modern subsistence. For black women, especially, who,
in the period 1950 to 1970, left domestic and farm-related employment
for the expanding service sector (in which hospitals formed the core
group of employers), expectation and hope for improvement collided
with certain realities of the workplace. In addition to a sub-minimum
wage of $1.30 an hour, hospital workers, many of whom had. grown up in
all-black island communities, daily encountered the residual impact of
a racial caste system.
          In 1968-69, the Medical College Hospital, presided over since 1964
by Dr. William McCord, son of American missionaries to South Africa,
had not one black physician on its staff, not one black student in its
School of Nursing. Blacks filled the ranks of low-paid nurses aides
and service workers. Never displaying much tolerance for shared
decision making in general, administrator McCord's reaction to the
revolt of the hospital workers, when it came, was not surprising. In
the midst of the strike for union recognition by black nursing
attendants and service workers, McCord exploded that he was "not about
to turn a 25 million dollar complex over to a bunch of people who
don't have a grammar school education."
          The hospital's relation to the community reproduced the social
separation apparent among its own work force. Sharp distinctions
characterized the care offered private (mainly white) patients
vs. non-paying (overwhelmingly black) patients. Bed and waiting room
assignments were divided along racial lines. Even the legacy of dual
restrooms remained. Certain practices seemed openly to reflect
assumptions of black racial inferiority: Black husbands, for example,
were not allowed in delivery rooms, while whites were.
          The racial subordination perpetuated in the hospitals reflected
long-standing social patterns of the surrounding society. South
Carolina, with blacks representing forty percent of the population,
had not elected a black state" legislator since Reconstruction;
indeed, fewer blacks proportionately were registered to vote in South
Carolina 

than in any other Southern state. And Charleston, where older
black males still doffed their caps to white passersby, seemed to fall
well within Robert Coles' characterization of the entire state in
1968: "No southern state can match South Carolina's ability to resist
the claims of Black people without becoming the object of national
scorn."
          In Charleston, relative social calm throughout the civil rights era
owed its longevity to several factors. Modern-day Charleston
patriarchs had committed few of the rhetorical or physical excesses of
a Bull Conner in dealing with rising black expectations. Instead, they
tended to smother dissent in an appeal to civic unity while
maintaining a sure hold on all centers of power in the city, including
conciliatory gestures to an elite of ministers, contractor-realtors
and funeral home directors within the black community.
          By the late 1960s, the Charleston establishment had reason to think
that it had effectively weathered the worst years of social unrest. In
the 1950s, the city itself had largely been spared agitation as civil
rights activists like Esau Jenkins and Septima Clark concentrated
their education and voting rights efforts on outlying Johns
Island. The city's only real trouble had come in the 1963 summer
desegregation campaign aimed at local merchants. Lunch counter
sit-ins, mass demonstrations, and night marches organized by the
"Charleston Movement," including one major confrontation with police,
finally led to a non-discriminatory agreement by the city's major
stores. Tensions had evidently eased in the city by the following fall
when, following a successful suit by the NAACP and under a court
order, eleven black 'children attended previously all-white public and
parochial schools without major incident. Peaceful, if still largely
symbolic, integration came to the entire city school system the next
year.
          The first organizers of the Charleston hospital workers were a
small circle of young "black power" advocates grouped loosely around
their elder stateman, thirty-seven year old William Saunders who in
1968 was working as a foreman in a local mattress factory. Saunders
had come out of the Army after Korea in 1954 determined to change
things for his people. His passage through voter registration and
integration fights on Johns Island had convinced him that the
nonviolent philosophy of the civil rights movement was a "sham." He
openly quarreled with older leaders. "The situation got bad enough,"
says Saunders, "until in 1966 or '67 I was elected to the OEO
Commission and a group of black leaders got a petition against me that
went to the governor and he would not certify me as an elected
commissioner."
          By 1967, Saunders with his Low Country Newsletter
represented the voice of rising anger within the black community. Two
important influences on him were Malcolm X and SNCC. Saunders hosted
SNCC leader Stokley Carmichael on a Christmas visit to the Charleston
area in 1967.
          Together, Saunders and Black Muslim Otis Robinson fashioned a
tight-knit, semi-secret self-defense group complete with code names
and weapons. The level of daily fear reached its highpoint in 1968
after the killings of three students at South Carolina State College
in Orangeburg and the King assassination. At that point, remembers
Saunders, "We all planned to die."
          Community organizing on Johns Island put Saunders in touch with
several hospital workers at Medical College Hospital (MCH) including
Mary Moultrie, the twenty-six-year-old daughter of a Charleston navy
yard worker, who had returned from New York City in 1966. Unhappily,
although Moultrie had worked as a licensed practical nurse at
Goldwater Memorial Hospital in New York, the MCH would not recognize
her credentials and slotted her at the less responsible and lower paid
position of nurse's aide. While Mary Moultrie had worked with Guy
Carawan of Tennessee's Highlander Center and Esau Jenkins on community
projects, Saunders was waiting for her and others at the hospital to
recognize that "they had a problem" at their own workplace. It did not
take long.
          In February 1968 a white nursing supervisor gave orders to a group
of black workers (three LPNs, two nurses aides) without showing them
patient charts. Incensed at this violation of custom, the workers left
work and were summarily fired. This incident was ultimately and
successfully resolved by the intervention of black community
leaders. It represented the beginning of continuous, although still
informal, organization among the city's hospital workers.
          Soon, a group of workers began meeting regularly with Otis Robinson
and Saunders. "The thing that I think had the biggest impact,"
Saunders remembers, "Jesse Jackson used it, James Brown too, we
stressed that you are somebody: 'There's no such thing as
non-professional hospital workers. You are professionals. It takes a
surgeon fifteen minutes to operate but you are there twenty-four hours
a day with the patient. You are the most important part of the
hospital.'"

          The idea of a hospital workers "union" emerged slowly. Saunders,
for one, initially had "very little interest" in unions. "I saw very
little difference," he says, "between George Meany and Richard
Nixon. I felt labor management was ripping off the workers." Instead,
Saunders and friends first envisioned a kind of broadbased association
of community owned businesses aimed at getting blacks into the
"economic mainstream."
          Mary Moultrie, who had had only distant contact with a union local
while at Goldwater Memorial, agrees that "at that time we didn't have
a union in mind to affiliate with or anything like that. We just knew
we had to do something to protect our jobs. We didn't want to be
picked off one by one. So we sorta kept it a secret. We'd go round and
whisper to people and we'd catch people during break time and on lunch
hour. We kept it out of the ears of the whites. After we started
having the weekly meetings we used to get community people to come in
and meet with us. When the idea for a union came up exactly, I don't
remember. I feel like its a union whenever people get together."
          A key community contact on the way towards formal organization was
Isaiah Bennett, president of Local 15A, RWDSU, which represented a few
hundred workers at the American Tobacco Company in Charleston. This
union beachhead dated to the 1945-46 Food, Tobacco and Allied Workers
strike, in which an old spiritual first became the movement song, "We
Shall Overcome." Bennett loaned the hospital workers Local 15A's
meeting hall and activated a network of community support to try to
establish some form of representation and airing of grievances for the
MCH workers.
          Meanwhile, hospital administrators took counter measures, hiring
Greenville textile counsel and antiunion specialist, Knox Haynesworth
(brother to federal judge Clement Haynesworth, who, later in the year,
would receive and fail to be confirmed in a Nixon appointment to the
US Supreme Court). The hospital offered to discuss work-related
problems only with small groups of workers selected at random. The
first official response to the unionization effort came in the form of
a crude cartoon picturing a fat, white, union boss enjoying wine,
cigars and shapely female company at workers' expense. To resist the
union, the hospital's administration promised to use "every legal
means at our disposal." The only concession offered the protesting
black workers prior to the strike was an extra holiday on Robert
E. Lee's birthday.
          In late September or early October, 1968, New York City's Local
1199 responded with interest to an appeal from the Charleston
workers. Only months before, in establishing a National Organizing
Committee (NOC), the hospital union had set its sights on territory
outside the state of New York and the city's metropolitan region,
"along the Eastern seaboard in the main."
          The turning point in the New York union's mind was a visit to
Charleston by 1199 vice-president and former dietary aide, Doris
Turner. She was scheduled to meet with organized workers one evening
at the tobacco workers hall. With delays, her plane did not arrive
until after midnight. Before she went to her hotel, she decided to
stop by the meeting hall just in case someone had remained behind. She
found the hall full of Charleston hospital workers.
          The national union decided to call its first out-of-state local
1199B. Over four hundred hospital workers elected Mary Moultrie as
president of the local, formally replacing Bennett as leader of the
organizing campaign.
          Once the union made a commitment to the workers to fight for
recognition, the struggle at MCH took a more conspicuous turn. Worker
delegations besieged local and state lawmakers, protesting vehemently
the refusal of the McCord administration to even meet with the
employees. While meetings with Gov. McNair, a self-styled South
Carolina "progressive," and key legislators were courteous, no
progress was made. In response to what Moultrie would tell Columbia
legislators in February, 1969 was an "explosive" situation, state
officials could only point to plans for a long-term re-classification
of all state jobs that might be completed within a year. "We're tired
of asking and begging. Now we are demanding. We want union
recognition," Moultrie told the legislators. "We warn you time is
running out," added Bennett. But while state officials allowed that
the legislature had the power to place the hospitals within the state
labor law, no one emerged to champion such an option.
          The precipitating event for the strike came on March 18. At the
urging of Mayor Palmer Gaillard, McCord agreed to meet with a workers'
delegation that included union members. Seven workers including
Moultrie were notified to attend an 11:00 a.m. meeting in the hospital
auditorium. When they arrived, however, they found that McCord had
selected eight "loyalists" to balance out the meeting. Soon nearly a
hundred pro-union workers had packed into the auditorium. An
administrative assistant emerged to explain that McCord would meet no
groups 

larger than fifteen, that the workers were being disruptive so
that the session had been adjourned and workers must return
immediately to their jobs. Instead, the workers met outside with
Bennett, before re-entering the hospital. The next day twelve union
activists including Mary Multrie, were formally dismissed for
dereliction of duty. One day later, March 20, after consultations
between 1199B leaders and national union vice-president Henry
Nicholas, the strike began. The strikers made two demands: union
recognition and the rehiring of the twelve fired workers.
          As picketers massed in front of the MCH entrance, they were
immediately faced with a reality which distinguished the Charleston
confrontation from any other strike in which the union had so far been
engaged. It was not just a rigid hospital administration that the
strikers faced but an entire city in which every formal lever of power
and influence was overtly hostile to the union effort, The union's
legal problems, for example, began March 21 with a temporary state
injunction severely limiting the strikers' physical presence. The
original terms of the injunction banned all picketing, but on the
advice of State Circuit Court Judge Clarence Singletary the order was
quickly amended. Picketing was limited to ten persons spaced twenty
yards apart over a distance of two hundred yards. "According to the
injunction," Mary Moultrie later told rally in Stony Field Stadium,
"we could put only five people on this field from goal post to goal
post. I think even the governor, as slow as he is, could get through a
picket line like that."
          Nor, the union quickly learned, could it expect to mollify the
court decisions by the intervention of elected state
officials. Governor Robert McNair, though shielded from day tb day
direct contact with the Charleston strike, set a simple and
straightforward pattern of response: "no agency of the state can be
involved with unions." From this view the strike was seen as a threat
to law and order, a provocation which would lead first to the
deployment of city police and agents from the State Law Enforcement
Division (SLED), then to the dispatch of National Guard troops in full
riot gear on April 25, and finally to the May 1 state-declared
emergency and dusk-to-dawn curfew.
          Before the South Carolina Bar Association on May 10, Governor
McNair reaffirmed his position: "In a sense this is not a simple test
of will or a test of strength. This is a test of our whole
governmental system as we have known it in South Carolina." Judge
Singletary, retrospectively, set the context for the state
position:
          
            In the 1960s South Carolina was among the leaders in the
South in attracting industry and our technical education program
. . . and our development board had become a model for other southern
states. Our governor and officials were going all over the world
seeking industries and one of the inducements, obviously, was
productive labor without the labor union problems that other areas of
the country were experiencing. So I think that that was one of the
reasons that we didn't want to give up. When I say "we," I think of
the political leadership . . .
          
          Since the anti-union commitments of Southern employers and
governmental officials were matters not only of public record but of
popular legend, what is perhaps most surprising about the hospital
faceoff in Charleston is why a small outside organization like Local
1199 would undertake such an effort.
          1199's support of the Charleston strike was, in fact, based on more
than a wing and a prayer. The 1199 stewards recognized that a
conventional organizing drive in Charleston was doomed to
failure. "The first key decision was to have a strike," recalls Moe
Foner of 1199's National Organizing Committee. "The second key
decision was that this strike could not be won unless it became a
national issue. But before you could make it a national issue, it had
to be made a labor-civil rights issue. The only way to do that was to
create turmoil in Charleston. And the only way to do that was to
convince SCLC to come in."
          The decision to enlist the SCLC as co-organizers of the Charleston
campaign seems to have been made very early. Despite different
backgrounds and areas of operation, history had already brought the
two groups to an overlapping set of goals and organizing strategy. The
organization of 1 199's National Organizing Committee in 1968 with
Coretta King as presiding chairman, and Rev. Ralph David Abernathy and
Andrew Young as signatories, signalled the intention of a close
working relationship between the two organizations. Martin Luther King
had come to the aid of earlier 1199 hospital campaigns--in 1962 and
during the 1965 Bronxville strike. The union, for its part, had
frequently endorsed SCLC mobilizations with funds and picketers. On a
personal level the bonds of trust between the civil rights and labor
organization were secured in the close, longterm friendship of
attorney Stanley Levison and Moe Foner. Levison, a former communist,
still shadowed by the FBI, for years had served as an advisor to King
and Young. With enduring commitments to both the labor and civil
rights movement, Levison was as an able go-between, increasing the two
organizations uncommon regard for each other.

          For the SCLC, the Charleston campaign offered the chance for
renewed purpose and strength out of growing internal disarray. The
movement which had sprung up from the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955
and provided the focus for a non-violent direct action approach to
civil rights through the mid-1960s had by 1967 already embarked on a
new course.
          A shift in focus from the statute books and city halls to the
marketplace, with its implied class as well as racial analysis of
oppression, had hardly solidified when King and SCLC were called to
Memphis to support the sanitation worker's strike. After King's
assassination on April 4, 1968, Rev. Ralph Abernathy's attempt to
renew SCLC's campaign was set back amidst the mud, indiscipline and
generally unfocussed strategy of the Resurrection City encampment in
Washington. Organizationally, SCLC was in sad disrepair, internally
feuding over Abernathy's leadership, when the strike in Charleston
broke out. Through the mediation of Stanley Levison, Moe Foner made a
strong appeal to SCLC to relocate its entire staff and make Charleston
its priority battleground. The black leaders of the organization
agreed. Andrew Young remembers:
          
            "We had decided that was the next frontier of the civil
rights movement before Martin's death. We began to see that having
made significant social and political progress, we'd have to take on
the economic question of full employment, of the right to organize, of
increasing minimum wage, of guaranteed annual income. Those were
things we talked about in '67, '68. And what led us into the Poor
People's Campaign was a specific effort to try to call the attention
of the nation to the plight of some forty million people who were
below the poverty line--many of whom were working. Hospital workers
came into the category of the working poor. Now of that forty million,
the majority of them were white. And so the Poor People's Campaign was
also the first opportunity we had in a national way to try to reach
out, to form a coalition between blacks, Hispanics, American Indian,
the trade union movement, and, say, white workers in Appalachia and in
the inner cities. It was really an attempt to overcome racial and
cultural differences and move into a common economic effort to get our
nation to eradicate poverty.
          
          In certain strategic respects, the SCLC approached Charleston as it
had Birmingham, Selma, and other places where it had faced a closed
fist of opposition. "When you could not get the government to
negotiate, either the state government or the local government," Young
recalls, "you had to mobilize the entire community, the churches and
the high schools students in a total program of non-cooperation or
economic withdrawal. So we had a boycott on Charleston for one hundred
days, and we had demonstrations conducted by the high school kids and
by and large, we kind of kept the city on edge until they were willing
to come around and talk about justice for these hospital workers."
          For the duration of the strike the SCLC made Charleston their main
organizing focus. For staff members, Carl Ferris, Andrew Young, James
Orange, and Hosea Williams, Charleston became a second home, while
Rev. Abernathy also spent considerable time there as the lightning rod
for mass mobilization, and Coretta King arrived at carefully selected
moments of greatest impact. Once involved, the SCLC drew on a network
of several hundred contacts gained through what Young called the
"underground work" of the state's citizenship or voter education
schools. To these natural allies the SCLC added an immediate outreach
to area churches.
          Dave White, sent from Brooklyn by 1199 to be Charleston community
relations liaison, recalls the conspicuous shift in focus as the
strike became a social movement:
          
            When they came in the first thing they did was to contact
all the ministers in the city and start lining ~p churches so we could
have mass meetings in the evening. They also contacted ministers and
got them to loan us their churches during the day to organize the
young people, kids all the way down to around eight and ten years
. . . and they organized activities for these 

kids, classes where we
had lectures on black history. I found out in Charleston that without
the church you can't do a fucking thing. And everything we did was
through the church, whether you believed in religion or
not.
          
          Entry of SCLC and a command post of civil rights movement
strategists had a mixed effect on Charleston events. Undoubtedly, the
collective experience and resources gathered there contributed to the
success of the campaign, reaching and mobilizing the black community
of Charleston as never before. But the outside help came at a certain
cost as well. More moderate figures, shy of the projected strategy,
tended to be pushed aside.
          A number of local figures who would ultimately figure prominently
in maintenance and resolution of the strike were alienated early from
the actual direction and leadership of events. They were the
indigenous leaders who would have to pick up the pieces once the major
drama was over. Isaiah Bennett, for example. He had sought to issue a
blanket invitation to all civil rights groups to help the strikers,
including the NAACP and the Urban League. "I was overruled by 1199. I
didn't know they had a working agreement with SCLC. I had no objection
against the SCLC, but, like Martin Luther King, he involved
everybody."
          1199 officials saw Bennett as too cautious on community organizing
strategy. Not long after the strike began, he was removed from an
official role in the campaign, and, although he continued to press for
a settlement from the mayor and other local authorities, his
activities were watched suspiciously by 1199 organizers.
          Directed at once to militant mobilization of the local black
community and to the sympathies of an outside, liberal white audience,
SCLC's aim was to force through shame, fear or property loss, some
relenting from the official position. As Young put it at the time, "It
is only when you create the same kind of crisis in the life of the
community as you have in the lives of workers that the community will
give in."
          SCLC leaders began their work in Charleston with confidence. Mass
marches through the central business corridors started April 21 as
Rev. Abernathy promised to "sock it to Charleston" and were repeated
at short intervals. Demonstrations were staged in the city's historic
district and at the Old Slave Mart museum. One Saturday morning scores
of teenagers dribbled basketballs down King Street, the city's
commercial thoroughfare.
          The intensity of the movement grew in late April and May. April
ended with ten marches in six days. Abernathy called for a boycott of
classes by school children. A May 11 Mother's Day March, led by
Abernathy, Coretta King and Walter Reuther brought out an
overwhelmingly black crowd of ten thousand. Finally, on May 24, SCLC
escalated an economic boycott of King Street businesses by conducting
"shop-ins" in which demonstrators would clog grocery aisles and cash
register lines.
          The coordinated actions on the ground in Charleston depended above
all on the unyielding determination of the strikers
themselves. Risking arrest and family hardship day after day, the
hospital strikers included some of the most dedicated union women ever
encountered in an American labor dispute. Letters from the workers,
some written from jail in the waning days of the strike attest to the
personal meanings of the struggle. For Mrs. D.P. Heyward the union was
"like an oak tree in a petrified forest." She saw the strike as a
matter of getting "all the little people together to decide now or
forget forever the hope of becoming a real American citizen." Lattie
Mae Glover, an aide at the Medical College, jailed once, wrote, "I've
seen sometimes in 1199B meetings and picket-lines Satan comes our
way. But appears to me that whenever Satan comes, 1199 B has prepared
a way to deal with him."
          Claire G. Brown, obstetrics technician at MCH, had five children,
some of whom joined her during two strike-related trips to jail.
          
            It was one of the most exciting, hardest, and important
periods of my life. The walking, walking, and more walking. The hours
and efforts spent trying to get programs together for mass
meetings.
          
          
            There were days I wanted to cry, I was so depressed, because
it seemed that in spite of all the hard work and sweat, that we
weren't accomplishing anything, . . . but 1199 didn't lie to us, they
laid it on the line and let us know just hard it was going to be
. . . If felt I was prepared . . . For anything else I know if I could
help it, I would never permit myself to be jailed, looking back I know
if I had it to do again I would do the same thing.
          
          Alongside the official union campaign, William Saunders' "black
power" group maintained an uneasy yet not insigificant relation to the
Charleston events. As an informal confidant of Mary Moultrie, Saunders
dispatched an armed "community militia" at strike meetings and
demonstrations, while functioning both as an ally of and watchdog on
the national strike leadership.
          Relationships between the militants and the mass movement leaders
were strained throughout. In Saunders' view the uncontrollable and
unpredictable nature of individual acts--no matter how
reckless--served as a powerful lever against white authority. Strike
organizers, however, took a much dimmer view. At one point they
reportedly paid Saunders and his group to maintain basic compliance
with strike discipline.
          From the beginning, the public image of the strike loomed large in
1199-SCLC thinking. The recipe of press coverage, financial support,
and political intervention 

that had worked so well in 1199's
successful organizing in New York was now projected at the national
level. The worse the picture of the city and state that emerged from
the Charleston strike, and the more aid that poured in from the
outside, so the union figured, the sooner all parties would reach an
acceptable compromise.
          Superficially, the strategy had the earmarks of success. While
running for weeks as national news, the Charleston strike gathered
support both from expected and unexpected sources. Not surprisingly,
New York 1199 members were the first to offer significant aid to their
Southern counterparts. But help also came from the national labor
movement as the AFL-CIO and the fledging UAW-Teamsters Alliance for
Labor Action competed as benefactors to the Charleston hospital
struggle. Moe Foner would even jest to Andrew Young, "If the labor
movement would only split two more ways, well make a profit here."
          The union effort also received a number of political
endorsements. Twenty-five congressmen led by New York representative
Ed Koch and seventeen senators led by Jacob Javits (R-NY) and Walter
Mondale (D-MN) urged federal mediation in this situation which had
become "a test of the principle of non-violence at a time when many in
America are losing faith in that principle as a strategy for social
change." Indeed, the plight of the Charleston strikers unified
northern liberal opinion as did few issues in 1969.
          Neither the endurance of the strikers nor the impressive array of
outsiders who came to their support swayed the hospital administrators
in Charleston or the political officials in Columbia. Six weeks into
the conflict, the parties seemed utterly deadlocked.
          One, although perhaps not the most important, problem for the union
concerned the effectiveness of the work stoppage itself. From the
beginning the Charleston strike probably created more trauma for the
city than real trouble for the struck institutions. Service at both
MCH and County was never severely curtailed. At the beginning of the
strike MCH reportedly reduced its patient load from 450 to three
hundred beds, while County Hospital also cut back by a half. By the
end of the first month of the strike, County had hired some fifty-four
replacements, while the Medical College made do with 250 new employees
in addition to volunteer labor.
          On the political front, as well, the strike was an altogether
different matter within the borders of South Carolina than it was on
the editorial pages of the Washington Post or New York
Times. Never before had the union been so far removed
from its influential friends.
          Governor McNair, considered by the union as vulnerable to political
pressure, simply would not budge on the issue of union
recognition. Instead, he tried to avoid it by offering new material
benefits to hospital workers. An early June news leak thus hinted that
an ongoing review of all state employee relations had decided to
recommend a raise in the state minimum wage for public workers from
$1.30 per hour to the federal minimum of $1.60. In addition the review
promised a serious look at job classifications, holding out the hope
to hospital workers of rational readjustment of salaries and work
descriptions. In the meantime the state legislators effectively
registered their opinion of the strike. In the face of the Charleston
school boycott organized by SCLC, the South Carolina House of
Representatives on May 29 approved a Senate bill making it unlawful
"to encourage or entice a child to stay out of school." The measure
provided for a fine of up to one thousand dollars and a prison term of
up to two years, or both, for a first offender.
          Such resistance to union demands at the state level had its
counterpart in the corporate consensus with which 

Charleston community
leaders handled the direct blows of the union forces. Relying on the
city's experience with the 1963 sit-ins, Judge Singletary and law
enforcement officials used discretion throughout the strike to avoid
violent confrontation and property damage. Several times, for example,
Singletary overlooked or delayed contempt citations; on principle he
kept his rulings to a bare minimum. Chief of Police John F. Conroy, an
articulate ex-marine from Niagara Falls, New York, likewise,
complemented the judicial approach with a cool, patient approach to
the demonstrators. There was no Bull Connor among Charleston
officials, thus depriving the SCLC of the issue of unreasonable,
indiscriminate force by local lawmen which had energized their
campaigns in Selma, Montgomery, and Birmingham.
          If the local white leadership kept a firm but controlled grip on
the strikers, white opinion, except for the lone voice of the
Charleston Catholic diocese, grew impassionately anti-union during the
disturbance. A resolution of the Charleston County Council (which
oversaw County Hospital) thus referred to "the unwarranted strike and
unrest foisted on its citizens by a small group of individuals, many
of whom are unrelated to this area interested only in their own
self-seeking ends."
          For many Charlestonians the assault by the union-civil rights
forces on their city cut deeper than issues of trade unionism or civil
rights. The message of deliverance and freedom carried by SCLC in its
oft-repeated refrains of "I Am Somebody" implicitly castigated the old
ways of a city whose very historic mindedness was both its pride and
chief economic selling point. Something of the resulting reaction of
outrage and hurt was evident in the paid "Letter to Ralph Abernathy",
by a local pastor which appeared in the Charleston News and
Courier, May 7;
          
            Remember what you said when you came to Charleston?--about
not wanting to see any more historic sites? When you said that I do
not think you knew what it could mean to some of our Negro
friends.... You have heard of the famous Gardens. Do you think any
real connoisseur can walk through one of these gardens without
appreciating the know-how and tender care of the Black man that makes
it all possible? Have you ever seen the look of pride on the Black
man's face as he watches these tourists admire these gardens?
. . . What of the colored Mammy? Could all your speeches and marches
ever replace the glow of pride on her face as she watches, day after
day, as her little charge grows into a man of importance in the
world?
          
          Clearly, the immediate struggle of the hospital workers was
projected over a much wider set of issues and symbols. It came to
stand on one side for a rebellion against years of white domination
and black subservience; on the other side the issue summoned up an
almost chauvinistic civic loyalty, an instinctual defense of a way of
life.
          Within the first two weeks of May, 1199 leaders reluctantly (and
privately) reached the conclusion that "we just did not have the
cards." Relying as they were on daily transfusions of outside aid to
maintain their operation, the union forces were faced not only with
the depletion of their resources in Charleston but growing sacrifices
of their commitment to union members back home. The grim reassessment
of the Charleston situation was coupled with an equally difficult
question: having focused so much energy and attention on Charleston,
how now to disentangle themselves without suffering a nationally
humiliating defeat? Publicly, the first change in the union's position
came in a hint by organizing director Elliott Godoff on May 15 that
the union might compromise its demand for direct recognition in favor
of some independent intermediary voice for the hospital workers.
          While the union initiative produced no sudden shift from the
state's refusal to negotiate, it was soon combined with an unexpected,
outside force to raise the odds on a compromise. The new influence
came from the direct intervention of the federal government. Sometime
in the latter half of May, union leaders, through contacts with HEW
Undersecretary James Farmer and former Undersecretary Ruby Martin,
learned that MCH was 

being audited under terms of the federal
regulations governing the millions of dollars in grants going to the
medical complex. On June 4 the strike got perhaps its most important
shot in the arm. In addition to citing thirty-seven civil rights
violations by the MCH administration, the HEW noncompliance report
included in its suggested means of redress the rehiring of the twelve
union workers whose dismissal had touched off the strike.
          Within ten days of the HEW intervention, the basic pieces were in
place to end the Charleston strike. On June 9 the Governor, after
cutting the city's curfew hours in half, publicly accepted the state's
responsibility to comply with the federal guidelines. McCord soon
announced his willingness to take back not only the strikers but to
rehire (in accord with the HEW request) the twelve fired
workers. State and hospital officials, desperate to end the unrest in
Charleston but politically constrained from appearing to appease the
strikers could now blame the feds for forcing concessions. Meanwhile,
the union issue itself might officially be finessed. Without any
formal reference to recognition or collective bargaining, the hospital
would agree to a new gievance procedure allowing a worker to bring a
representative of her own choosing to grievance sessions (i.e. a
procedure which could allow for active union delegates). Given solid
backing by the workers 1199 (as it had in New York City in 1959) might
eventually turn such a deal into a union beachhead. For political
officials as well as embattled hospital administrators, the immediate
moment, however, counted for more. Behind the scenes hopes rose high
in the union camp as the informal signing date of June 12 neared for a
real agreement.
          Then, only hours before the planned meeting, McCord countermanded
his earlier offer to rehire the fired workers. The formula for
settlement had worked perfectly, except for one problem. The Federal
Government, during the Nixon Administration, was not so immune from
political pressures as to allow a free hand to HEW's civil rights
enthusiasts. The Administration, in fact, felt the tug on each
side. On the one hand liberal pressure for compromise and settlement
of the dispute arose form the second-level administrative staff of the
Administrtion. Politically, however the "Southern strategy" of the
Nixon Administration looked to a different constituency and was
therefore susceptible to different pressures. In this case the heat
welling up from a key state and from strategists in Nixon's narrow
1968 electoral victory could not be ignored. Already, state party
chairman, Ray Harris, had made clear that Governor McNair and his
fellow Democrats would be held accountable for any waffling on the
hospital issue. Then, in a powerful one-two punch on the morning of
June 12, Democratic Representative L. Mendel Rivers and Republican
Senator Strom Thurmond prevailed upon HEW Secretary Robert Finch to
back off the threatened fund cutoff to MCH "pending a personal
investigation" once he returned from a planned vacation to the
Bahamas. This signal of retreat from Washington effectively let the
air out of the Charleston accord. Only hours later, McCord rescinded
his pledge to rehire the twelve workers.
          Collapse of the projected settlement set off two more weeks of
rising tension, including night marches, mass arrests, fire-bombings,
and threats to tie up area telephone and transportation arteries. ILA
(International Longshoremen) leaders hinted that the longshoremen
might close the port of Charleston, while 1199 sympathizers talked
opening of spreading the union agitation to the South Carolina textile
industry. The tone of the hour was suggested by SCLC aide Hosea
Williams at a June 20 rally:
          
            White folks are crazy. White America is insane. We have
played around with Charleston long enough. We're going to march in
Charleston tonight or we're going to die.
          
          Again it fell to Washington to break the impasse. Foner links the
final initiative to the behind-the-scenes work of presidential
counselor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whom the union leader called on a
tip from New York Post editor, James Wechsler. "I
[Foner] say, 'Look, I'm not going to be responsible, but I think you
[Moynihan] have' to know, the night marches are going to continue, and
this town is going to burn.' He says, 'Thank you and stay in 

touch
with me.' " Through Moynihan's intervention the White House took
advantage of Finch's holiday absence to transfer authority over the
Charleston crisis to Labor Secretary George Shultz. Armed with the
renewed threat of a fund cutoff, Schultz, with Mayor Gaillard's
acquiscence, sent mediator William Pierce to Charleston on June
24. Finally, on Friday, June 27, after a tough call invoking the
national interest to McCord from White House aide and former state
Republican chairman, Harry Dent, the hospital director agreed once
again to rehire the twelve fired workers along with the other
strikers. At the same time Andrew Young paid a surprise, secret visit
to the white nurses at MCH and convinced them to drop their opposition
to the return of the strikers, thus removing the last political hurdle
to settlement. McCord's official statement was terse: "We have
settled."
          For hospital officials the agreement itself ended the drama. Union
leaders, partly because they had been through such wars before, knew
better. The union needed a 'victory,' not just a stalemate. In the
immediate coverage of the strike, they got their triumph. By
selectively leaking details of the settlement and putting the best
possible interpretation on the official language of settlement, the
union salvaged a major public relations victory. As the New York
Times noted on June 28, the settlement "appeared to
meet the major demands of the hospital workers." While no mention was
made of union recognition or collective bargaining in the settlement,
the union pointed to the grievance procedure and proposed credit union
as means by which the union might effecively both represent employees
through a union grievance committee and achieve some form of dues
checkoff. These terms--neither of which were to pan out as
predicted--together with worker raises, and rehiring of fired and
struck workers were what four hundred jubilant, singing strikers were
celebrating the night of the settlement at Zion-Olivet United
Presbyterian Church.
          With money, militancy, and mirrors 1199 had fought itself out of
the Charleston thicket, avoiding disaster saving workers' jobs and
vindicating the determination of their followers. To some local eyes,
Rev. Grant's among them, the Charleston settlement indeed was "more
than a compromise. It was a victory."
          Grant notes even more important side-effects of the strike for the
community; "it was like a revolution," black voter registration "shot
up like mad" (black representation on the city council, for example,
went from one to six delegates in ten years), neighborhoods in
Charleston County were partially integrated, "people were forced to
take notice of the entire black community."
          In 1970 Herbert U. Fielding, Charleston funeral home director,
became the first black elected to the state legislature, while vocal
strike supporter, Rev. Robert Woods, would follow a few years
later. In addition to some positive changes in labor relations at the
hospitals, Saunders, reminiscing in 1979, said that the strike made
whites "respect blacks for having organized. They're a little scared
now and will negotiate before situations reach that same level of
polarization."
          Next to such "benefits" of the strike, however, must be placed its
ultimate failure to organize the Charleston hospital workers into an
enduring and recognized union. When one turns to workers, particularly
strike militants, the victory in Charleston appears comparatively
hollow. At the time of the settlement, many, at least among
second-level 1199 staff left the city still convinced that the
foundation for a successful union local had indeed been laid. Such
confidence proved ill-founded. The Charleston strikers never got their
union, or anything close to it. The battle lines remained for three
more weeks until County Hospital followed up the MCH settlement
practically to the letter, on July 19. After that, the outside support
for Charleston hospital campaign all but dried up. The money was gone,
the issue had lost its national dramatic appeal, and, perhaps most
importantly, the union and SCLC had other priorities. The local
leadership around Mary Moultrie, more national spokesperson than
organizer in any case, proved unable to maintain difficult grassroots
organizing work. The workers had no office of their own and outside
help came only intermittently from New York. Lone SCLC staffer, James
Orange, turned his attention to other community matters including a
city- 

wide organizing drive by black sanitation workers. What was
worse, long-simmering mistrust and differences among workers burst
forth when the real terms of day-today life at work reasserted
themselves. Jubilation and celebration quickly turned to bitter
recrimination and accusation against Moultrie, against Saunders,
against the union itself. Only the hospital administration in this
case was able to capitalize on the post-strike wave of
disillusionment.
          In the months following the strike the MCH administration not only
refused to authorize checkoff through the credit union but effectively
undermined informal union stewardship through the grievance procedure
by limiting the number of times that the same person could serve as
the griever's representative. Mary Moultrie herself, strike heroine,
was ultimately voted out as chapter president and withdrew from
hospital organizing in discouraged confusion. The unhappy end of her
roller-coaster ride into stardom and notoriety with the union was
highlighted in a family trip she made to New York City in 1973. With
one of her cousins, an 1199 member in New York, Moultrie paid a visit
to the attractive new headquarters of the hospital workers union, the
Martin Luther King Labor Center. Her cousin led Mary down one hallway
at the end of which she encountered a giant, blown-up photograph of
herself marching arm in arm with Walter Reuther. Mary left the
building without even making her presence known to officials
upstairs. Moultrie, in the end, felt, "hurt and disappointed with a
lot of people who I had been involved with." "If I had it to do again
I would. But then I'd be careful."
          Beyond the conclusions of the hospital campaign in Charleston--part
vindication part defeat--lay the significance of the struggle for
hospital workers and 1199 nationally. Here the returns for the union
proved much more tangible. In the course of the Charleston campaign
the hospital union, before a nation-wide audience, had proved itself
willing and able to take on any foe.
          Particularly to younger black workers the "union power-soul power"
crusade broke down barriers often separating labor and civil rights
militancy. If such a strategy won concessions in the heart of the
anti-union South, would they not utterly triumph in the
urban-industrial North? In the weeks following the Charleston
settlement, 1199 organizers confidently set up shop in a half-dozen
cities, while in Baltimore the mere threat of "pulling another
Charleston" extracted a union recognition agreement from huge and
prestigious John Hopkins Medical center.
          As Claire Brown declared at the end of the film, "I Am Somebody," a
union-sponsored documentary produced during the Charleston events: "If
I didn't learn but one thing it was that if you are ready and willing
to fight for yourself, other folks will be ready and willing to fight
for you." She was right, of course, but the location of the fight
often proves to be decisive. For those who look forward to the
unionization of the Southern work force, the experience of Claire
Brown and her friends leaves two difficult questions--What more is
required? What more is possible?
          The years since the Charleston dispute have hardly been encouraging
ones for the labor movement in general, let alone for those struggling
in non-union Southern bastions amid restrictive state
legislation. Nevertheless, the Charleston experience may offer a few
strategic clues for the future. The Charleston campaign got as far as
it did by combining militant community organizing work with available
political power levers--in this case the civil rights arm of the
federal government. While those particular levers are considerably
weaker now than they were in 1969 (and in any case are limited by the
demographics of the labor force), the "political" lesson should not be
lost. Short of a national "new deal" of labor legislation, the
hardline anti-union policy of Southern states must be whittled away
both at the workplace and the statehouse. Both "ends" of such an
effort require a greater effort form the national unions. Yet, if
unions are to take a more active role in Southern community life, then
confident talk of a progressive "sunbelt" must come to include a
formal voice for the region's working people.
          
            Leon Fink is assistant professor of history at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is author of
Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American
Politics (University of Illinois Press, 198S). This article
was first presented as a talk to the Fourth Southern Labor Studies
Conference, Georgia State University in Atlanta, September 30--October
2, 1982. It forms part of a larger history of the hospital workers'
union co-authored by Brian Greenberg to be published by Harvard
University Press in 1984. The author gratefully acknowledges the help
of Stephen Hoffius and David J. Garrow in his research.
          
        