She Came Home With a Nursing License. They Hired Her as a Maid.

Mary Moultrie graduated from Burke High School in Charleston and went north for her training. She earned her license as a practical nurse at Goldwater Memorial Hospital in New York City. Then, in 1967, she came home.

The Medical College Hospital in Charleston, the institution now known as MUSC, hired her as a nurse's aide. The state of South Carolina would not honor the license the state of New York had issued her. Same woman, same training, same hands on the same patients. Lower title. Lower pay. That is the Jim Crow labor story in one sentence, and it is the grievance on which Local 1199B was built.

The pre-strike wage for Black workers at MCH was one dollar and thirty cents an hour. About 90 percent of the workers who would eventually strike were Black women. They cleaned the rooms, fed the patients, lifted the bodies, and took home less than two dollars an hour to do it.

In the spring of 1968, Moultrie and her co-worker Lillie Mae Doster picked up a telephone and called Local 1199 in New York, the drug and hospital workers union that had spent the 1950s proving a hospital could in fact be organized. In October 1968, Local 1199B was chartered in Charleston. Moultrie was elected its founding president. Dues were three dollars a month. Every dollar of that came from women who were getting paid a dollar and thirty cents an hour to do licensed work.

On March 19, 1969, the hospital fired 12 of the workers who had been organizing, Moultrie among them. At five in the morning on March 20, about 100 workers walked out. Within weeks the strike would swell to roughly 500 at MCH and the Charleston County Hospital combined, and it would hold for 113 days.

The price Moultrie paid for leading it was that she could no longer sleep at home. For the duration of the strike she slept at the union hall, guarded by armed local youth, because the threats against her life were specific and steady.

Deep into the strike, Moultrie stood at Stoney Field Stadium in front of a crowd of strikers and supporters and addressed Governor Robert McNair directly. "Unless you shape up, governor," she said, "our talking might just get a little bit louder. And our walking might just get a little bit longer."

Read that line again knowing what it cost to say it. The state of South Carolina had already decided that Mary Moultrie's New York license did not count. Over the course of the strike that same state would put more than a thousand National Guardsmen and troopers in the streets of Charleston to make sure she did not win a raise or a union. That is the arithmetic of Jim Crow labor, rendered down to a governor and a licensed practical nurse. The state could pay for a regiment. It would not pay for the title on her paycheck.

When Moultrie told McNair the talking might get a little bit louder, she was talking about a license South Carolina would not recognize.

The long-form drops Saturday. Her name is in it.

Sources

• Mary A. Moultrie (Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, College of Charleston)
• Civil Rights Unionism (Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, College of Charleston)
• Leon Fink, "Union Power, Soul Power: The Story of 1199B and Labor's Search for A Southern Strategy," Southern Changes 5, no. 2 (March 1983)
• 1969 Charleston Strike Victory (1199SEIU magazine)