In Charleston, South Carolina, March 1969, the hospital workers of Local 1199B of the National Organizing Committee of Hospital and Nursing Home Employees went on strike. The underpaid Black workers, many of them nurses and exam room technicians, held out for union recognition by the Charleston County and Medical College Hospitals. It was the first major strike since Dr. King’s murder. As months went by with no resolution, journalists compared the rising tension between strikers, citizens, police, and hospital administration to that of the Memphis sanitation strike, which Dr. King had been supporting when he was murdered. The New York Times compared the Charleston and Memphis strikes as two “national rallying centers for a coalition of union and civil rights groups.” Coretta Scott King strongly supported the strikers, often invoking her husband’s name to persuade allies of the strike’s righteousness, and she positioned the strikers’ struggle for livable wages and a less hostile workplace as a fight for both economic and civil rights. In the end, the strikers won a pay raise and a formal process for filing grievances, but the hospitals never recognized the 1199B union, and by 1970, its unacknowledged charter was gone.

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