MLK’s Legacy: The Charleston Hospital Workers’ Strike of 1969

During the year after her husband’s assassination, Coretta Scott King made several visits to Charleston, S.C., where hospital aides at what was then the Medical College of South Carolina were involved in a protracted fight for decent wages.

After a 113-day strike, the union won an agreement that led to wage increases and new grievance procedures.

The campaign was led by Mary Moultrie, a South Carolina native who had worked as an LPN in New York City but who was unable to find licensed nursing work when she returned to her home state. Instead, she was hired as a nursing aide at the Medical College.

If you have an hour to spare today, listen to (or read) an amazing interview that Moultrie gave to a historian in 1982. It’s not an entirely happy story: In Moultrie’s telling, the gains that the union won lasted only for a few years. Because South Carolina is a right-to-work state, the union couldn’t manage to maintain much strength.

But Moultrie didn’t give up: She was still organizing as recently as 2008.

Below, MLK’s speech to 1199 in 1968: