Charleston, 1969: One Hundred and Thirteen Days for Recognition as Human Beings

Five o'clock in the morning, March 20, 1969. In the predawn dark outside the Medical College Hospital in Charleston, South Carolina, about 100 women in paper caps walked off the job. By five-thirty another 300 had joined them on the sidewalk. Nearly all of them were Black. Most of them were nurse's aides, orderlies, and kitchen workers inside a public hospital that, five years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became federal law, still paid them a dollar and thirty cents an hour to do licensed work and still refused to let them through the front door as anything but help.

The federal minimum wage in 1969 was one dollar and sixty cents. The 1966 amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act had extended that floor to hospital workers for the first time. The Medical College Hospital was exempt, because it was operated by the state of South Carolina, and the state of South Carolina had decided its own employees did not qualify for the wage floor its Senators had voted on three years earlier.

They were striking for thirty cents an hour. They were also striking for recognition of Local 1199B, the Charleston chapter of the Drug and Hospital Employees Union, which had been chartered in October 1968 and which the hospital's president, Dr. William McCord, had publicly vowed never to recognize. McCord had already circulated a letter to his staff in all capital letters: "WE DO NOT WANT A UNION HERE AT MEDICAL COLLEGE." Later in the strike, on camera, he said the quiet part out loud: "I'm not about to turn a 25 million dollar complex over to a bunch of people who don't have a grammar school education."

He would, before the summer was over, have to turn over a great deal more than that.

This is the story of what those women built in 113 days, what the state of South Carolina spent to break them, what they won, what they did not win, and why Rosetta Simmons, one of the twelve workers fired the night before the walkout, gave the clearest summary anyone has ever given of what a settlement short of full recognition actually meant. "We gained," she said, "recognition as human beings." That sentence is not a consolation prize. It is the load-bearing beam of American labor history.

Who ran it

The celebrities arrived in Charleston because the workers called them. Name the workers first.

Mary Moultrie, the founding president of Local 1199B, is the subject of the companion piece that published earlier this week. She was a Burke High School graduate, trained as a licensed practical nurse at Goldwater Memorial Hospital in New York, hired back at MCH only as a nurse's aide when she came home in 1967 because South Carolina would not honor her New York credential. That credential denial is the piece of grit around which the pearl of Local 1199B formed. The rest of this piece will name her and move on.

Lillie Mae Doster was the co-organizer who in the spring of 1968 picked up the telephone with Moultrie and dialed Local 1199 in New York. The two women together brought a national hospital workers union into Charleston. Local 1199 had spent the 1950s proving you could in fact organize a voluntary hospital; Moultrie and Doster brought them south for the first time.

Naomi White was a nurse at MCH and one of the founders of the strikers' enforcement committee, which the women themselves named the "Hell's Angels." The Angels visited the homes of coworkers who were thinking about crossing the picket line. They visited at night. They were not subtle. White spoke for the committee in a line borrowed openly from Fannie Lou Hamer: "We are sick and tired of being sick and tired." It is a sentence that sounds like a slogan until you consider that a hospital worker making a dollar and thirty cents an hour to lift bodies for eight hours a day is, in the most literal sense the language admits, sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Rosetta Simmons was one of the twelve workers fired on the night of March 19, 1969, the firings that triggered the walkout at five the next morning. At the end of the strike she gave the sentence this piece is built around.

Isaiah Bennett was the president of Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union Local 15A, the Charleston tobacco workers local, a majority-Black, majority-women local that had held a contract in Charleston since the 1940s. Bennett gave Local 1199B its institutional scaffolding, its negotiating experience, and its meeting rooms.

William Saunders, a 37-year-old Army veteran who had been politicized by Malcolm X and by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, became the lead worker-side negotiator across the table from Medical College Hospital vice president William Huff. Bill Saunders is the voice at the end of this piece.

Everyone named in the paragraphs above was doing the work before Ralph Abernathy arrived, before Andrew Young arrived, before Coretta Scott King arrived, and before Walter Reuther arrived. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference did not bring the strike to Charleston. The strike was already there. SCLC answered a call.

What the state of South Carolina spent

On the first morning of the strike, Circuit Judge Clarence Singletary issued an injunction against the picket line. Later court orders narrowed the picket further: ten picketers at a time, spaced twenty yards apart. Moultrie's public response was, "Even the governor, as slow as he is, could get through a picket line like that." The governor she was naming was Robert E. McNair.

On April 11, 1969, Moultrie was arrested on the picket line along with 30 other strikers and held in jail for 11 days.

On April 25, Governor McNair declared a state of emergency in Charleston. He ordered more than a thousand state troopers and National Guardsmen into the city. He imposed a curfew from nine in the evening until five in the morning. Armored personnel carriers rolled down Calhoun Street past Emanuel AME Church. Soldiers with fixed bayonets patrolled the same sidewalks on which the strikers picketed. Ralph Abernathy, the president of SCLC, was arrested that day. Leon Davis, the national president of Local 1199, was arrested with him.

The daily cost to South Carolina taxpayers of the National Guard deployment was approximately ten thousand dollars, about seventy-one thousand in today's money. The state of South Carolina was spending ten thousand dollars a day to prevent a thirty-cent-an-hour raise at a hospital it owned.

Henry Nicholas, the 1199 national organizer dispatched to Charleston to anchor the campaign, had his hotel room bombed. Mary Moultrie stopped sleeping at home. For the remainder of the strike she slept on a cot at the union hall under the guard of armed local youth, because the threats against her life were specific, repeated, and credible.

Governor McNair explained his theory of the case to the South Carolina Bar Association. The Charleston dispute, he told the assembled lawyers, was "a test of our whole governmental system as we have known it in South Carolina." What he meant was that no state agency in his reading of South Carolina law could legally bargain collectively with its employees, and that if the Medical College Hospital were forced to do so, the governing order of the state would dissolve. The all-white South Carolina General Assembly passed a resolution backing him.

Over the full course of the strike, roughly a thousand people were arrested. Day-by-day contemporary press counts vary, and the precise total is contested, but every institutional source converges on something close to a thousand arrests. For context: that is roughly twice the number of workers who were on strike.

Set it down plainly. The state of South Carolina deployed a regiment, imposed a curfew, ran armored cars through a majority-Black city, arrested a thousand people, and spent what would today be more than six million dollars over the course of the strike to prevent a public hospital from paying the federal minimum wage.

The New York Times, in coverage on April 21 and April 29, called the Charleston strike "an almost perfect counterpart" to the Memphis sanitation strike that had ended with Martin Luther King Jr. dead on a motel balcony 353 days before the Charleston walkout.

What Coretta Scott King said at Emanuel AME

In 1969, Local 1199 launched a national organizing committee under the slogan "Union Power, Soul Power." Coretta Scott King accepted its honorary chairship. One year and three weeks after her husband had been killed in Memphis supporting AFSCME Local 1733, she took a title in a hospital workers union.

On April 29, 1969, she addressed a crowd of about four thousand people at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. She wore a paper cap identical to the one the strikers wore on the picket line. Her line on the wage was verbatim: "One dollar and thirty cents an hour is not a wage. It is an insult." Her line on Black women's work was also verbatim: "the black working woman is perhaps the most discriminated against of all of the working women."

The next day, April 30, she led a march of about fifteen hundred people from Morris Brown AME Church through downtown Charleston. Andrew Young, the SCLC field coordinator assigned to the strike, walked with her. Moultrie walked with her. Naomi White walked with her. Andrew Young's framing of why SCLC had taken up the Charleston fight, recalled later by Leon Fink, was clean: the civil rights movement had decided that "the economic question of full employment, of the right to organize" was its next frontier.

On Mother's Day, May 11, 1969, Emanuel AME filled with a rally of about five thousand people. From that rally a march of ten to fifteen thousand moved through Charleston to the gate of the Medical College Hospital. The speakers' list is worth reading slowly. Ralph Abernathy spoke. Mary Moultrie spoke. Walter Reuther, the president of the United Auto Workers, who had flown in and who over the course of the strike directed substantial UAW financial support to the Charleston workers, spoke. Rosa Parks spoke. William Kircher, the AFL-CIO's national director of organizing, spoke. Five United States congressmen spoke. Jesse Jackson joined the march before the end of the day.

Return now to Moultrie, Doster, Simmons, White, Bennett, and Saunders. They had been the ones on the picket line in the dark on March 20. They were the ones sleeping at the union hall under armed guard. They were the ones who had built the relationships that made it possible for a Detroit UAW president, an Atlanta civil rights widow, and a Montgomery bus boycott icon to show up in Charleston on the same afternoon.

Celebrities came because workers called. That sentence is worth repeating in a movement that is forever confusing who works for whom.

What the settlement said and what it would not say

In early June 1969, the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare conducted a civil rights audit of the Medical College Hospital. The auditors cited thirty-seven violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Approximately twelve million dollars in federal funding for the hospital came into question, because Title VI of the Civil Rights Act conditions federal funding on nondiscrimination.

Inside the Nixon administration, Secretary of Labor George Shultz and White House aide Harry Dent began to pressure Dr. McCord and Governor McNair to settle. Harry Dent had been Strom Thurmond's chief of staff; by 1969 he was the Nixon White House's architect of what Kevin Phillips was then calling the Southern Strategy. A Republican administration strategizing to hold the white South was forcing a South Carolina hospital board to concede to the Black women on its picket line because the alternative was watching twelve million federal dollars walk away and taking a civil rights case on the evening news with it.

On June 26 and 27, 1969, the settlement was announced. Read its terms carefully, because the shape of what the workers won and the shape of what they did not win are both inside them.

Every one of the strikers was rehired, including all twelve of the workers fired on March 19. The minimum wage at MCH was raised to the federal floor of one dollar and sixty cents an hour, an increase of thirty cents; workers in specific classifications received raises of up to seventy cents. A six-step grievance procedure was created. A credit union was established. Approximately 280 of the roughly 300 MCH strikers returned to work in the first week of July.

The settlement did not formally recognize Local 1199B. It contained no collective bargaining agreement. It contained no dues checkoff. The union that had struck for recognition did not win recognition. Dr. McCord kept what he had said he would keep.

Charleston County Hospital, the second public hospital, held out three more weeks. It settled on July 18, 1969, on similar terms: rehiring, wage floor, grievance procedure, no recognition.

Bill Saunders, who had done the actual negotiating across the table from William Huff, gave the strike's best summary from the workers' side: the settlement was "a victory for 25,000 hospital workers, black and white, across the state." He meant it as a victory over the claim that public-sector workers in South Carolina could be held permanently below the federal minimum wage on the grounds that their employer was the state. He was right. He also knew, because he had been in the room, that the employer had given up the wage floor in order to keep the recognition line intact. Both things are true and the piece that refuses to hold both is not telling you the truth.

Call it honestly. The workers won a raise, the twelve fired organizers back on the schedule, a grievance procedure, and a credit union. They did not win a union contract. The state of South Carolina spent what would today be well over six million dollars to prevent them from winning the piece of paper they had struck for, and then, under federal civil rights leverage, accepted every other demand on the list rather than lose the twelve million federal dollars that were propping up the hospital.

That is what happens when a labor action is also a civil rights action, and the federal government's civil rights enforcement is finally the lever that cracks the state's coalition. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not, in the end, give Local 1199B a contract. It gave the women who struck for it a wage floor, a reinstatement, a grievance procedure, and, through Rosetta Simmons, a sentence.

What Charleston seeded

Within a year after the settlement, Local 1199B was effectively gone as a functioning local. The 1199 national organizing committee, having spent down substantial resources on the Charleston campaign and having failed to secure a dues checkoff through a recognized contract, redirected its Southern strategy elsewhere. Without checkoff, the local could not sustain itself financially. Moultrie was eventually voted out as chapter president. Local 1199B's formal life was short.

The local's afterlife was not. In the decade after 1969, Black voter registration in Charleston surged. Black representation on the Charleston City Council grew from one seat to six. In 1970, Herbert Fielding was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives, the first Black state legislator from Charleston since Reconstruction. Every one of those gains ran through networks built, meeting by meeting, on the 1969 picket line. A strike that did not win a contract remade the Black political class of a city.

Nationally, the Charleston campaign became a warning to hospital administrators outside the South. Johns Hopkins Hospital, hearing that a 1199 campaign modeled on Charleston was about to begin in Baltimore, voluntarily recognized 1199 rather than face what Dr. McCord had faced. Other voluntary recognitions followed in cities across the East Coast. The Black women of Charleston had made 1199 nationally a thing to be avoided by means of a contract at the door.

A year after the strike ended, the filmmaker Madeline Anderson released I Am Somebody, a 28-minute documentary commissioned by Local 1199, built around footage of the Charleston picket line and Mary Moultrie's own narration. It was the first half-hour documentary directed by an African American woman admitted to the film union. It is today preserved by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. The strike that did not win recognition was documented, preserved, and written into the national archive anyway.

Six weeks after the MCH settlement, in August 1969, Charleston's municipal sanitation workers walked off the job. The strike ran through October 29. Among the negotiators for the workers was a young James Clyburn, who today is the dean of South Carolina's congressional delegation. The church networks, worker leaders, and legal strategies of the hospital strike fed directly into the sanitation strike. One picket line built another.

Mary Moultrie spent the next four decades in Charleston doing the work. She ran a Charleston neighborhood center. In the early 2000s she organized sanitation workers again. In 2011 she received the YWCA Harvey Gantt Triumph Award. She died in 2015. Her obituary in the Charleston papers called her a civil rights leader. She was that. She was also a licensed practical nurse whose state had refused to honor her license, and who had organized 500 women in response, and who had made a governor deploy a regiment against her and still had come back to work.

What Rosetta Simmons meant

Return to the sentence this piece has been circling.

"We gained recognition as human beings."

Rosetta Simmons was one of the twelve workers fired on the night of March 19. She had been on the organizing committee that built Local 1199B. She had worked the picket line. She had been rehired as part of the settlement. When she was asked, after the strike was over, what they had won, she did not say they had won a contract, because they had not. She did not say they had won a union, because they had not. She said they had won recognition as human beings, and every word of that sentence is load bearing.

"Recognition" is a legal term of art in labor law. It is a formal status conferred by an employer or mandated by a labor board. It comes with a contract, with a grievance process, with a dues checkoff, with a bargaining relationship. Simmons knew that. She was using the word the employers used and deliberately moving it off the paper of a contract and onto the ground of what the strikers had actually become to each other, to their employer, and to the state of South Carolina over 113 days.

"Human beings" is not a soft word in a sentence like that. It is the hardest word in the English language in 1969 Charleston. It is the word Dr. McCord had refused when he said he would not turn over a twenty-five million dollar complex to people without a grammar school education. It is the word Governor McNair had refused when he declared that bargaining with the hospital's employees would dissolve the governmental system of the state. It is the word the National Guard was in Charleston to refuse. Simmons took that word back from the people who had sent the soldiers, and she gave it to the women who had held the line.

The union was never recognized. The workers won anyway. A wage raise, twelve reinstatements, a grievance procedure, a credit union, the Fair Labor Standards Act floor finally dragged over a South Carolina public hospital, and a rewritten Black political class in Charleston. None of those are the contract the strikers struck for. All of them are things the state of South Carolina and the Medical College Hospital spent every weapon they had trying to prevent, and lost.

The settlement hit the wire on June 27, 1969. Fifty-seven years later, the women who held that line are the ones history remembers. Governor McNair, Dr. McCord, and the all-white General Assembly of South Carolina that backed them are the ones history remembers as the losing side.

Mary Moultrie came home with a nursing license and got hired as a maid. Rosetta Simmons was fired for organizing and rehired by court order. Naomi White told the truth in a sentence Fannie Lou Hamer had already written. Bill Saunders negotiated a floor under twenty-five thousand hospital workers across a state that had told him the law would not allow him to negotiate anything. Coretta Scott King put on a paper cap in a church her husband had not lived to stand inside. Walter Reuther wrote the checks. Ralph Abernathy went to jail. Andrew Young named the frontier.

The women of Charleston did not win a union. They won everything a union exists to win.