Mary Moultrie, Naomi White, and the Women of the Charleston Hospital Workers’ Strike of 1969

Abstract

This article explores the lives of black women involved in a 113-day strike of Charleston area hospitals in 1969. Mary Moultrie, the local union president, and Naomi White, an outspoken and assertive participant, became involved in labor organizing out of necessity and used a variety of methods to secure change. The article uses their lives as lenses into the complexities of labor and civil rights–Black Power activism in the late 1960s as well as into the experiences of black women activists during the period.

Keywords::

• Black women’s activism
• civil rights–Black Power movements
• labor

About the Author

Jewell C. Debnam is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Michigan State University and is completing her dissertation, “Black Women and the Charleston Hospital Workers’ Strike of 1969.”

Notes

Marjorie Amos-Frazier. Interview with Otha Jennifer Dixon. Recording. Charleston, SC., June 17, 2008. Interview number U-0384 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.

“Remarks of Mary Moultrie at South Carolina Voices of the Civil Rights Movement Conference: A Conference on the History of the Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina 1940–1970 on the occasion of the opening of an exhibit We’ll Never Turn Back A Smithsonian Institution Travelling Exhibit 130 photographs of the Civil Rights Movement October 30–November 28, 1982” November 5–6, 1982 at The Charleston Museum,” loose files, Avery Research Center, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, USA.

There are a few essential texts on black women’s work. Jacqueline Jones’s Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (New York: Basic Books, 2010) provides a long history of black women’s work from slavery to contemporary times. It centers black women’s work around the family unit and was the first book of its kind that privileged the lives of working-class black women. Tera Hunter’s, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) chronicles the 1881 Atlanta washerwomen’s strike within the context of other similar strikes during and immediately after Reconstruction. Importantly, Hunter also provides an essential history of Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction black resistance and is an integral text in the history of black working women.

Rebecca Sharpless, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1950 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 180.

See Darlene Clark Hine’s Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890–1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989) and Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

Scholarship on the 1969 Charleston Hospital Workers’ Strike has generally focused on the involvement of Local 1199 and the turn towards radical black activism in the late 1960s. Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg’s, Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: A History of Hospital Workers’ Union, Local 1199 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989) offers a thorough history of Local 1199. Likewise Stephen O’Neill’s, Dissertation “From the Shadow of Slavery: The Civil Rights Years in Charleston” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1994) focuses more on the radical activism during the strike than on the importance of black women to the success of the strike. Both works offer useful insight into the development of the strike, some of its participants, and the strike’s consequences. Steve Estes’s “Case Study: The Charleston Hospital Strike” (Folder 19, Steve Estes Papers, Avery Research Center, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, USA) offers important insights into the effectiveness of the strike but does not engage it as a women’s movement. Philip Foner discusses the relationship between the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike and Charleston in a chapter in Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1981 (New York: International Publishers, 1981). Millicent Brown’s chapter, “Black Women on Strike in Charleston, South Carolina: We Shall Overcome, I Think,” in Studies in African American Leadership: Individuals, Movements, and Committees, edited by Victor Oguejiofor Okafor and Tunde Adeleke (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006), 55–67. This article briefly documents the connections between the 1945–46 Tobacco Workers’ Strike and the 1969 Hospital Workers’ Strike. But Brown does not delve deeply into the complex role of black women leaders in the 1969 strike.

Mary Moultrie. Interview with Jean-Claude Bouffard. Recording. Unknown Location, July 28, 1982. AMN 500.009.005, Jean-Claude Bouffard Civil Rights Interviews, Avery Research Center at the College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, USA.

William Saunders. Interview with Kerry Taylor. March 5, 2009. Charleston, SC, The Citadel Oral History Program, The Citadel Archives & Museum. Charleston, SC, USA.

Mary Moultrie. Interview with Jean Claude-Bouffard. July 28, 1982, AMN 500.009.005, Jean-Claude Bouffard Civil Rights Interviews, Avery Research Center, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, USA.

“Pickets,” The Columbia Record, March 21, 1969, 2-A. South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA.

“12 Workers Dismissed At Hospital,” The Charleston News and Courier March 19, 1969, 1-B, accessed February 12, 2014, Google News.

Elaine S. Stanford “ … Strike,” The Charleston News and Courier March 21, 1969, 2-A, accessed August 25, 2013, Google News.

Ibid.

Elaine S. Stanford and William Walker, Jr., “ … Injunction,” The Charleston News and Courier March 22, 1969, 2-A. Accessed August 2013, Google News.

Stewart R. King, “Abernathy Pledges Support to Strikers,” The Charleston News and Courier, April 1, 1969, 1-A, Accessed March 20, 2014, Google News.

Stewart R. King, “ … Strike,” The Charleston News and Courier, April 1, 1969, 7-A Accessed March 20, 2014, Google News.

Ibid.

“Volunteers Keep Hospital Running,” The Charleston News and Courier, 1-B, April 9, 1969, NewsBank.

“Hospital Strikers Stage Charleston Office Sit-In,” The Columbia Record, 1-D, April 14, 1969 South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA.

Mary Moultrie. Interview with Otha Jennifer Dixon. June 23, 2008, Charleston, South Carolina. Interview number U-0390 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.

Mary Moultrie. Interview with Jean-Claude Bouffard. Recording. Unknown Location, July 28, 1982. AMN 500.009.005, Jean-Claude Bouffard Civil Rights Interviews, Avery Research Center at the College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, USA.

Mary Moultrie. Interview with Otha Jennifer Dixon.

Mary Moultrie. Interview with Jean-Claude Bouffard.

Ibid.

Naomi White. Interview with Otha Jennifer Dixon, June 25, 2008, Charleston, South Carolina. Interview number U-0393 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.

Mary Moultrie. Interview with Otha Jennifer Dixon.

Ibid.

Ibid.

William Saunders. Interview with Kerry Taylor, Mary Moultrie, and Rosetta Simmons. March 5, 2009, Local 1199-Charleston, 1111 King St., Charleston, SC The Citadel Oral History Program. The Citadel Archives & Museum. Charleston, SC, USA.

Mary Moultrie. Interview with Otha Jennifer Dixon.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Naomi White. Interview with Otha Jennifer Dixon.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Scholarship on self-defense during the civil rights–Black Power movements includes: Hasan Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Akinyele Umoja’s, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Simon Wendt, “The Roots of Black Power? Armed Resistance and the Radicalization of the Civil Rights Movement”, in The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, edited by Peniel Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2006), 145–65. Donna Murch’s, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and Jeffrey Ogbar’s, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) among many others.

Jack O’Dell, “Charleston’s Legacy to the Poor People’s Campaign,” in Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell, edited by Nikhil Pal Singh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 189.

I Am Somebody. Directed by Madeline Anderson. 20 min. First Run/Icarus Films, 1970. DVD.

Mary Moultrie. Interview with Otha Jennifer Dixon.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., emphasis in the original.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Mary Moultrie, William Saunders, Rosetta Simmons. Interview with Kerry Taylor, March 5, 2009, Local 1199-Charleston, 1111 King St., Charleston, SC, The Citadel Oral History Program, The Citadel Archives & Museum. Charleston, SC, USA.